“Shut up. Leave me alone,” he says.

From the back, he looks like a pile of dirty laundry. Hell, he looks that way from the front. It’s three p.m. on a Thursday, and Vernon Kendall isn’t drunk enough, but if he has one more drop he’ll be chilling his clammy forehead on dirty porcelain.

“Maybe I could buy you a drink,” I say, knowing what a bad idea it is. “C’mon. Look. I can leave your name out of it. I won’t even quote you, just give me the name of someone I can talk to, someone who knew her.”

He grabs my lapel and pulls me into him, wheezing a toxic gasp of stale liquor and gum disease into my face. My hand to God, it’s all I can do not to puke in his face.

“Don’t’cha get it? Everyone who knew her is gone. Except me, and all I did was sell her the ticket. All they had to do was ruin me. But her friends? Family?”

He releases me and looks at his hands. They were beautiful hands when he was a jazz musician with a day job at the SpeedySav on South Street.

Before she bought a lottery ticket from him…