Mrs. Schmulowitz smirked. “I may not come from a long line of farmers, Bubeleh, but I do know what a cow looks like.”

“What about his car? What did that look like?”

“Small. White. With fancy schmancy wheels, and one of those things on the back.”

“Things?”

“Like a race car.”

“A spoiler?”

“Spoiler, schmoiler. One of those things. Like a wing.”

I asked her if the car could’ve been a Honda.

“What do I know from a Honda?” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “All these cars today. A New Yorker. A Buick Regal. Now, those were cars!”

White. Small. With fancy schmancy wheels. And one of those things on the back. It sounded suspiciously like the car that had pursued me from the airport before I left for Los Angeles.

Kiddiot climbed down from the tree with slow caution, one paw after the other, and jumped the last couple of feet to the ground. He rubbed up against Mrs. Schmulowitz’s legs, making little chirping noises. When he was finished showing my landlady how much he was into her, he sauntered toward me — and trotted past without stopping, straight into the garage. I made a note to self: no more cat toys for Kiddiot from the clearance bin at Petco. No more Taco Bell leftovers, either. Not until he showed me some love, too.

“Some nerve,” Mrs. Schmulowitz observed. “After all you’ve done for him.”

You don’t need an appointment at Primo’s on Cortez Avenue in downtown Rancho Bonita. You walk in and climb into Primo’s ancient barber chair, assuming it’s otherwise unoccupied. Primo hands you a well-worn Playboy without asking and pins a sanitary neck strip around your neck. He takes a cutting smock and flaps it high into the air, the way matadors flap capes, then lets it settle gently around your shoulders while you thumb through the magazine. He raises the chair with a few pumps of the pneumatic lift, pivots you so you’re facing the mirror, and then, standing beside you, comb and scissors at the ready, asks, “So, how would you like your hair cut today?” Then he proceeds to ignore your detailed instructions and cuts your hair the way he thinks it should be cut, which is usually not half-bad. For fifteen bucks, including a beard trim and a five-minute neck rub, you can’t go wrong.

Business was slow that morning. Primo was sitting in the chair, his own jet-black hair pomaded and perfectly combed as usual, wearing his usual spotless sky-blue Mexican wedding shirt. The bell jingled over the door. Primo looked up from the latest issue of Boxing Monthly.

“Que pasa, Logan?”

“How’ve you been, champ?”

“It’s all good, boss.”

Primo got up out of his barber chair, a little stiff, befitting a sixty-one-year-old former fighter. I settled into the chair. The comfortable brown leather seat was warm and bowed like an old swayback horse. He handed me a Playboy.

After the sanitary strip had been pinned in place and the smock settled down around me, he said, “And how would we like our haircut today?”

“In silence,” I said, perusing Miss February. “Need to catch up on my reading.”

“In silence it shall be,” Primo said.

Our little joke.

Primo and I rarely talked while he worked his magic on my tresses. We liked it that way, content in each other’s company. No need to humor or impress. He’d been a pretty good welterweight in his prime, I gleaned from what little of his career he’d shared with me. His nose was bent like the blade of a hockey stick — a souvenir from a summer night forty years earlier when he’d gone twelve rounds with Pipino Cuevas at the Fabulous Forum. The crowd cheered, “Primo! Primo! Primo!” over and over as he stood toe-to-toe with the younger, stronger Cuevas, giving as good as he got, only to loose on a split decision. Every writer sitting ringside that night said it was a con job. But it didn’t matter to Primo. He’d gone the distance with the champion when every bookie from Reno to Tijuana swore the match wouldn’t last two minutes.

He got out barber shears and a clean comb from a drawer while I read all about Miss February. I was old enough to be her father. Snip-snip-snip. Primo circled me like he was still in the ring, clipping and combing. The shop was redolent of bay rum and Aqua Velva. My scalp tingled pleasurably. I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. Fifteen minutes later, we were done.

He handed me a mirror to check the back of my head. I nodded my approval and gave him twenty bucks. He deposited the bill in an old cigar box and took out a five spot.

“Keep the change.”

Primo forced the bill into my hand. “No way, boss.”

“It’s called a tip, Primo.”

“You ain’t been in for a cut in three months, Logan. That tells me you gotta be more hard up than me. So you keep it. Spend it on your lady. Buy her some flowers or something.”

I made a joke about him not realizing how much flowers cost these days.

“Don’t matter how much they cost. Just get ’em. It’ll make her feel good,” Primo said. “The thing you always gotta remember about women is this: at any given moment, they are what they feel.”

Primo’s version of a fortune cookie. Every customer got one on their way out the door, whether they wanted it or not.

“I have no idea what that means, champ.”

“Go buy yourself a copy of Cosmo,” Primo said. “Probably do you some good.”

He was right. It probably would’ve helped, if I’d actually had a woman in my life. One particular woman, anyway.

They say meditation is an adventure in self-discovery. It’s supposed to bring one a sense of fullness, of completion. It is, according to those who swear by its power, the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within the mortal human frame. Whatever the hell that means.

I’ve tried sitting and meditating. The sit-stand method of meditation. The recliner-chair method. I’ve tried mirror gazing. All with no joy. While I wait for the indescribable bliss that the earth is supposed to unleash upon those who meditate with sincerity and patience, my head is filled with questions like, “Who do the Broncos play Sunday?” or “Does anyone really know what Jell-O is made of?” or “I wonder what Savannah is doing right now?”

Savannah. It always seemed to come back to Savannah.

I was sitting lotus-like on the sand at Jenkins Beach, trying to become one with the universe and failing miserably. In the haze, the oil platforms two miles offshore resembled aircraft carriers. A jogger ran past me, her path paralleling the retreating tide line. She was petite, mid-twenties, with sinewy legs and a strong, determined face more handsome than pretty. Her chestnut hair was pulled back in a severely tight ponytail that flapped side-to-side like a metronome, the way Savannah’s hair did, when we used to go running together.

I shut my eyes and tried to focus on my inner self. “I am not this library of memories. I have no history. I have no biography.” I repeated it over and over, my self-inquiry incantation. “I am the space. I have always been the space, and I crush these bonds of attachment now.”

But it was no use. The universe and I definitely were not one.

My phone rang. The caller ID said Savannah Echevarria. She was angry with me. What else was new?

“First, you tell my father you think his business partner killed Arlo—”

“—I never said that.”

“Then, you have the audacity to tell him that Miles Zambelli did it?”

“I never said that, Savannah.”

“Well, you certainly insinuated it!”

“You asked me to help. I’m trying to.”

“I asked you to go to the police. I didn’t ask you to piss off everybody. You need to stop asking all these questions.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid of what I’ll find out?”