We began where Smith bought his winning ticket.

When someone goes through a spectacular change of fortune, such as dying in a horrible way or winning a great fortune, it is customary for journalists to go poking around the lucky or unlucky person’s haunts.

There was just such a search Monday into the life of James Smith, the $2-million lottery winner from Pacoima. I went on it with a photographer.

We began where Smith bought his winning ticket, the Lucky market at Nordhoff Street and Van Nuys Boulevard. The people there weren’t yet aware that they had been touched by destiny. An assistant manager was piling goods on a shelf.

He said he didn’t know anything about it but would call the store manager on the loudspeaker.

The manager, Rudy Zamora, appeared with a stack of packaged meat in his hands.

He handed it to the assistant to shake hands, then took it back.

Zamora said he didn’t know Smith by name and had not been told that one of the store’s customers was in the lottery’s Big Spin.

We took pictures of Zamora holding the meat and moved on to Smith’s neighborhood. It, too, was calm.

Smith’s house is on the south side of Pacoima, just above Arleta, in a working-class neighborhood where young men were working on their cars and dogs wandered up and down.

Many of the homes were dressed with well-crafted and pretty patches of flowers, but others were left to the will of the semi-hostile climate.

Smith’s house fell into the latter group.

A child in a blue-and-white T-shirt stood in front the house on a path of dirt where the sidewalk would be in a newer neighborhood.

“What did they do?” the boy asked.

We said he had won $2 million.

“Oh,” he said. He mugged for the camera.

A small dog barked through a gate beside the Smiths’ house. No one answered the door.

Next door, a small girl stood in an open doorway on the other side of a withered lawn.

Two young women who came to the door had heard the news. They didn’t expect the Smiths back early.

“He told me, ‘If I win, I’m going to go out to the bars and brag,’ ” one of them said.

Up the street, Annette Alexander, another neighbor, was talking to a couple in front of their house.

“They’re quiet people,” she said. “He comes home early, goes to bed, gets up and goes to work.”

She didn’t think Smith had been expecting to win $2 million.

“They were talking $10,000,” she said. “Let’s face it. They’re older people, just like we are. When you have not that many years left, you start talking about your retirement fund.”

She volunteered that one of the family’s haunts was the American Legion Hall in Panorama City.

“I’ll tell you, everybody down at the Legion Hall is having an extra beer for him tonight,” she said into a clicking camera.

The American Legion Hall on Ventura Canyon Avenue, half a block south of Roscoe Boulevard, is an interesting structure consisting of a medieval-like stucco turret linked to a two-story building that looks something like the above decks of a Mississippi steamboat. An Army fieldpiece stands outside.

Inside there was an empty dance floor and, on the other side of that, another set of closed doors. Voices could be heard.

Behind the doors, in the bar, a couple of dozen men and women were drinking beer and talking loudly.

They knew James Smith.

“Oh, you want to talk to Harold, his brother-in-law,” a man said.

He called out to Harold, who was on the other side of the room.

Harold Conroy, short, muscular, in a short-sleeve shirt, appeared.

He didn’t think Smith would be showing up at the hall, but he had an idea where we could find him.

“Try the Sand Trap or the Brandy Snifter,” he said.

They are small bars tucked into shopping centers on Woodman Avenue. Although Smith wasn’t at either place, the customers at both said they were expecting him.

“I know where he is, out getting drunker than . . . .” one man said through his beer.

Conroy, the brother-in-law, was in the Brandy Snifter’s parking lot. He had a slight, almost apologetic smile on his face.

“I know another place you can try,” he said.

He suggested Tailor’s, a bar on Van Nuys Boulevard.

Smith wasn’t at Tailor’s either. Conroy was, having joined the chase. He was on the pay phone trying to get the telephone number of a place called Reiner’s.

He couldn’t find it. But he said we could find Reiner’s on Woodman Avenue near Chase Street, behind the Mobil station.

We took pictures of Conroy and went to Reiner’s. There the trail got cool. There were only three people there, a woman bartender, a customer in a business suit and Reiner. He said in a faded Germanic accent that he knew a lot of Jims.

The customer remembered the pixieish little Irishman.

“Try the Knight’s Head,” he suggested. It’s in a shopping center farther south on Woodman.

A half a dozen men there remembered Smith. They hadn’t seen him for quite a while.

“Doohinkey’s,” they said. At that point we decided to stake out the Sand Trap, a strategy that finally worked about midnight.

As we left the Knight’s Head, one of the customers shook his head.

“I’ll be go to hell,” he said. “That guy won $2 million?”