Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 141, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 858 & 859, March/April 2013

SLO Pizza by John A. Miller

John A. Miller is a professional artist as well as a writer. He is also a former businessman, a background he may have made use of in this new story for EQMM. His first work of fiction, Jackson Street and Other Soldier Stories, published in 1995, won the California Book Award. It became available as an e-book in 2011, as did his latest novel, The Power of Stones. The Oregon resident is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Cutdown, Causes of Action, Tropical Heat, and Coyote Moon.

Tony Packer, Ph.D., clipped a couple of VC firms that should have known better for twenty million dollars and one particularly fine California morning took it, as they used to say, on the lam. One year later, I was sitting in Roscoe Jackson’s office near the top of the Transamerica Pyramid watching a peregrine falcon dismember an unlucky pigeon on the ledge outside Roscoe’s window and beaming like a man who just filled an inside straight. Or the village idiot, depending on your point of view.

“What are you so happy about?” Roscoe asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Two things,” I told him, holding up two fingers for emphasis. “First, I can tell you with absolutely no doubt whatever that the estimable Dr. Packer has gone to earth in neither Europe nor Asia.”

“That’s not what the police and the FBI think,” Roscoe pointed out. Roscoe was a rainmaking partner in San Francisco’s most powerful law firm, and his client in this matter was the larger of the two Palo Alto venture-capital firms that had provided mezzanine funding to Dr. Packer’s software startup firm.

“They’re idiots, the lot of them,” I replied, waving a hand dismissively. “Listen, Roscoe, you know as well as I do that law-enforcement agencies, the FBI included, have an absolutely abysmal record of solving crimes where the perp isn’t a certifiable moron. And, hard as it may be to believe, they’re even worse when it comes to skip-tracing.” I shook my head. “In this case, they’re never going to find him because not only is our man not a moron, in fact, he happens to be a bona fide genius.” I pointed at the file on his desk containing all there was to know about Tony Packer, except, of course, his present whereabouts. “Graduated from college at sixteen with a computer-science degree, a doctorate in math from Berkeley, post-doc work in high-energy physics from Princeton, and a chaired professorship at Stanford before he was thirty.”

“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?”

“Basically, yes. But they do know how I’m going to spend it,” I reminded him. “Instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off I’m going to sit in one place and let him come to me, like the detective at Les Deux Magots in Paris.”

“I can’t tell one of the most important venture capitalists in the Western world that you’re going to take his money and open a pizza parlor,” Roscoe said, obviously meaning it.

I laughed. “Then don’t tell him. He doesn’t need to know exactly how I’m going to spend his money, at least not right away. And to make it easier for both you and your client, you may tell him that I’m so certain I know where Dr. Packer has gone to earth that I won’t take a fee, not a penny, unless I’m successful in fingering him.”

“So, tell me,” Joey asked as we rode the Greyhound south, “how you’re so certain that this crook—”

“Dr. Tony Packer.”

“—whatever, how this so-called genius, is laying up in a small town—”

“San Luis Obispo. Everybody who lives there calls it SLO.”

“—south of San Francisco, when nobody else could figure it out.”

“Simple, Joey. The guy grew up there, stayed in town to go to Cal Poly when he could have gone to any university in the state — Stanford, for one, had offered him a full scholarship, as had Caltech. He thinks San Luis Obispo is heaven on earth, and has said so in at least half a dozen interviews over the past twenty years. Plus, he’s put lots of his own money, several million dollars at least, where his mouth is, by funding a bunch of local charities and community organizations. And,” I smiled, “the icing on the cake, so to speak, is that he’s been an avid surfer since he was a little kid, and SLO is just a few minutes away from some of the best surfing on the Central California coast.”

“How do you know all this?”

I smiled. “There’s this thing in San Francisco called a library, where you can get free access to this other thing called the Internet...”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Joey responded, shaking his head. “But what you’re talking about, him taking it on the lam in his own hometown, is too obvious. Way too many people would know him, would have heard of the theft up here in the Bay Area.” He shook his head again. “Even today, twenty million’s a lot of dough. Someone would have said something if they’d seen him down there. I guarantee you, somebody woulda dropped a dime by now.”

“I don’t think so. Sure, lots of people might know him, but even more people down there admire him, admire what he’s done for the community. And keep in mind, stealing money from fabulously wealthy venture capitalists in Palo Alto wouldn’t even be considered a crime by more people than you might think — particularly if the thief was otherwise well liked, and for good reason. The local attitude down there would be, hey, if he clipped a couple of Silicon Valley greed merchants, more power to him.”

“I know what you’re saying, but how about the local police? The sheriff’s office? As soon as he disappeared, you can bet law-enforcement agencies up and down the state were told to be on the lookout for him. If he’d settled in down there the police woulda known about it.”

“Not necessarily. Remember, Packer’s not exactly a dummy. He hasn’t been down openly strolling around town, telegraphing his presence to anyone interested enough to take notice. No,” I shook my head confidently, “he’s stayed under the radar, probably changed his appearance somewhat, kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. I would also be astonished if he doesn’t have at least one, and probably several, of the local police and sheriff’s deputies on his payroll, maybe even the chief, keeping him advised as to any official activity that might crop up from time to time.”

“Now that,” Joey interjected forcefully, “I can believe. Any cop that isn’t taking a little money under the table isn’t worth a damn to anybody.”

“And, almost certainly, a few, a very few of the local civilian heavy hitters know he’s in the area and keep him informed as to what’s moving up and down the grapevine as it relates to him.”

Joey and I got off the Greyhound in San Luis Obispo, bought a local paper, and, two hours later, found a furnished duplex apartment within walking distance of the quaint downtown. That evening we walked around the commercial district, checking out the small restaurant scene. Several places sold pizza, mostly aimed, not surprisingly, at what could charitably be called the student trade. Joey dismissed them as competitors based on smell and ambiance alone.

“I’m not even going to tell you what I smell in there in terms of nothing you want to eat, but beyond that any place that plays loud rock music is no place to expect good food of any kind,” he assured me. “Take my word for it,” he added, nodding his head as if to confirm the veracity of his own words, “these people,” meaning, I presumed, the good citizens of San Luis Obispo, “are going to be talking about us for years to come.”

Thanks to hard economic times that had resulted in a glut of commercial vacancies downtown, it took only two weeks to find a suitable spot, sign a rental agreement, hire a local starving artist to paint a tasteful Roman street scene on one of the interior walls, and lease the bare essentials needed to get a pizza parlor up and running. Knowing how outsiders are often viewed with suspicion by the local bureaucrats, I retained the services of a former city attorney, Anabel Fuentes, to help us with the necessary licenses and permits, and paid her a nice premium on top of her usual hourly billing rate for cutting through the clutter with admirable efficiency.

“What are you going to call your business?” Ms. Fuentes asked as we were filling out forms in her office.

“SLO Pizza,” I immediately replied. The name was totally spur of the moment — it arrived on my lips at the same instant it hit my brain.

If Ms. Fuentes was impressed, she didn’t show it. “If the pizza’s any good you’ll do just fine — most people around here, the ones with a brain anyway, believe that you’ve got to go all the way to San Francisco for a good pizza.”

“Yeah, and good luck finding one there,” Joey interjected with a snort of derision.

“Joey comes from a multigenerational family of Detroit pizza makers,” I assured her. “It takes him twenty-four hours just to make and simmer the tomato sauce. Furthermore, we’re going to use only local, certified organic vegetables, together with handmade artisan cheeses from a small creamery in Santa Barbara.” I smiled at her. “Tell all your friends about us — I promise you they won’t be disappointed.”

“Oh, by the way, if you haven’t hired your delivery boys yet I know a couple of high-school kids who would do a good job,” she said, looking up from the forms.

“Thanks, but at SLO Pizza there’s going to be no delivery and no takeout.” I looked over at Joey, who nodded his head. “Our pizza’s too good to eat any way other than right out of the oven.”

Ms. Fuentes raised an eyebrow and I could see her thinking that she was glad she had demanded a cash retainer before doing any work for us.

We opened SLO Pizza soon thereafter, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who showed up. Several told me they had heard about us from either Anabel Fuentes or our landlord while the rest said they had been walking by and were attracted by the smell of the simmering tomato sauce and the cooking pizzas. Joey stayed busy behind the counter spinning pies while I waited tables, chatting up the customers and enjoying the looks of disbelief when people took their first bites. We closed at two-thirty and while Joey walked back to our apartment to take a short nap, I cleaned up and got the front end ready for the dinner trade. We opened again at five and by the time we closed at ten I was exhausted.

“I hope to hell our boy Packer shows his face soon,” I told Joey after the last customers left and I locked the front door. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this — my feet and back are killing me.”

Joey laughed. “See, the thing is, most guys got no idea how hard it is running a restaurant, even a little pizzeria like this. But I got to tell you,” he sat down and put his feet up, a happy smile on his tired face, “it feels good to be back in the kitchen. I never realized how much I missed it before.”

After a week we were filling up for both lunch and dinner, and we had to hire a kid to help Joey out in the kitchen with prep work and dishwashing. I was running around like a madman out front but managing to hold my own, at least for the time being. Every night we both collapsed into bed, exhausted, and every day it seemed like we sold more and more pizzas. Just as we had planned, our customers by and large represented the upper echelons of the broader SLO community — both town and university. Given that our pizzas were priced at double those of the competition, such as it was, and our environment — no loud music, no video games, no flat-screen televisions tuned to ESPN or MTV — was ill suited for anyone under the age (chronologically or emotionally) of thirty, we attracted exactly the cohort into which I expected Dr. Packer to fit. It was just a matter of time, as I repeatedly explained to Roscoe Jackson during our weekly telephone calls.

“Plus,” I told him during the most recent of our calls, “we’re making money hand over fist down here. I mean, who would have guessed that there could be so much profit in pizzas? In fact,” I shook my head at the thought, “if we could get a beer and wine permit, it’d be like having a license to print money.”

Three days later five surfers walked in just as we were preparing to close for the afternoon. Two were middle-aged, in their fifties I guessed, one was ten or so years younger, and two were probably mid-twenties. All were dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, the official footwear of SLO, and had obviously just come over from the beach. The two young guys were tatted and big-time buffed, with arms like cannons, whitewall haircuts, and attitudes that shouted law enforcement so loudly a deaf man would have heard it. One of the older guys and the forty-something sported beards while the other, a guy who would have been called a silver fox at Folsom, wore his surfer gear as if it were a Brooks Brothers suit.

“We just came over from San Onofre,” the silver fox explained in a voice that reminded me of Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” It also reminded me of the voice of the judge who had sentenced me to three-to-five years. “We’re not too late for a pizza, are we?” He smiled. “We would have gotten here earlier but the waves were too good to leave.”

“The sign on the door says we close at two o’clock,” I replied casually, “but we’re not fanatics about it. Welcome to SLO Pizza. Everything’s fresh and,” I nodded toward the chalkboard on the wall that showed the toppings available that day, “if it’s not up there, we don’t have it.”

“What kind of beer have you got?” one of the young cops asked.

“We sell no intoxicating spirits,” I replied, shaking my head for emphasis. “The state of California, in its infinite wisdom, believes that issuing beer and wine permits to convicted felons would lead inevitably to a breakdown in public order, if not outright anarchy.” The three older guys all laughed. The two younger ones didn’t even crack a smile. Dicks for sure, I thought. And the only reason they’d be out surfing with the three older men would be to provide muscle, begging the question, why do the older dudes need muscle?

“Too bad,” the bearded oldster said, clearly meaning it. “Nothing goes with pizza like a cold beer.” He looked at his two buds and then back at me with a mischievous grin on his face. “Say, how about if we bring our own? I’ve got a cooler out in the Jeep filled with Coronas.”

“Well, with a group like yours, and the fact that we’re now officially closed for the afternoon, perhaps we could accommodate you.”

“What do you mean a group like ours?”

I smiled. “I’m guessing that at least one of you,” I indicated the three older men, “is a judge, and that you guys,” I nodded at the two steroidal stiffs, “are sworn peace officers.”

“Excellent,” the forty-something said, smiling and nodding his head. “You’ve got a good eye.” He pointed at the silver fox. “Meet Judge Sam Jackson, presiding judge of the superior court here in SLO, and Matt and James here are, as you guessed, deputy sheriffs. Bill Masterson,” the other bearded one, “owns Seven Hills Winery, the oldest and largest vineyard along the Central Coast, and I’m Charles Young, a healthcare consultant.”

“And surf bum,” the judge interjected.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” I said, shaking their hands. “And, like I said a minute ago, welcome to SLO Pizza.” The fact that Young had neglected to tell me Matt’s and James’s last names confirmed that they were the hired help, so to speak.

“What were you in the joint for?” Matt rather rudely asked.

“Stupidity,” I answered, looking not at him but at the three older men. They laughed and even the two hard-faced young cops cracked a smile.

They ordered three large pizzas with Italian sausage and mushrooms and, an hour later, when they were finished, left a twenty-dollar tip on the table. Back in the kitchen Joey watched as I dropped the twenty in our tip jar.

“I take it they liked the pizza,” he said as he chewed on a toothpick.

“They liked it a lot,” I assured him. “And by the way, the forty-something guy, the one who paid the bill and left the tip, is none other than the elusive Dr. Tony Packer.”

“Yeah?” Joey nodded his head, apparently no more impressed than if I’d just given him a weather report. “You sure it’s him?”

“About ninety-nine percent sure. He’s grown a beard and had what looks like a little plastic surgery done, but yes, I’d say I’m as sure as I need to be short of lifting his fingerprints. Which reminds me, I notice that they took all their empty beer bottles with them when they left.”

“Probably to be sure they got their bottle deposits back,” Joey sniffed. “You see it all the time — guys worth a million bucks would rather be poked in the eye with a stick than leave a nickel lying on the table.”

“Which probably explains why they’ve got the million dollars to begin with,” I pointed out.

“Whatever. So, what are you going to do now that you’ve ID’d our boy?”

“Nothing for the time being. His crew out there,” I nodded back toward where they had been sitting, “consisted of the presiding judge of the superior court, one of the leading vintners in all of California, and, for beef, two sheriff’s deputies.”

“I spotted the young guys as dicks the minute they walked in.” Joey paused and looked at me in a way that made me a little uneasy. “So,” he finally said, still working on his toothpick, “what’s the plan?”

“I don’t know, Joey, I’m going to have to think about it for a while. This guy is so smart, and so well protected, just like I told you he would be, that taking him into custody is going to be no easy thing.”

“It sounds like you’re not planning on calling the guy in San Francisco...”

“Roscoe Jackson?”

“Yeah, him. It sounds like you’re not planning on calling him with the news right away.”

“No,” I confirmed, shaking my head, “I’m not. Actually putting the collar on Dr. Packer and the missing twenty million dollars is going to require an extraordinarily delicate touch. If Roscoe’s client sends in the cavalry Packer’ll hear about it and be gone before they even leave San Francisco. And the big problem with that is that if they don’t actually succeed in apprehending Packer the VCs who hired us will almost certainly refuse to pay our fee.”

“Not good.”

“Not good at all. So, until I have more information, like where he’s living and what his day-to-day routine is, I’m saying nothing.”

“I heard that.” Joey paused for a long minute, obviously choosing his next words with some care. “Now that our boy has shown his face, I was thinking of something else,” he finally said.

“What’s that?”

“We drop a dime on him and, you know, as popular a guy as he seems to be around here, I mean it being his hometown and all that, our business is going to take a big hit.” He shook his head. “A big hit,” he repeated for emphasis.

I started to laugh, thinking for a second that Joey was being ironic, when it hit me — Joey liked it here, liked having his own pizzeria, liked being respected, admired even, as a legitimate member of the business community. I cut the laugh off. “The pizzeria was never intended to survive beyond our search for Dr. Packer,” I gently reminded him. “For one thing, the VCs who fronted the money are going to want as much of it back as possible, which means we’re going to have to liquidate all the assets as soon as we finger Packer. And for another, you’re right, as admired as Packer is locally, I doubt you and I are going to be the most popular dudes in town when word gets around that we’re the ones who busted him.”

“You’re coming up in the world.”

I was sitting in Anabel Fuentes’s office and had just told her about meeting the judge, the vintner, and the man who had introduced himself as Charles Young.

“If they like your pizza you can bet that everybody who’s anybody in SLO will hear about it,” she added.

“Just what we need,” I said, feigning dismay. “More business. I’m about to work myself into an early grave as it is.” I paused for a second, striving, probably unsuccessfully, for an air of nonchalance. “So what’s the story on this Charles Young? He introduced himself as a healthcare consultant and, to be honest, Joey and I should probably be thinking about some sort of health-insurance plan. Would he be someone we should maybe talk to?”

“If your question is does he sell health insurance, the answer is no.”

I waited for her to say something more and when she didn’t I couldn’t not smile. “Do you know him? Personally, I mean.”

“What, precisely, are you getting at?”

I shook my head and stood up, her obvious disinclination to talk about Charles Young telling me all I needed to know for the time being. “Just trying to get more acquainted with the local movers and shakers. Who knows,” I smiled and turned to leave, “at some point Joey and I may want to join the SLO Country Club and, God knows,” my smile broadened, “in that eventuality we’re going to need all the sponsors we can get.”

Anabel looked at me silently for several seconds, the expression on her face reminding me of the one on the associate warden’s face when he welcomed me, so to speak, to Folsom. “You would do well to keep in mind that SLO is still very much a small town, particularly when it comes to the men and women who matter most, from a business and political point of view. People asking questions, particularly people newly arrived like you and your partner, often raise suspicion, regardless of motivation. My advice is that you count yourself fortunate that Charles Young and his friends like your pizza and let it go at that.”

Two evenings later, twenty minutes after we’d closed for the night, the man who had introduced himself as Charles Young strolled into SLO Pizza, this time unaccompanied. I was alone, lying on the floor with my feet up one wall, a restorative yoga pose called viparita karani. Not something, I can assure you, I learned at Folsom.

“Namaste,” he said, a smile in his voice.

“Namaste.” I lowered my legs and rolled to one side, standing in one easy motion.

“You look closed,” he said with obvious disappointment, gesturing toward the darkened kitchen.

“Not only do we look closed, we are closed,” I confirmed. “But if it’s a slice or two of pizza you were looking for you’re in luck. Joey made me up a pie just before he left and you’re more than welcome to share it with me when it comes out of the oven.”

We chatted about inconsequential things — the quality of the surf at Pismo Beach, his favorite yoga studio in SLO — while I set a table for two. By the time everything was ready the pizza was done and I brought it to the table still bubbling from the oven.

“Be careful not to burn your mouth,” I warned. “It’s even hotter than it looks.”

He smiled. “I understand you’ve been asking around about me,” he said as he moved a slice to his plate.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it asking around,” I replied, pleased that we weren’t going to beat around the bush. “Just Anabel Fuentes, and not surprisingly she wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Not surprisingly?”

I tasted the pizza and closed my eyes momentarily as the intense flavors of Joey’s sauce spilled across my palate and rose into my sinuses. “Not surprisingly inasmuch as she and a few other heavy hitters in SLO like Bill Masterson and Judge Jackson know that your name isn’t Charles Young.”

“Who do you think I am?”

“None other than the elusive Dr. Tony Packer.” I took another bite and smiled with pleasure. “Can Joey make a dynamite pizza, or what?”

“I’ve never tasted anything like it,” he admitted, “anywhere in the world, including Italy. And as far as Tony Packer is concerned, most folks who think about it at all think he’s living like a king in Bangkok, or lying on the beach at Phuket.”

I shook my head. “That’s yesterday’s news. Just before leaving San Francisco I heard that the latest confirmed sighting has you living the ex-pat high life in Ho Chi Minh City, in a colonial French mansion overlooking the Saigon River.” I smiled. “Where, even as we speak, the FBI and a veritable posse of private dicks are throwing serious money around from the Mekong Delta to Hanoi in the hopes of finding a capitalist-minded communist official who will drop a dime on you.”

Packer laughed. “A delightful image.” He helped himself to another slice. “But answer me this: Why a pizza parlor? I mean, I know you’re here on behalf of your friend Roscoe Jackson, and that he, of course, is working for the VCs from whom twenty million dollars was borrowed—”

“Dude, I don’t think they think it was borrowed.” I smiled. “Stolen is more along the lines of how they see it.”

“—but why,” he continued, ignoring my good-natured interruption, “a pizza parlor?”

“I’ll tell you why a pizza parlor if you’ll tell me how you knew about me working for Roscoe Jackson.”

“All it took was a single phone call to a friend in San Francisco.” He shrugged. “She, my friend, asked one or two reasonably well-informed people who in turn made a call or two, and voilà. Your life is an open book, although I will say that your conviction and subsequent disbarment made things a good deal easier. As to why I would have made the call to San Francisco in the first place, you didn’t honestly think you could just ride the bus down here and open a restaurant without raising a few eyebrows, did you? Now,” he leaned back in his chair, “why a pizza parlor?”

“Have you ever heard of a cafe in Paris called Les Deux Magots?”

Puzzled, he shook his head, and I told him the same story I had told Roscoe Jackson. He threw back his head and laughed. “Too cool for school.” Still smiling, he looked at me carefully. “I’m curious as to why you haven’t yet told your friend and employer Roscoe Jackson about what you think you’ve discovered?”

“How do you know I haven’t told him?”

“Because if you had, all those FBI agents allegedly wasting taxpayer dollars in Vietnam would be agitating the natives here in SLO instead.”

“Heaven forfend.” sighed contentedly, pleasantly satiated by yet another of Joey’s extraordinary pizzas. “You are, of course, correct — Roscoe knows nothing yet. As to why I haven’t told him anything, it’s simple: My deal for finding you is entirely on the come — I succeed I get paid. I fail,” another shrug, “it’s Take a hike pal, and don’t let the doorknob hit you on the ass on the way out. The problem is that finding you isn’t quite enough. My concern is that should you slip away between my call to Roscoe and the arrival of the cavalry here in SLO, the VCs will take the position that our agreement requires your physical apprehension.” I shrugged. “So, before calling I felt I needed time to gather a more complete dossier on you.”

“Are you also thinking that perhaps I might give you more money to stay quiet than they would to know my whereabouts?”

I laughed with genuine humor. “If I learned anything at Folsom it was not to do business with crooks.” I held up a hand. “No offense intended. No, as I said a minute ago, I merely needed a little more time to dig up information. That’s why I went to Ms. Fuentes. Beyond that, I must say that I’m also mildly curious as to why you stole the money in the first place.”

“Why do you think I took it?”

“It certainly wasn’t for the money per se — not in the sense that you needed it to support a drug habit, or toys like Gulfstream jets or exotic cars. You could have done all that quite easily on the money you had already earned. And, despite your success to date in staying severed steps ahead of the law, there’s no way you would have believed you could remain under cover forever, not with twenty million on the line. No,” I shook my head, “clearly something else was going on, and until I figure it out I have no intention of telling Roscoe or anyone else that I found you.” I snapped my fingers as it suddenly came to me. “Jesus, I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.” I looked at him, shaking my head ruefully. “You never intended to stay hidden long-term, did you?”

“And why not?” Packer asked, obviously pleased that I was starting to figure things out.

“Because you never intended to keep the money — you always intended to return it.” I paused for a sip of water. “But I still don’t know why you took it in the first place.”

Packer waved a dismissive hand. “Simple enough — my startup wasn’t a startup anymore. You see, we’d proceeded well past the mezzanine funding stage and were all set to do an IPO. At that point, the VCs controlled the board of directors and were really running the company, leaving me with lots of time on my hands. During the dog-and-pony shows we were putting on for Wall Street ahead of the IPO I met a guy, a quant for one of the big private-investment houses, and got interested in the concept.”

“A quant?”

“A quantitative analyst, someone who uses mathematic formulas to predict movement in the stock market. At its heart quantitative analysis is based on stochastic calculus, coincidentally a particular interest of mine when I was studying at Cal.”

“Does it work? Reasonably dependably, I mean.”

“Depends on who you ask. The concept got wildly popular some years back and math Ph.D.’s from the best universities across the country suddenly found themselves swamped with ridiculous employment offers from Wall Street.” He shook his head. “Between you and me, I believe one of the reasons for quantitative analysis’s sudden popularity was that few brokers on Wall Street could spell stochastic calculus, much less understand its strengths and limitations when applied to the stock market. In any event, fortunes were made and, as is usually more often the case, lost, and the bloom has gone somewhat off the rose, so to speak.”

“So let me guess: You secretly became a quant and needed money, big money, to break the bank at Monte Carlo.”

Packer smiled and nodded his head affirmatively. “I was able to come up with what is a truly novel approach, mathematically speaking, and used it to write a computer program to play the market in a very specific way. After putting it through several dry runs I was convinced that the program worked and calculated that twenty million was the minimum amount I needed to get into the game.”

“Now, see, this is the part I still don’t understand. Why steal it? I mean, everybody already knew you were a genius, wouldn’t your VC partners have been more than happy to front you the money once they had seen your program?”

“You don’t know a great deal about the venture capital business, do you?”

“Almost nothing,” I cheerfully admitted.

“Then the main thing you need to understand is that, contrary to popular opinion, venture capitalists hate risk. In fact, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that they positively loathe it. The men and women who run the major VC firms are little more than bean counters, glorified bankers and accountants who demand an almost ridiculous level of assurance before they’ll deign to invest in a new firm or a novel idea.” He shook his head again. “There’s absolutely no way they’d have backed a computer program based on mathematical principles not fifteen people in the entire country could fully understand. What’s more, even if they did, it would have been next to impossible to keep the specifics of my computer program, not to mention the underlying math, a proprietary secret.”

“But it is their money, right? I mean, it’s up to them how they want to invest or not invest it.”

“Correct. That’s why I had to borrow it without their consent.”

I smiled. “Back to that word borrow.”

“Well, it is borrowing if I intend to pay it back, with interest of course. And,” he held up a finger for emphasis, “if the interest is, let us say, sufficiently generous, trust me when I tell you that there will be no quibbling about whether the initial borrowing was consentual or not.”

“Not on your or the VCs’ part, perhaps, but the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco is not likely to be deterred from pursuing the matter merely because the money got paid back.”

Packer smiled broadly. “U.S. Attorneys work for the Attorney General in Washington, and the Attorney General works for the President, and the President, all Presidents, work for men and women like me.” He shook his head. “A bank robber steeds twenty grand and goes straight to jail, whether the money is ultimately recovered or not. A wildly successful entrepreneur borrows twenty million and,” he shrugged expressively, “accommodations can be made, particularly when the so-called victims hugely profit in the end. And especially when the entrepreneur takes nothing for himself.”

“Nothing? Not even a little to cover expenses, overhead, pizza, stuff like that?”

“Nada. As you figured out before you even left San Francisco, I already had more money than I could reasonably expect to spend in my lifetime, plus the ability to make more by cranking out a succession of high-tech startups, all of which I could easily get funded based on my reputation alone. Difficult as it may be to believe, the entire point of this particular caper,” he smiled again when he said the word caper, “was merely to prove the validity of the math underlying my program.”

“With big money on the line.”

“Exactly. Otherwise it’s just an intellectual exercise.”

“So where is your share of the profit going?”

“Into a nonprofit foundation established and controlled by Judge Jackson and Bill Masterson—”

“The wine baron,” I interjected.

“The wine baron indeed. Another one of those men and women for whom the President of this country actually works. As I was saying, all the profit from my trades, after an appropriate set-aside for my VC friends up in Palo Alto, goes directly to their foundation, from whence it is put to use here in SLO.”

“Doing what?”

“Doing good, of course.” Packer smiled. “For instance, no child living in this county will ever go without medical care because of an inability to pay. No child living here will ever pay a penny in tuition at an institute of higher education, whether the local community college or Stanford. The local schools have fully funded music and arts programs, and free after-school tutoring in math and the sciences for all who need it.”

“You have made a lot of money,” I said, impressed.

“More than you can imagine. Enough to fund all that I just described plus a one hundred percent return for the VCs from whom the money was borrowed.”

“Stolen,” I said, shaking my head, “not borrowed. And Robin Hood notwithstanding, doing good with ill-got gains in no way alters the underlying crime.” Packer looked at me with obvious irritation for several seconds before responding. “As a convicted felon I should think you’re hardly—”

“You’re right,” I said, holding up a hand as I interrupted him. “My own appallingly long list of shortcomings, both moral and neurochemical, has been well documented by the California judicial system, and in any event I came down here only to find you, not to pass judgment. And having done so, as I said a minute ago, I was just curious as to why you stole the money. All that’s left now is a quick phone call to Roscoe Jackson and Joey and I are out of here.”

“I’m afraid you’re too late by about,” he looked at his watch and then back at me, a broad smile on his face, “eight hours or so.”

I nodded my head, knowing right away what he meant. “So a deal was done before you came in here tonight?”

“Pretty much. Judge Jackson drove up to San Francisco this morning and has spent most of today meeting first with the VCs and then with the U.S. Attorney.”

“Fast work.”

“Not really. We’ve been laying the groundwork for the past couple of months, lining up the support of both of California’s senators as well as a handful of House members.”

“Still,” I paused a second, running the numbers around in my head, “on the face of it you took a chance, and something about that worries me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You knew who I was at least two days ago, right? I mean, three days ago you first came in for pizza with your buds, and the next day you supposedly made your call to San Francisco. But then, even when you knew who I was you waited a couple of days before sending the judge up to make the deal, all of which time you couldn’t have known whether I was telling Roscoe Jackson or not.”

“Maybe I like to gamble.”

“Not about this,” I disagreed, shaking my head. “You’ve planned everything too well right from the beginning to risk a wild-card like me dropping a dime before you had a chance to make your deal.” Suddenly it hit me and I felt a major-league stomach ache coming on. “Oh, man,” I said with a genuine groan of pain, “Joey.” I shook my head again and looked at Packer. “You didn’t call anyone in San Francisco, did you?”

“Didn’t have to,” Packer confirmed. “That first time we came in, three days ago? The next morning, while you were still asleep, Joey called the judge and set up a meeting with me. He told me all about the deal you had with Roscoe Jack-son and that you weren’t going to call him until you knew more. That’s what gave us time to set things up in San Francisco without worrying about what you were up to. Joey knew you wouldn’t call Jackson without telling him first.”

“What was the deal? I mean, how much did he settle for?”

Packer looked around the pizzeria. “This place.” He smiled. “Joey didn’t want any money, just the freedom to keep this place going as his own. So part of my deal with the VCs was that they agreed to forgive the startup money they gave you to get the pizzeria going.”

“Meanwhile, assuming the VCs elect not to pay my fee for finding you, I take it in the shorts.”

“Consider it tuition,” Packer said as he stood to leave. “When push comes to shove I don’t trust anybody, and neither should you.”

As I had assumed they would, the VCs refused to pay me, taking the position that the instant Packer turned himself in our deal was rendered null and void. Roscoe tried to push them on it but could gain no traction, so I returned to San Francisco with my curiosity satisfied and my billfold empty. I probably could have sued, but they were too a big a client of Roscoe’s firm for me to want to rock that boat. Well before I left SLO I had gotten over my annoyance at Joey selling me out. He felt real bad about it but, as he pointed out with an eloquent shrug, in the final analysis a fellow’s got to look out for number one. You should have learned that at Folsom, he rather needlessly added. To show him there were no hard feelings I tried to warn him about what a treacherous snake Packer was, but he just laughed.

“I been gettin’ into bed wit’ crooks all my life,” Joey assured me as I was boarding the Greyhound for the ride north, the irony of his own statement apparently lost on him. “And this one’s easy money ’cause he don’t even know he’s a crook. He ain’t careful,” he rolled a toothpick around his mouth and smiled, “I’ll have him waitin’ tables for me before it’s all over.”

Your lips to God’s ear, Joey, I thought as the bus pulled away from the station. Your lips to God’s ear.