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

The Bathtub Mary by James T. Shannon

I got the call a little after four in the morning. Trouble. At that time it had to be trouble, I thought groggily as I reached out to stop the damned cell phone beeping. I remembered I was on vacation, so the call couldn’t be coming from the station. No, at this time it had to be family. Sondra, my wife, was muttering something in her sleep. Ashley and Jason, our two kids just pushing into their teens, were in their rooms down the hall. My mother, then. Or one of my sisters. Or... and I picked it up to hear that familiar scratchy voice rasping, “Gilbert, I need to see you.”

“Now?” I said, hearing in my own voice the whiny kid she always managed to bring out in me.

“Of course now! You think I’d call you this early in the morning if I didn’t want to see you now?”

“But, Vo, it’s four o’clock.”

“Young people sleep too much, Gilbert. You get to be my age, you begin to see what a waste of time all that sleeping is.”

“And you live fifty miles away.”

“I know where I live, Gilbert Souza. And I certainly wouldn’t have called such a big-deal Boston police detective if it wasn’t important.”

“Okay, Vo,” I said with a sigh that I didn’t much try to hide. And I’d learned a long time ago that it was no use correcting her about my job. Putnam, where I live and work on the force, is a suburb of Boston, but not a big city, not by a long shot. “What’s so important?”

“It’s the Blessed Mother statue,” she said. Then she added cryptically, “Somebody’s going to die.”

Knowing she had me about as hooked as any trout in the stream, my grandmother hung up.

I called back, of course, and since she was the woman she was, and had caller ID, she didn’t answer the phone, although I filled about two minutes on her answering machine asking her to pick up. Which left me with no alternative but to dress as quickly and quietly as I could in the dark, leave a note on the kitchen table for Sondra, and drive the fifty miles down to Fall River wondering all the way what the hell my vo was up to now.

Vo isn’t actually my grandmother’s name. It’s the diminutive form of the Portuguese word for grandmother, avo, which is about right since my vo is the diminutive form of a grandmother. Barely five feet tall, even in her thick-soled sneakers, my vo was the only grownup I could look down on by the time I was thirteen. But no one, child or adult, priest or policeman, ever dared look down on my vo.

My grandmother never treated me with the adult condescension that all kids learn to hate early on, but she also didn’t realize that she could embarrass a grandchild, who knew that when you stood out from the crowd, you only became a better target. Much of the embarrassment she caused me came out of her attachment to that Blessed Mother statue she had mentioned in her call, the bane of my youth, the Bathtub Mary.

As common as backyard gardens or pastel-sided triple-deckers in the Portuguese-dominated city of Fall River, the Bathtub Mary is what irreverent Catholic kids called those small shrines people placed in their yards. The shrines celebrate the appearance of the Blessed Mother to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.

As I’d always heard it, the Bathtub Mary actually began life decades ago as an old porcelain claw foot bathtub tossed out during an apartment renovation. Someone got the idea of burying the tub upended half in the ground, then placing a statue of the Blessed Mother in the resulting niche, so it sort of looked like a grotto. Landscape the back and sides of the tub and plant flowers in the front, and you’ve got yourself a shrine.

They became so popular that later innovators came up with precast cement grottos, which still managed to look pretty much like upended bathtubs. They later added statues of the kneeling shepherd children, resulting in a kind of year-round creche.

But that wasn’t good enough for my grandmother, whose own triple-decker was two streets away from her second home, Our Lady of Fatima Church. My vo’s statue of the Blessed Mary was life-sized — well, life-sized if Christ’s mother had been the size of my grandmother. But back when I was eleven, she couldn’t find any life-sized statues of the three kids to go in front of it. She solved that problem by inviting the family, her three sons and two daughters and all of her grandkids, over for her semiannual meal of a sopa, which my cousins and I called “swamp soup” because it was full of spearmint and soggy bread. Since I was the only grandchild with guts enough to admit I hated this sopa, she told my parents, “Oh, and tell Gilbert I’ll have lots of chourico pizza for him. And I’ve baked raisin squares for dessert.”

She had the pizza, all right, covered with slices of chourico, the hot sausage I liked so much. And the raisin squares that I’d do almost anything for. Almost anything did not, however, include what she had in mind, a surprise for me and two of my cousins, Natalie and Norbina Oliveira. She had sewn costumes for us so we’d look like the three kids from Fatima. Now these were shepherd kids. From 1917. In the newspaper pictures taken of them, the two girls have these huge, dark scarves that fall halfway down their backs. The boy is wearing some kind of weird, overblown turban-like affair that hangs off the back of his head like a sack that he’s using to steal a watermelon. Besides the headwear, my grandmother had been historically accurate with the girls’ ballooning dresses and the boy’s dark little jacket. Slick maybe for shepherd kids in Portugal in 1917, but not the fashion statement for an eleven year old in the early ’80s who wanted to dye his black hair blond so he could pass for a midget version of Sting.

My mom, Vo’s daughter, gave me up like a Spartan mother sending her son off to the army, and she didn’t even flinch when I came out of Vo’s spare bedroom practically radioactive with embarrassment. My grandmother, followed by the obedient herd of everyone else in the family, marched me and my cousins out to her back yard and had the three of us kneel in front of the statue. Then my chubby, tech-crazy cousin, Victor Medeiros, seventeen and safely out of the running for shepherd boy, stood off to the side braying like a mule. Over and over he asked me to throw in a prayer for him while he took our pictures with his brand new Nikon F3 35 millimeter.

But my mortification didn’t end there. My vo decided one of Victor’s pictures was so nice that she sent it in to the local Portuguese weekly, where in what must have been a very slow news week it ended up on the front page.

For months after that it seemed to me that every kid in Our Lady of Fatima school came up with variations on Victor’s tired “Pray for me, Gilbert” line, and since they all knew that the Blessed Mother had supposedly told the three children of Fatima predictions about the course of events in the world, they kept asking me if Mary had told me anything worthwhile.

“Hey, Gilbert, any chances I’m gonna get a ColecoVision for Christmas?”

“How ’bout the Red Sox, Gilbert? Was one of her miracles the Sox finally winning the World Series?”

You get the picture. I got the picture, all right. I got the picture taped to my desk and my locker, taped to the back of my coat, taped to any schoolbook I happened to leave lying around.

It could’ve been worse, I suppose. If I’d been older, my classmates would probably have come up with more creative forms of torture. But this was bad enough, and though I knew most of the attacks were stupid, that still didn’t keep them from bothering me.

In fact, as I drove down to Fall River in the early morning darkness, I could still remember them clearly, still feel that sharp sense of unfairness that kids never let go of. As for worrying about my vo saying that someone was going to die — well, considering the source, I didn’t really take it too seriously.

On the other hand, almost every light in the third floor apartment of the triple-decker my grandmother owned seemed to be on. She insisted on staying on the third floor despite her age because she said she got extra heat coming up from the people below. And climbing the stairs was good exercise.

I could see her silhouette at the curtains of the front parlor, the only semidarkened room in the apartment, and she appeared to be cradling something that looked ominously familiar in her arms.

So I hustled up the two flights of stairs but was careful to stand off to the side as I rapped on the door.

“Who is it?”

“You know who it is, Vo. I saw you at the window.”

“You alone, Gilbert?”

“Yes, of course I am. So will you please carefully put down Vo’s shotgun and open the door?”

I heard the thunk as the stock of my late grandfather’s old Remington .32 over-and-under hit the floor, then the slow turning of her lock.

“Took you long enough,” she muttered, closing and locking the door behind me.

She was dressed in gray sweats, top and bottom. With her fly-away white hair and dark eyes, the only touch of color on my grandmother was the gold bracelet she always wore. It had cameos and the date of birth for each of her fourteen grandchildren, and we all jangled from her wrist with every move. Kind of like life. I was number eight.

“Sorry, I was slowed down by all that five A.M. traffic.”

“This is no joking matter, Gilbert. No joke at all.”

“Right. You said someone’s going to die, and it’s connected to the statue?”

“Did you see it?” she said, dark eyes blazing. “Did you see what they did to it? To the shrine of the Mother of God?”

“Uh, no, Vo. The statue’s in the back yard. It’s... well, it’s still pretty dark out.”

“They destroyed the boy, Gilbert! They knocked his head off, smashed him all to smithereens.”

“You mean the statue of the boy in your shrine?”

“Yes, of course. The one you dressed up as.”

My grandmother usually knows what buttons to push, but this wasn’t one of those times. I had spent too much of my youth daydreaming about taking a baseball bat to that statue myself.

“It was probably kids that did it, Vo,” I said, trying to hide my concern that she had called me out for what seemed to be simple vandalism. My grandmother wasn’t the kind of person who thought that way.

“No, it wasn’t no kids, Gilbert,” she said, her lips a thin, determined line. “It was that good-for-nothing, Tiago D. Costa.”

Whoa, now that slowed me down. Tiago D. Costa was a name I’d been hearing ever since I was a kid. Always the full name, his middle initial as permanent a placement as George C. Scott’s or James T. Kirk’s. Tiago D. Costa. Although he was only seven years older than I was, graduating from Our Lady of Fatima with my cousin Victor’s class, Tiago D. Costa quickly became a legend for his run-ins with authority. He had the fastest car in the city, the fastest fists. Soon he had the fastest rise to ownership of triple-deckers and small stores in the north end of the city. He was also rumored to have a piece of every illegal transaction that passed through the city, so much so that his name was mentioned three times in a Boston newspaper story about crime in New England.

“Tiago D. Costa broke your statue, Vo?”

“Damned straight, Gilbert. Either him or one of his flunkies.”

“Why would he do that?”

My grandmother had a sudden flash of caution streak across her dark eyes. It was a look I’d seen too many times, even in a small town like Putnam, on people trying to hide some guilt from me.

“Vo?” I said. “Why would Tiago D. Costa break your statue?”

“I don’t know, Gilbert. How would I know why anybody does anything? Especially an animal like him.”

But she knew, I had no doubt about that. I also knew she wasn’t about to tell me.

“You have to go talk to him, Gilbert,” she said, her dark eyes worried, even a little frightened. I’d never seen her frightened, except maybe that night in the hospital when my aunt Lucy had been in an accident and...

“Who is it, Vo?”

“Who’s what? I told you, that animal, Tiago D. Costa,” she said, going over to her stove to get a frying pan.

“No, I mean who are you worried for? Who’s really in trouble with Tiago here?”

She frowned, stared down at the frying pan where she was putting in slices of sweetbread she’d cut from a fat round loaf. I’d guessed right, no doubt about that. My grandmother only worried about two things: the potential closing of Our Lady of Fatima Church and bad things happening to people in the family.

“I need to know, Vo. If I’m gonna speak to him, I need to know.”

She sighed, began toasting the bread in the frying pan as she muttered, “Maybe Victor. He could be in a little trouble.”

“Victor? What’s Victor got to do with Tiago D. attacking the Bath... uh, the shrine to Mary?”

“Talk to Tiago D.,” she said, cracking a couple of eggs into the frying pan to go along with my sweetbread. “Just talk to him, Gilbert, that’s all, that’s all I’m asking you to do.”

Victor. It figures. My cousin had turned his love of technology into a career as a private investigator. I’d heard that he’d recently begun to take ads on local cable, speaking both English and Portuguese and selling himself to the community with the label, “The Portuguese P.I.”

My grandmother shuffled slowly to her refrigerator, suddenly looking very old. She had always looked old to me, but old like some ancient, tough tree planted so firmly in the ground that no wind could knock it over. Now she just looked old.

Five thirty. Okay, if Victor was responsible for my being awakened at four, I could get him up now.

“What’s Victor’s number, Vo?” I said, holding up my cell phone and hoping she wouldn’t know that my phone could store all the numbers I needed. Victor’s had never been one of them.

“Don’t call him, Gilbert. I don’t want him to know I called you. All I want you to do is talk to Tiago D. Costa.”

“Well, if you’re not gonna tell me what you know, I have to ask Victor. I mean, I can’t just go in and face down Tiago without knowing what I’m talking about.”

“You’ll be talking about the destruction of part of my shrine to the Blessed Mother, Gilbert. And don’t you have a badge that will put the shakes even in a crumb like Tiago?”

No point in telling her that that wasn’t the way it worked. Tiago would know my Putnam shield would have no real weight down here. Also no point in telling her that Tiago D. Costa had always been the shadow at the end of the dark street of my mind, half hero, half bogeyman, all intimidating legend of my childhood.

“I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find Tiago?”

Her smile was a small one that flickered off quickly, but I still felt as if she’d just mentally whispered, “Checkmate.”

“He’s usually down at that lousy club of his around the corner by eleven or so,” she said, and to reward me she took a length of chourico that she must have fried earlier out of her refrigerator and began chopping off big slices to toss in the pan with the eggs and sweetbread.

Tiago’s “club” was actually a bar called the Ace, and my grandmother had always hated the place, even before Tiago owned it. She also had always described it as “around the corner.” The front of it was, but its back entrance and rear parking lot were snugged up against my vo’s back yard, just on the other side of her chain-link fence.

When I was little and used to sleep over here some weekends with my sisters, we liked to sneak out of bed late at night and peek out the kitchen window, giggling at the drunks reeling through the parking lot down there.

My vo had caught us doing it once. The next morning at breakfast she had kept hinting to my vô about “that thing we talked about,” and from the way my grandfather kept glancing over at us, we knew she’d ratted us out.

When we came back the next weekend, we found out the “thing” they had talked about was planting a row of arborvitae along this side of their backyard fence. The shrubs were only about two feet high, and it would be a few years before they’d actually block the view of the Ace’s back lot from the third floor window. My poor grandfather, torn between being economical and protecting his netos from the evils of the world, had really done neither.

I walked to that back window now. The line of arborvitae had long outlived my vô; the trees had grown tall while he had faded, and had finally succeeded in keeping the view of the back door and back lot from the prying eyes of his grandson.

Over in the far corner of the yard, just past the end of the line of arborvitae, I could see the shrine. The Blessed Mother still had her hands held open and out, the two girls still prayed to her. But the boy lay shattered, his hands clasped together on the lawn, his head smashed, as my grandmother had said, to smithereens.

To the left and two streets over I could see the cross on the top of Our Lady of Fatima Church, which like so many other churches around here was barely hanging on. Already the diocese had closed a number of churches, consolidating them, sometimes crunching as many as three parishes into one.

It was the topic everyone tried to avoid at family get-togethers because it always upset my grandmother, who had been baptized, confirmed, and married in that church, and, we all knew, planned to be buried out of it as well.

She scooped the sweetbread, eggs, and chourico onto a plate and brought the plate over to the table. Now that I had agreed to talk to Tiago D., she suddenly didn’t look so old any more.

She smiled as she watched me eat. Food was love for her, brought up as she was during the Depression when sometimes there wasn’t much food around. The food was good too, but I think I would have enjoyed it a little more if the shadow of Tiago D. Costa wasn’t hovering over every bite I took.

There was nothing else to do after I ate, and it was still too early to call home. My grandmother caught my second yawn and nagged me into taking a nap in her spare bedroom. I thought I was just humoring her, but I was asleep in that old bed I used to love within five minutes.

The Ace, which had always looked run down when I was a kid, had a new face of sand-colored bricks. Though I’ve seen the inside of a few of the city’s bars, I’d never been in the Ace. I was always sure my grandmother’s eyes were frowning down, right through the quickly growing shield of arborvitae, from her third floor kitchen window.

I could hear a buzzer go off in back as I opened the bar’s front door, could see the video camera in the far left corner checking me out. Lots of caution for a small, neighborhood bar — though maybe not for the headquarters of Tiago D. Costa.

It looked as if the renovations had stopped with the new brick front and the surveillance equipment. The inside, dark and smelling like an early Sunday morning after a very late Saturday night, was deserted. Couldn’t blame people for staying away. The dark wood of the long bar was almost obliterated by nicks and burn spots. The stools, small tables, chairs, looked as if they’d been picked up curbside on trash day. The only thing that looked new and clean was the green felt surface of the pool table.

The door buzzer brought a tall, thin guy through a door to the back. He had the kind of pale complexion that made you wonder if he ever went outside. He must have decided that I wasn’t one of the occasional eleven A.M. drinkers they get because he stood with crossed arms and made no move toward the bar.

“What?” he said, with the kind of look my wife gets when she realizes it’s a telemarketer on the phone.

“I want to talk to Tiago D. Costa.”

“He expecting you?”

“I dunno. Why don’t you ask him?” I said, nodding up at the ceiling-mounted camera.

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.

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.”

“And you’re sure there was nothing on the tapes.”

“No, swear to God. It was the same boring thing night after night. People coming and going until closing, a few workers leaving after that, then Tiago, then nothing but a dog or a cat showing up every now and then. You know how stakeouts are, lots and lots of the same boring nothing happening. At least with these I could fast-forward.”

“They all looked the same, huh?”

“Yeah, you know how it is.”

I thought about it for a while before saying, “I think I do. I’ve got to make another visit to the perp.”

Victor nodded sagely, though I’d used the word as a joke.

“Gonna go back and have a little sit-down with Tiago D.?” he asked.

“Tiago? No, Victor, not even close.”

“You holding Vo’s shotgun, Vo?”

She opened the door, frowning up at my caution. But I noticed that the Remington was within easy reach.

The coffee pot was just beginning to perk, so she must have seen me from her front window. I sat at her table, and she brought a plate covered with a white cloth which she whipped off like a magician, showing freshly baked raisin squares beneath.

“You sent a tape to Tiago D. Costa, didn’t you, Vo?” I said, feeling so guilty to be accusing her that I ignored the raisin squares, though I knew she’d made them as a kind of payoff for me.

“Gilbert! What on earth are you talking about?” she said. Her white brows were knit with confusion, but beneath them her dark eyes gave her away. Now that I knew my guess had been right, and it was just a matter of time, I felt okay taking a raisin square.

“I think you know,” I said. “It had to be you. Tiago mentioned a tape, not tapes, like he’d already seen one. Victor had no clue how Tiago found out he was being taped. In fact, all the tapes Victor saw were worthless, nothing for Tiago to get upset about. That leaves you, Vo.”

“But why would I do that?” she said.

“Actually,” I said around bites of juicy raisins, “that’s the question I really want answered.”

I probably should have also told her that Tiago was willing to back off Victor, but that might take away what little leverage I had.

I watched my grandmother get up, walk over to the back window, and head cocked to one side, stare down toward the Bathtub Mary in the far corner of her yard, then over to the left, toward the cross on the top of Our Lady of Fatima.

“When did you get him on tape?” I said quietly.

“The second night,” she whispered, her eyes fixed, her confession aimed toward her church. “It was clear as day, Gilbert, those lowlifes bringing packages into the Ace at three fifteen in the morning.”

“But Victor never saw that tape.”

She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth was turned up in a small, satisfied smile.

“You ran the first night’s tape again and told him it was from the second night?”

He had actually given me the answer himself when he said the nothing-happening tapes had all looked the same.

“I love Victor,” she said, shaking her head as she added, “but sometimes I think he’s not cut out for that job. He didn’t even notice the date on the tape was the same.”

“You made a copy of the tape you sent Tiago D., right?”

“See?” she said, a big smile lighting her face as she turned to look at me. “Now you, querido, are in the right profession!”

“Where is it, Vo?”

But she was already heading for her spare bedroom. I heard her kneel down and slide out one of the storage boxes she keeps under the bed. I’d taken this morning’s nap right over the damned tape she now brought out. She inserted it in her player and fast-forwarded through five hours and fifteen minutes. Then at three eighteen by the timer Victor had set, a panel truck pulled into the back lot of the Ace. Two guys in dark jackets got out as Tiago opened his back door and waited there while they carried in a dozen large cardboard containers. Then he handed one of them an envelope and they got back into their truck and drove away. Any halfway decent technician could get good blowups of the two men’s faces, bring up the license plate on their truck, and help build a case for a warrant. Shouldn’t be a problem with fruit of the poisoned tree, either, since the video had been taken by a private detective working on a totally separate case. But that had been a few days ago. Once Tiago D. Costa saw the tape my grandmother sent him, he sure as hell wouldn’t be keeping the goods stored in the back room of the Ace.

“This tape can’t prove anything now, Vo,” I said. From her shrug, I realized I wasn’t giving her new information.

“Will Victor be all right with Tiago D.?” she said.

“Yeah, though I should give Tiago your copy of the tape too. Tell him there aren’t others. And that there won’t be any others from Victor.”

She nodded, ejected the tape, and handed it to me.

“I didn’t want to get Victor in any trouble, Gilbert. I just... didn’t think that far ahead.”

“But why did you do it? Why send the tape to Tiago in the first place?”

It was the one thing I wanted to know, and I knew she wasn’t about to answer. Her lips were a thin firm line even before she began shaking her head. No way would I want to get that lady in an interrogation room.

We had a cup of coffee together, and I had another square.

“Take the rest, Gilbert,” she said, wrapping them carefully in wax paper even while I was telling her no. “Your Ashley and Jason like them, no?”

She knew Sondra didn’t approve of anything that sweet for the kids. Maybe I’d just keep the squares in my car, snack my way through them in a day or two.

“And you gonna come down and see me with the family soon?” she said at the door as she put the videotapes carefully on top of the package of squares. “Bring my great-grandchildren here to see me?”

“You’re not gonna make Jason dress up in that costume for the shrine, are you?”

She shook her head and laughed as she said, “You made such a handsome shepherd boy, Gilbert. There was such, I don’t know, such holiness shining in your eyes. Y’know, I still got a lot of copies of that picture around. Maybe I’ll send one to your family, if I don’t get to see them soon.”

“We’ll come down this weekend, Vo. And I’ve got to tell you, blackmail is against the law.”

“Blackmail, Gilbert? Showing my great-grandchildren a picture of their father is blackmail?”

“We’ll be down, Vo. I’ll call first, but, please, no pictures. Huh?”

“Okay, Gilbert,” she said, rising on tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek, her small, strong fingers digging into my arms. “Thank you for squaring it about Victor and Tiago D.”

I nodded and started down the stairs when it hit me. Of course, it was the same thing she’d just done to me!

Still nobody in the Ace, though it was a little after noon and they advertised a lunch special.

The tall, pale shadow came out of the back room again, but this time just waved me in there. Tiago looked as if he hadn’t moved an inch since I’d last spoken to him.

“Here’s the only other copy of the tape my grandmother had,” I said, dropping it on his desk. “And Victor had nothing to do with sending the first one to you.”

Tiago was hard to read, but he didn’t seem surprised.

“It’s okay, with you and Victor then, right? If there’s no more taping?”

His nod was almost imperceptible, but it was there.

“One question,” I said. “Just out of curiosity. What’d she want? Money for the church, for Our Lady of Fatima?”

Tiago didn’t exactly smile. He was the kind of guy you probably never wanted to see smile anyway. But there was a twitch at the corners of his lips as he said, “She’s a tough old woman, that grandmother of yours. Smart too.”

“Didn’t give you much time before she said she’d go to the cops with her copy?”

“She’s a smart woman,” he said again, but I already knew that anyway.

“Well, if she ever asks you to come pose for a picture at her shrine,” I said as I turned to leave his office, “tell her no.”