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

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.”