“I will,” I said, getting up, not sure what the hell we were talking about. A blackmail tape? “Can we put any other actions on hold while I do so?”
“If it stops here, I’ll let it stop here,” he said. “But that depends on your cousin... and your grandmother.”
Victor’s office was in a small strip mall on the far side of the city. Two of the stores were empty and there weren’t many cars in front of the others. MEDEIROS INVESTIGATIONS was announced on the thick, glass door with NoS FALAMOS PORTUGUeS beneath it. It seemed that Victor’s TV ads had brought at least one client; as I entered his outer office I could hear my cousin in the back room speaking Portuguese, as the sign on his door had promised. I could only make out a couple of words clearly here and there, but I knew from the sound that he was asking questions. The man he was speaking to sounded upset. One of the words I could hear most clearly told me the questions were about his esposa. Chasing down cheating esposas, and esposos, was, I knew, Victor’s pão and butter.
There was a small secretary’s desk in the front room, so I sat at it and waited. In the movie that I always thought was spooling through Victor’s imagination, a wealthy, seductive blonde would have walked in. In this world, no one did. Not for the half hour I sat there anyway. And the phone didn’t ring. And from the thick layer of dust on the desk’s green blotter, it looked as if no one had been sitting there for at least a month to answer a phone that didn’t ring.
I was tempted to look in the desk drawers, for something to read if nothing else, but Victor, just like his nemesis, had a security camera mounted on the wall, so I just looked up at it every once in a while, smiled, and waved. This always brought a pause in the sound of my cousin’s questioning in the inner office.
I tried to avoid looking up when he came out with his client, who scurried out of there as if he’d just left a confessional after screaming out some very embarrassing mortal sins.
“Gilbert,” Victor said, turning and looking pleased and surprised to see me despite all my waving at his monitor.
He looked heavier than the last time I’d seen him, with his hair thinner and combed flat to his scalp. In his dark three-piece suit, he could easily be mistaken for a well-fed undertaker. And I didn’t like his coming over to shake my hand. I was his cousin, for chrissakes.
“I just finished having a talk with Tiago D. Costa,” I said.
“Oh really? What about?”
“That’s what I want to know,” I said. “I maybe can help you out here, Victor, but I’ve got to know what I’m helping you out of. You’ve gotta be straight with me, and none of this ‘what about’ crap either.”
He absorbed this patiently, as if he’d expected it.
After a while, he said, “You talked to Vo, huh?”
I nodded.
He sighed, sat on the edge of the small desk, staring out at the strip mall’s nearly empty parking lot. His eyes were narrowed, probably pretending he was Dirty Harry, with the “Clint squint” I used to kid him about practicing in front of a mirror.
“It was just a simple surveillance job, Gilbert,” he said at last. “That’s all. A woman who thought her husband was banging one of the waitresses at the Ace. Funny thing is, she was suspicious because it was a case of the dog that didn’t bark. Y’know, like in Sherlock Holmes?”
I nodded, hoping to move Victor along, but he was operating on Victor time.
“Thing was,” he said, smiling, “this guy had stopped coming home half in the bag. I mean, he was still going to the Ace three, four times a week, getting there about six and coming back about ten thirty, eleven, the way he always had. But he wasn’t drunk any more. So that’s when the wife knew there was something up. I followed him there a couple of nights. He parked in front, stayed in the place until about ten thirty, then drove home, alone and with no wobble in his steering. I was gonna give him a clean bill of health with the wife, but I needed to be sure.”
“You couldn’t go in there? See how he acted with the waitress?”
Victor shook his head.
“Tiago D... uh, he didn’t want me in there. Told me it made the regulars nervous.”
Ah, the downside of those ads Victor did on the local cable channel. I guess my cousin had become a little too public for a private eye.
“So, I sent in an associate,” Victor said. “And he saw the husband go out the back door with the waitress about six fifteen. He followed them, got in the lot just as the waitress was driving out, with the husband in the front seat.”
He went on to explain how he had his associate time their return at eight. Seems the waitress had a flexible schedule, and the Ace only really got busy after eight, which gave the husband almost two fewer hours to drink before heading home to the wife who was wondering why this dog she’d married wasn’t barking anymore.
“So I thought I’d have to set up surveillance on them,” Victor said at last. “And I couldn’t do it in the Ace’s back lot because Tiago D. has all kinds of video monitors out there.”
“So you set up your own video?”
“Right. At first, I went up to Vo’s apartment, but there was no looking over those big shrubs along the back fence. Then Vo said I should set up at the Bathtub Mary. I think she kind of liked the idea of using the shrine to catch the adulterers. So I gave Tiago D. Costa a taste of his own medicine. I had one of my micro-cams there — actually, the boy statue was holding it. Thought you might appreciate that.”
Further proof that my cousin didn’t always understand people.
“But why go to all the trouble?” I said. “Why not just follow the waitress and the cheating husband to her apartment or wherever they went for those couple of hours? Isn’t that what you’d usually do?”
“I dunno,” he said slowly, trying to feel his way to an alibi like a man in the dark looking for a light switch. “I had some new night equipment, wanted to try it out.”
“What’d you want to get on the tape, Victor?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. I’m talking about why Tiago D. would be mad enough to destroy part of Vo’s shrine. It had to be a warning, and not just because you got some pictures of one of his waitresses leaving the back door with a customer. It had to be something with him.”
“Well...” he said slowly, looking down at the floor, “I had heard that Tiago D. was waiting on a shipment, that it’d be delivered to his club.”
“A shipment of what? Drugs?”
“No, some boosted electronic equipment. A lot of it.”
“And this wasn’t exactly coming UPS,” I said.
“No, not exactly.”
“And your plan was what? Try a little blackmail on him? Victor, you’ve got to be nuts to try to work that on a guy like Tiago.”
“No, no, Gilbert,” he said, waving away my argument with his chubby fingers. “I know this Fed from Boston. I’d been talking to him, told him I thought I could give him Tiago on a silver platter. And, y’know, with Tiago on the State’s mobster first team, he said there might be some kind of reward involved. Though getting that bastard, Tiago D. Costa, woulda been plenty enough for me.”
Ah, now it made sense. Victor had never talked about it, at least not to me, his kid cousin. But being a classmate of Tiago D. Costa, from grade one through high school, must have taken quite a toll on my chubby, camera-toting cousin.
But no blackmail? Then what the hell had Tiago been talking about?
“What went wrong?”
“I don’t know, Gilbert, I just don’t know. I had that mini-cam working for seven nights from ten until six in the morning, with a feed of the video into a machine up in Vo’s apartment where it was saved onto eight-hour tapes. I’d go over there, have lunch with Vo and check the tapes. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then this morning, maybe four o’clock, Vo called me, said someone had smashed up the shrine, taken the camera. She said she thought she saw some guy with a sledgehammer leaving her yard over the back fence and going into the Ace through the back door. Then she must’ve called you.”