“And number two?” Roscoe asked, not quite sighing.
“Number two?”
“You said there were two things you were happy about.”
“Oh, right,” I said, nodding enthusiastically. “Number two: I know where the elusive Dr. Packer is.”
Roscoe’s jaw didn’t exactly drop, but almost.
Forty-eight hours later I was riding the dog south to San Luis Obispo with Joey Carbone, a man with whom I had served time at Folsom State Prison. Five minutes after we left the Greyhound station in San Francisco, Joey fell asleep, allowing me to replay the conversation I had had with Roscoe Jackson...
“You do?” Roscoe just looked at me for a couple of seconds. “You’re telling me that you actually know where Tony Packer is?”
“That is exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t know precisely where he is, you understand, not a street address, but I’ve pinned it down to within a radius of, say, twenty or thirty miles from a point certain.”
“That covers a lot of territory.”
“It does, and it’s the reason your client is going to have to spend a little money for me to run him to ground.”
“How little?” Roscoe asked, the suspicious tone returning to his voice.
I shrugged. “Not much, when you get right down to it. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen thousand dollars should do it.” I paused a beat. “Twenty tops.”
“You call twenty thousand dollars not much?”
“Not much relative to the twenty million Dr. Packer is alleged to have absconded with. Besides, they’ll get a good bit of it back when I’m done with it.”
“What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Before I answer that let me ask you a question: ‘Have you ever heard of a café in Paris called Les Deux Magots?’ When he shook his head I explained that Les Deux Magots was a Parisian sidewalk café famous, particularly between the first and second world wars, for its artistic and literary clientele, people like Wilde, Sartre, Hemingway, Picasso, and Modigliani. It was so well known and popular that it was said, only half jokingly, that a detective looking for a wanted person from anywhere in the world need only sit patiently at a table at Les Deux Magots, for sooner or later his man, or woman, was bound to show up.”
“You’re proposing to open a café?” More than a hint of incredulity had crept into Roscoe’s voice.
“Of course not.”
“Thank God for that,” Roscoe said with a nervous laugh. “I can’t even imagine trying to explain such a thing to my client, not to mention my partners. They’d think I’d lost my mind.” He laughed again. “Wait a minute.” He looked at me carefully and the smile dropped off his face like a ball rolling off the edge of a table. Roscoe had known me for far too many years to accept a simple negative. “What are you proposing to open?”
“A pizza parlor.”
Although Joey Carbone was not by nature predisposed to look gift horses in the mouth, neither was he so credulous as to accept one out of the blue without first checking to see if it might be hollow. “I don’t know,” he’d first said when I approached him with my proposition.
Joey was an essential element of my plan to locate Tony Packer, because, apart from the fact that Joey preferred to earn a living dealing in stolen goods, he was also the scion of a Detroit family that had been making pizza for three generations. Joey and I had shared a cell at Folsom State Prison for almost nine months, a time in which he had bemoaned on a stupefyingly regular basis the fact that it was impossible to find a good pizza in all of California. “My dad or granddad would come out here,” he said on more than one occasion, “and the first thing they’d do would be have a heart attack when they saw what these morons call a pizza. I got a thousand dollars says my five-year-old nephew, he could make a better pizza than you can get anywhere in this state.”
“You don’t have a thousand dollars,” I pointed out. “And what’s wrong with the pizza in California?”
He looked at me much as one might look at a simpleton. “You been to college, got all these degrees, and you don’t know nothing. You want to know what’s wrong with pizza in California, I’ll tell you what’s wrong.” He held up three fingers. “Cheese, sauce, and dough.”
That about covers it, I thought but did not say.
“First, they glop on the cheese like it’s a goddamn cheese sandwich. Worse, it’s not even good cheese, it comes from a factory someplace, probably China, so right away you know it’s got no flavor to it at all. Then the sauce, talk about no flavor, it’s right out of a can with no spice, no nothing. They might as well be spreading on plain tomato paste, ’cause that’s all it is. And the dough. Man, don’t even get me started on the crap these places call pizza dough.” He shook his head dolefully. “Tell you what,” he added, pointing a finger at me, “as quick as you get out of this dump I’ll make you a real pizza.”
Joey was as good as his word. He got out of prison about six months ahead of me and the first thing he did when I arrived back in San Francisco was make me a pizza. “Jesus, Joey,” I said after the first bite, “this is the best pizza I’ve ever eaten.” And I’ve got to tell you, it was. And not by a little. By a whole lot.
“I don’t know,” Joey had said when I first approached him with my proposition.
I knew that he was considering getting back into fencing stolen goods with a guy over in Oakland. “What’s in it for me?”
“You mean other than a lot of money?” I replied sarcastically. “Legal money, the kind you can spend without fear of subsequent arrest and incarceration?”
“I gotta tell you, it sounds a little too good to be true,” Joey observed, not the least offended by my sarcasm. “Someone’s paying big bucks for you—”
“For us.”
“Okay, for us, to open a pizza parlor in this place down south—”
“San Luis Obispo,” I interjected. “Just north of Santa Barbara.”
“Whatever. These clients of yours, they’re paying you, us, to open a pizza parlor just so you can finger a guy who’s done such a good job of dropping out of sight that nobody, not the cops, not a whole bunch of private dicks, has been able to find him for over a year. What makes you think that in all the world this guy’s gonna come strolling into your — our — place?”
I smiled. “The pizza.”
Roscoe Jackson, of course, had asked essentially the same question. But first he wanted to know how I knew where Dr. Packer was hiding out.
“It’s all there,” I told him, nodding toward the thick file on his desk. “Everything you need to know about Tony Packer, including where he is even as we speak.”
“Okay,” Roscoe said, “I’ll bite — where is he?”
“I can’t tell you,” I replied, smiling as his initial look of surprise at my answer turned immediately to one of annoyance. “Look, Roscoe, if I tell you, you’ll have to tell your client, and before you could say Bob’s your uncle Tony Packer will hear about it.” I splayed the fingers of my right hand, simulating a wisp of smoke dissipating on the wind. “And just like that he’ll be gone like Keyser Söze.”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, has nobody yet figured out that Packer almost certainly has someone on the inside of probably both the VCs and local law enforcement keeping him abreast of developments?”
Roscoe looked away briefly, an unhappy expression on his face. “I will admit that the thought has occurred to me.” He shook his head. “But you expect my client to write you a blank check for up to twenty thousand dollars without knowing where, or even exactly how, you intend to spend it?”