A Retirement Village To Spy For by Joseph E. Vitolo

Author:Joseph E. Vitolo [Vitolo, Joseph E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty

The next morning, I called Tony Flores. “Tony, I will investigate the James Howard case for the insurance company.”

“I had a feeling you would.”

“I’ll need your help. First, I want to see the police report the officers filed at the scene. And second, I’d like to get access to the house. I found out that Paul Simpson of Richfield Realty is the real estate agent. It would be better if you contact him and tell him you want to look at the house because of the way James Howard died.”

“No problem. Stop over later and look at the report. In the meantime, I’ll go over to see Mr. Simpson and tell him we need access to the house. He’ll want to meet us there.”

“Sounds good. Is twelve noon okay?”

“Yes, see you then.”

When I got to police headquarters, Tony had the report ready for me. “They treated this as an accidental fall down a long flight of stairs,” said Tony. “Susan Andros, Jim Howard’s daughter, found his body five days after he died. That’s when she called the police. There was blood on the steps where they found Jim Howard. His body was in the middle part of the staircase, his bloodied head on the corner of one step. The theory is that he slipped going down the stairs and fell hard onto one of the steps. He was wearing pajamas, a robe and slippers. The light at the top of the stairs was on. The police looked through the house to see if anything had been taken or disturbed. They found nothing out of place.”

Tony had the medical examiner’s report there for me to review. This showed the cause of death as “blunt force trauma to the head,” as Doctor O’Rourke had told me. They all concluded that Howard had taken a very hard fall.

“What do you think?” Tony asked.

“Let’s get into the house and see what that tells us.”

“I’ll call the realtor, Paul Simpson; he said he would meet us there.”

We took separate cars over to James Howard’s house. When we get there, we look around outside and around the back, where there was a deck that led to the kitchen. The management company maintained the property. That included mowing, lawn care, and shoveling snow. Looking for footprints or other clues would be useless. The gardeners that maintained the landscaping had even blown the dirt off the decks. Paul Simpson arrived about thirty minutes later. He got out of his car, wearing a wrinkled suit and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He saw me and Tony walking around the perimeter of the house. We walked over to him and Tony flashed his badge. “Are you Paul Simpson?”

“Yes, are you Captain Flores?”

“Yup, this is Dean Steele.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Steele. I’ll let you in the house. They cleaned it about two weeks ago. It was quite a mess, especially the stairs—you know, blood and all.”

“Right,” I said. “You don’t need to take us around the house, as we’ll be checking a few things.

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