“Hi, Rob!” he said when I walked over. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“This would be a good day to get out into the country for a while, don’t you think, Rob? Wouldn’t you like to see all those animals? I just love cows and horses and all those other animals they have on farms.”

He was dressed, as always, in filthy white sneakers, worn-out blue jeans, and a long-sleeved white-and-brown cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. He often talked about getting out into the country.

“Did you used to live in the country?” I asked him.

“I thought I did, but now I’m not too sure,” he said, serious for a moment. “I know my mom used to tell me about it.”

He was an exceptionally childlike young man, someone who had never grown up for some reason and probably never would. I wondered what had become of his family and how he had ended up here.

“Don’t you love cows and horses and roosters and stuff?” he said, smiling again.

“I do, actually.”

“Me, too,” he said, smiling still more broadly in a way that made me smile with him.

“What are you in such a good mood about?”

“I’m rich,” he said, ecstatic, dribbling his coins again and then tossing them up in the air so that they rained down around him.

I had an urge to practice some unlicensed reality therapy and point out to him that the coins were plastic, but I bit my tongue as he gathered them up. He was probably mildly retarded. If the plastic disks made him feel rich, what was the harm? He was no more deluded than people who bought into the artificial value of diamonds with thousands of real dollars or built their identities out of the fool’s gold of brand names, department store clerks and Hollywood stars who wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in the mirror if they weren’t looking through Ray-Bans or to believe in their own reality if their bodies weren’t wrapped in designer duds.

I took a long, searing drink of my Coke, the only kind of cola I ever buy, then screwed the top back on and held the half-full bottle out to Ozone.

“You want the rest of this?”

“Sure, Rob. Thanks!” He put the bottle in his Batman backpack.

“See you later,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“To the library.”

“Can I walk over that way with you?”

“Of course you can. What kind of books do you like?”

“Books about the country,” he said. “Ones with pictures of cows and horses.”

As we went south along the boardwalk toward the terminus of Venice Boulevard, where it stops, awestruck at the sight of the Pacific, shopkeepers and street performers shouted out friendly greetings to my companion. Some called him by his strange name, Ozone Pacific. Others called him Oz. Despite his limitations and lack of resources, or maybe because of those limitations, he was a popular character in the carnival world that clung to the edge of the continent. He seemed to know everyone.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Baba Raba?” I asked him as we passed a body-piercing booth sandwiched in between a Thai takeout place and a shop that sold incense and statues of Buddha and Shiva.

“Do you know Baba Raba?” he said, excited.

“No. But I’ve heard of him. Do you know him?”

“Yes. He’s a nice man. He talked to me before and made me feel better when I was sad.”

“Really? Does he live around here?”

“He has an ash farm over that way.” Ozone waved his rayon-clad arm toward the east, toward Lincoln Avenue and the 405 and the whole Los Angeles basin. “What is an ash farm, anyway, Rob?”

“It’s not an ash farm, Oz, it’s an ashram.”

“What’s that?”

We had come to Venice Boulevard and turned inland between the brightly painted fronts of the restaurants and bars that lined the block between the boardwalk and Pacific Avenue. The street was colorful as Bob Marley’s cap, and reggae music blasted from speakers on a patio where people were eating rice and beans with jerk chicken.

“It’s a place where people go to meditate and pray,” I said. “Kind of like a church. Do you know where his ashram is? Is it near here?”

“I don’t know, Rob.”

“Do you know when he is going to be down here again?”

“No. I haven’t seen him for a while. I wish he’d come back.”

The soothing sound of the surf crumbling on the beige sand a hundred yards behind us gradually blended with the sound of traffic as we approached the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Pacific Avenue.

“Are you going to be seeing him, Rob?”

“I might be.”

“Would you ask him if I can have my picture back?”

We were standing at the intersection, waiting for the light to change, surrounded by a mixed crowd of local hipsters, homeless people, and tourists.

“What picture?” I asked him, keeping an eye on the signal on the other side of the busy street. “The one of the lady?”

“Yes,” he said.

Just then the light changed and the walk signal came on and I crossed the avenue with the herd.

“Why did he want the picture?” I said, stepping up onto the far sidewalk. When Ozone didn’t answer, I stopped and looked back. He was waving to me from the other side of the street. “Come on,” I called out, “cross before the light changes.”

“You go on,” he yelled over the sound of car engines idling. “I gotta get back down to the beach.” He turned his small, cowboy-shirt-clad back and melted into the crowd.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Abbot Kinney Memorial Library was six blocks straight ahead of me on Venice Boulevard, but I detoured a block south to walk along one of the city’s remaining canals. Gentrification had hit hard in the canal district. Most of the antique Victorians and prewar bungalows that lined the waterways had been restored with newly milled gingerbread, stained-glass windows, and lavish applications of pastel paint. Here and there, a shack that had moldered beyond repair was being replaced with a bulky modern structure that filled every cubic inch of its lot and airspace. Evelyn Evermore’s handsome yellow bungalow was two blocks farther south, along the Linnie Canal.

I was happy to discover that Baba Raba frequented the neighborhood. If the necklace belonged to him, as Jimmy Z said, it was critical to case him as quickly as possible, and I was starting to get a bead on him. He was in fact a guru of some kind with an ashram in the area. He was not a secretive spiritual teacher who stayed hidden from public view, meditating the day away within a cloud of incense smoke, safe from the troubles and temptations of society, but a classic California swami who liked to get out in the sunshine and mingle with homeless kids and millionaires. He had the power to make sad people feel better and perhaps to charm money out of the pocketbooks of lonely ladies. I wondered if he had found out about Evermore and her necklace from Ozone’s picture, same as me, and if she had really given him the diamonds. And if so, why.

Ozone had showed me the picture less than three weeks before. If Baba had gotten his hands on it and wrangled a meeting with Evermore and managed to extract a twenty-six-carat donation from her in the short time since then, he must be one of the truly anointed, radiating the most inspirational energy imaginable. Or else a first-class charlatan.

There was nothing about the guru in the library’s newspaper database, but there was a flyer on the cluttered bulletin board in the lobby announcing that free introductory meditation classes would be offered each Saturday night in January at the Murshid Center for Enlightened Beings, where seekers could bathe in the beneficent darshan of Baba Raba, head of the Magdalene Order, healer of the heartsick, frustrated, angry, confused, homeless, loveless, and depressed.

I’d fit right in.

If Baba stuck to his schedule, there would be a meditation class at eight o’clock that evening. The ashram was on Broadway between Sixth and Seventh, about ten blocks north of the library. I wrote down the address and phone number.