He noted the other man’s expensive suit, clean-cut good looks and flat, athletic stomach. Skip looked what he was, a ladies’ man, from his well-cut hair and sweet-smelling skin to his hand-made shoes. He was also a hood, a small-time Mafia man earning money from the numbers and a few other lucrative ventures. He was the great-nephew of Tommy Corolla, a big mob man who had his own family. At twenty-five Skip felt he wasn’t getting the action he deserved so he was making a little action of his own on the side.

That was where Evander Dorsey came in.

He had been very drunk one night, working in a seedy bar, his gnarled hands playing him up. During his break someone had put a record on the juke box. It was one of Kerry’s. He had sat back on the stool listening to her voice, looking down at the deformed fingers of his hands, when a guy beside him had asked him what he was thinking about. The guy was Delroy Burton, a black spiv who owned the club Evander was playing in. For some reason he had felt a great rage against Kerry, because she was big, a big star, famous, while he, Evander, was left broken down, working in dives because of her. He had told Delroy the whole story, having more and more drinks bought for him. The next night Delroy had been waiting for him, buying him drinks and getting names, dates, places, anything about his time in England. Then he had ignored him and Evander had just been sorry that the free drinks were not coming any more and forgot about Delroy.

Then one night a few months later Delroy had come to his house. Evander lived alone since the terrible ‘accident’ to his hands. Hands that were numb a lot of the time where they had been hastily set in Liverpool by a little black woman called Rula Demoinge. Hands that could still play music to a degree, but had lost the suppleness and eagerness of before. Hands that were getting weaker and more gnarled as the years wore on. Delroy had come to the little shanty where he lived with two white men. Italians. The men had been introduced and one had produced a couple of bottles of Wild Turkey and a hundred dollars. All they wanted was to hear the story of Kerry Cavanagh. Evander, eyes wide at the sight of the money and the booze, had welcomed them in with open arms and told them everything, embellishing the story as drunkenness descended. Later that night they’d left him, a hundred dollars richer and drunk enough to sleep.