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He flipped his cigar sparking into a rosebed. "You catch that racist bastard, Mr. Robicheaux."
"I don't think Aaron Crown's a racist."
He placed his hand, which had the contours of a claw, on my arm. An incisor tooth glinted in his mouth when he grinned.
"A Ku Klux Klansman? Don't deceive yourself. A man like that will rip your throat out and eat it like a pomegranate," he said.
The breeze blew his fine, white cornsilk hair against his scalp.
Fifteen minutes later I had to use the rest room.
"Go inside," Helen said.
"I'd like to avoid it."
"You want to take the cruiser down the road?"
"Bad form."
"I guess you get to go inside," she said.
I walked through the crowds of revelers in the yard, past the zydeco musicians on the flatbed truck, who were belting out "La Valse Negress" with accordion and fiddle and electric guitars, and with one man raking thimbles up and down a replicated aluminum washboard that was molded like soft body armor to his chest. The inside of the house was filled with people, too, and I had to go up the winding stairs to the second floor to find an empty bathroom.
Or one that was almost empty.
The door was ajar. I saw a bare male thigh, the trousers dropped below the knee, a gold watch on a hairy wrist. Decency should have caused me to step back and wait by the top of the stairs. But I had seen something else too—the glassy cylindrical shape between two fingers, the thumb resting on the plunger, the bright squirt of fluid at the tip of the needle.
I pushed open the door the rest of the way.
When Buford connected with the vein, his eyes closed and opened and then glazed over, his lips parted indolently and a muted sound rose from his throat, as though he were sliding onto the edge of orgasm.
Then he heard me.
"Oh . . . Dave," he said. He put the needle on the edge of the lavatory and swallowed dryly, his eyes flattening, the pupils constricting with the hit.
"Bad shit, Buford," I said.
He buttoned his trousers and tried to fix his belt.
"Goat glands and vitamins. Not what you think, Dave," he said.
"So that's why you shoot it up in your thighs?"
"John Kennedy did it." He smiled wanly. "Are you going to cuff the governor-elect in his home?"
"It wouldn't stick. Why not talk to somebody you trust about this, before you flame out?"
"It might make an interesting fire."
"I never met a hype who was any different from a drunk. I'm talking about myself, Buford. We're all smart-asses."
"You missed your historical period. You should have sat at the elbow of St. Augustine. You were born for the confessional. Come on, a new day is at hand, sir, if you would just lend me yours for a moment."
I helped him sit down on top of the toilet seat lid, then I watched, almost as a voyeur would, as the color came back in his face, his breathing seemed to regulate itself, his shoulders straightened, his eyes lifted merrily into mine.
"We glide on gilded wings above the abyss," he said. "The revelers wait—"
I shattered his syringe in the toilet bowl.
