Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

Hell, Tiago must be back there, and he must have seen me on his monitor.

Confirming my guess, we both heard the troll voice from out back calling, “Send ’im in, for chrissakes!”

The pale guy said, “You can go in,” as if he’d just made up his mind.

Whenever I come back to the city of my childhood, I notice how things have shrunk. The trees I used to climb, my grammar school, that bed in my vo’s spare room. I supposed in the back of my mind I was hoping that Tiago D. Costa had shrunk too. No such luck. He had a few gray hairs at his temple, but looking up from behind a small steel desk he was every bit as broad and carved from stone as I remembered him. His white shortsleeved shirt was tight around his muscled upper arms. His thick hands, folded comfortably on the desktop, looked as if they could still punch out anyone or anything that got in his way, and his dark eyes had kept that dangerous, flat stare that used to make me change direction or cross the street when I was a kid.

“Whattaya want?” he said, his voice as dark and as uninflected as his eyes.

“I’m the grandson of the lady lives in the yard behind this place, the yard with the Bathtub Mary in it.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “I asked you what you wanted.”

I’ve been on the other side of so many interrogations that I knew instinctively I was already at a disadvantage. He had let me know that he had information about me, but not how much or how he intended to use it.

“Somebody destroyed one of her statues,” I said. “She thinks you’re the one had it done.”

What the hell, might as well go with the truth no matter how lame it sounded.

“You’re Victor Medeiros’s cousin,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Victor, the Portagee private eye.”

I waited, thinking maybe he was pushing his early advantage.

“You’re Gilbert Souza, right? You’re a cop in some punk town up near Boston.”

Okay, now he was just showing off.

“About the statue,” I said.

“You might want to talk to your cousin about it.”

“He wasn’t home,” I said, unblinking so he wouldn’t catch the lie.

“Your grandmother, then.”

“She’s the one asked me to speak to you. She was worried that maybe you had it in for Victor for some reason.”

For the first time I thought I caught a glint of something that looked suspiciously like humor in those flat eyes.

“You’re a cop, Gilbert,” he said, tilting his chin to one side. “You know what blackmail is?”

“Blackmail?” I said, though I had heard him clearly, and any rookie on the force would know that I was just trying to buy a little time to figure out what the hell we were talking about here.

He nodded, pulled a thin, leather cigar case from his shirt pocket, removed an even thinner cigar, and lit it up. The gesture reminded me of the tapes I’d seen of old Celtic games, with Red Auerbach lighting up one of his victory cigars before he left the court at the Boston Garden.

“And Victor’s connected... how?”

He blew a narrow stream of smoke toward the already browned ceiling tiles, then fixed me with that stare and said, “Why don’t you go ask the Portagee P.I. about his tape?”

“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.