Killer Market

4

« ^ » “Very beautiful enamelled furniture, especially for bedchamber sets, is extensively manufactured.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

“We’ve met before,” Chan drawled.

Not wanting to go into all the circumstances of my misspent youth, I hastily said, “He and that blue ox just gave me a line dancing lesson.”

Chan raised an eyebrow, but mercifully took the hint. There was a battered tomcat sexiness to the smile that twitched the edge of his lips, a smile that meant he’d pursue the subject later if I knew anything about battered tomcats.

(And yeah, unfortunately, I do, having gone so far as to marry one once.)

The young woman hanging on his arm was Drew Patterson, who had her mother’s fair coloring and slender height and her father’s wide smile with only the merest hint of his broad nose. As she glanced from his face to mine and back again, I could almost see a hurt suspicion in her blue eyes, but she made a quick recovery.

“Dad’s still mad ’cause Jacaranda’s stealing the best vice president of sales in the business,” she told me after introductions were over.

Chan Nolan took a long pull on his beer. “Fitch and Patterson doesn’t have to worry about Jacaranda.”

“They’re moving into high end, aren’t they?”

“So?”

“Don’t be coy, Chan. You’ll be competing against us directly.”

Chan shrugged. “Fitch and Patterson doesn’t own high end.”

“But that infusion of Hong Kong money will make Jacaranda another one of the high rollers,” said Dixie.

Chan caught my eye and appealed to me for support. “You see how they gang up on me, Deborah? Like it’s my fault? Jacaranda’s going offshore and high end whether I’m there or not. So why shouldn’t I jump on a moving wagon?”

“What’s high end?” I asked. “And who or what is Jacaranda?”

“High end’s the luxury market,” he explained. “The best quality and most expensive furniture to make and sell.”

“And Jacaranda is a Texas company that makes schlock!” said Dixie.

“It might’ve been schlock years ago,” he agreed easily, “but they’ve been steadily upgrading and now they’re poised to get huge. Once they finish tooling up the Malaysia factory, you’re going to see hand-carved mahogany case goods that’ll set the market on its ear. By this time next year—”

“Coming through, please!”

I grabbed my new tote bag from under the edge of the table and stepped back as waiters removed the nearly empty serving dishes and deposited fresh platters of ribs and chicken.

More dancers surged forward to stoke up. I still wasn’t hungry but Drew fixed a plate for Chan with a proprietary air. “Cornbread, hon?”

“Yes, ma’am! And what about a couple of those brownies?” he said hungrily.

“Two?”

“One for me, one to take to Lynnette. She loves nuts and chocolate as good as I do.”

“Chan, you idiot!” Drew scolded. “You can’t give a seven-year-old chocolate at bedtime. She’ll be bouncing off the walls. Tell him, Dixie.”

“He’s the daddy, honey. I’m just the grandma.”

Dixie’s tone was light but that lightness didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Before Chan could reply, a pudgy middle-aged man tapped him on the shoulder. “We talk to you a minute, Nolan?”

The “we” was the heavy set woman who’d earlier handed Jay Patterson her beer when he was gasping from the jalapeno cornbread.

“Look, Jackson, I told you and Kay both—”

“Just hear what we’ve got to say, okay? Is that too much to ask after twenty-seven years?”

With an exaggerated sigh, Chan told us, “Be right back,” and followed them over to the corner that was probably the quietest place in the overcrowded ballroom at the moment.

“Poor Poppy,” said Drew. “He told Dad if Chan gives Muir an exclusive, they might as well close up now.”

Dixie frowned. “He’s yanking their account?”

I had only the vaguest idea what Drew and Dixie were talking about, but from the half-angry, half-entreating gestures the older man and woman were making, it certainly seemed as if Chan was yanking their chains, if nothing else.

Dixie saw my blank look and laughed. “Are we talking Urdish again?”

“I guess every industry has its shorthand jargon,” I said. “Are they buyers?”

Drew nodded, brushing a long blonde tress from her cheek. “Retailers. Here to check out the new designs and see what’s going to be hot this fall. Poppy Jackson has a beautiful old store in Green Oaks, Virginia, and Kay Adams has a store down at the beach. They’ve been selling us since before I was born.”

I began to see why those two seemed so hostile. “But why would Fitch and Patterson give another store an exclusive? Isn’t the object to sell as much furniture as possible as widely as possible?”

“It is,” said Dixie, “but high end has the snob appeal to do that if it’s marketed slickly. A lot of the retailers in our Southern Retail Furnishings Alliance are small independents like Poppy and Kay. They run a single-store mom-and-pop operation, maybe gross a million-five a year if they’re lucky. Muir’s a chain that’s moving into the Southeast. These huge new stores are really starting to hurt my little guys.”

Drew chimed in. “Stores like Poppy and Kay’s stock too much inventory. They may carry middle to high end but they jumble our pieces in with Lane and Thomasville. A chain like Muir will hire designers like Connie Post or Lynn Hollyn, install a three thousand square foot Fitch and Patterson gallery full of exciting room vignettes, and show a whole line for a synergistic effect.”

“And gross two hundred million in the process,” said Dixie.

“But they won’t do a gallery unless you give them an exclusive for that town,” Drew finished. “They don’t want to be undercut by a store that doesn’t have the same class and image. And I’m sorry, Dixie, but in your heart, you know that most of the independents look like dowdy old maids next to these high-tech chains. Poppy and Kay and retailers like them want to keep on doing what they’ve done for the last fifty years and that simply won’t cut it in today’s market.”

“But what about loyalty?” I asked. “If these two have been with you for so long—?”

“I know, I know,” said Drew. “It just about breaks my heart, and Dad feels rotten about it, too, but Chan’s right. If Fitch and Patterson’s going to stay competitive, we have to cooperate with the chains and we couldn’t say no to Muir’s offer.”

She glanced at the tiny jeweled watch that encircled her slender wrist.

“And speaking of cooperating, I’d better get back to our own reception before Mother comes looking for me.” She handed Dixie the plate she was holding. “Give this to Chan? Nice meeting you, Deborah. You going to be around all weekend?”

“I hope so,” I answered, patting my Home-Lite badge. “As long as I don’t ran into the real Jack Sotelli.”

“Good. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

She gave Dixie a quick kiss on the cheek and then slipped away through the crowd.

Dixie sighed as she watched Drew go. “She’s such a sweetie and Chan’s treating her so badly.”

“He is? She doesn’t act like it.”

“Because she probably doesn’t fully realize it yet,” Dixie said darkly.

She gave me a considering look. “You know something, Deborah? I’m really glad you turned up tonight. I seem to be in need of some up-to-the-minute legal advice.”

“Advice? But you probably know as much as I do.” Suddenly though, I wondered. “You did pass the bar, didn’t you?”

“Nope. I went back for a while after Evelyn was out of therapy, but I couldn’t seem to stick it. Luckily, a good job opened up here and one thing led to another and here I am—B.A. but no J.D.”

Briskly, she checked her watch and swung into what was probably her Executive Director’s mode. “We can talk about my problems later though. Right now, let’s see. It’s only eight-fifteen. I saw Pell—he’s the one with the spare room—cruising the halls about twenty minutes ago which means he won’t be home yet. Tell you what. Why don’t you wander around, enjoy the Market while I mingle and show the flag? Things’ll start winding down in another half hour, so let’s meet back at my office around nine?”

She gave me her card and sketched a simple map on the back. “These buildings can be a little confusing if you don’t know where you’re going. The easiest way is to take the elevator out there in the lobby down to nine, cross over the sky walk into the first building and then take the main elevator down to six. Here’s what you do when you get off the elevator.”

I was still studying her sketch when she walked over to Chan, handed him the plate Drew had fixed, then began making nice to those two retailers who seemed so upset with Fitch and Patterson’s new sales policy.

The sea of people around the table parted briefly, and sitting on the blue tablecloth like a small island was a platter of those moist and chewy brownies, studded with walnuts and dusted in powdered sugar. Their siren voice of chocolate sang to me, tempting me with promises of sensuous pleasure, assuring me that of course I was strong enough to take just one tiny bite and throw away the rest. Since there wasn’t a mast in sight to which I could lash myself, I launched off in the opposite direction.

Up by the bandstand, the American Leathergoods Wholesale Association’s blue ox had grabbed a mike and was belting out “We Are Family.”

He didn’t sound at all like Sister Sledge.

Out in the vestibule, people were starting to leave both ballrooms and the elevators were as crowded going down as they had been coming up. In the second elevator, after crossing the skywalk, I was pushed against someone wearing such strong perfume that my sinuses began to close up and I got off as quickly as I could even though it was only the eighth floor.

These halls were as brightly lit as the others I’d seen, but most of the showrooms were locked and dark, and there were fewer people wandering around. A set of benches and planter boxes filled with flowering azaleas, irises and buttercups were clustered where four halls intersected. I had to touch the flowers to convince myself that they weren’t real. A small sign announced that they were silk creations fabricated in Arizona and that orders could be placed at their showroom around the corner.

A harried-looking man in shirtsleeves and loosened tie had slung his jacket over one arm of a bench and papers spilled from his opened briefcase beside him as he spoke angrily to someone over his cell phone.

“—so they’d only give me one car. No, I do not know where Mary is. We lost her at the airport this morning and the fucking rental clerk wouldn’t take my word that I was authorized to pick up the car she reserved in her name alone for some fucking reason. She’s God knows where and the five of us are stuck with one car. Nothing to be had between here and Durham. So here’s what I want you to do and I don’t give a damn what it costs: start phoning and get me another fucking car! And if Mary calls in, tell her she’s fired and I really mean it this time.”

Having been through the same thing with hotel rooms, I could sympathize with his frustration over the shortage of rental cars, only there was nobody I could call up and bully into getting me what I needed.

I walked past him and wandered aimlessly through the nearly empty halls, pausing here and there as a leather chair or chrome and glass coffee table or a sofa upholstered in a rich tapestry caught my eye. I tried to imagine Kidd Chapin’s lanky, six-foot-three body stretched out on that couch, his head in my lap, flipping through the channels by remote control. Antique tapestry fit the picture better than the polished floral chintz in the adjoining showroom. Somehow I couldn’t see Kidd amid floral chintz.

The trouble was I really didn’t know what my tastes were when it came to furnishing a home.

There was a stretch of several years between the time I stormed away from my father’s comfortably shabby farmhouse and the time I moved into the apartment my Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash had carved out for his mother on the second floor of their big white brick house, a few blocks from the courthouse in Dobbs.

In those years, home was wherever I happened to light for ten minutes. Some of the places were furnished in early Salvation Army; some were bare except for futons and sleeping bags and a few rickety tables and chairs.

Old Mrs. Smith had died the summer before I came home to Colleton County, and since Uncle Ash’s job required a lot of traveling, Aunt Zell said I’d be doing her a favor if I moved in. Uncle Ash said he’d rest a lot easier on the road, knowing she wasn’t alone in the house when he was gone. There was no way I was going to swallow my pride and go back to the farm, so it’s worked out fine all around.

I’ve rearranged the furniture to accommodate some updated audio and video equipment, but otherwise the three-room apartment—bedroom, sitting room, efficiency kitchen—still reflects the late Mrs. Smith’s taste for white organdy curtains, pale greens and blues, and dark wood. The place is bland enough not to jar on my nerves and pretty enough that I’ve never been motivated to redecorate, even though Julia Lee, the wife of my cousin and former law partner, is itching to redo the whole place.

A lot of my sisters-in-law have worried that I’ve settled in too comfortably at Aunt Zell’s, and now that Uncle Ash is talking about retirement, they’re pushing me to get a place of my own. Their thinking here is that while I’m acquiring new furniture and curtains and kitchen equipment, I’ll get so caught up in domesticity that I may decide to go on and acquire myself a husband at the same time.

Land isn’t a problem. Mother left me some and I’ve bought more of my own over the years. Several of my eleven brothers have offered to cut me off a couple of acres of their land anywhere I want, and Daddy would probably have the deed drawn up in ten minutes if I asked him for a building lot next to him.

Andrew’s April knows of a 1920 bungalow in Cotton Grove that’s up for sale. “You could move it out by the long pond. Be cheaper than building from scratch.”

Zach gave me floor plans for some houses that would use passive solar design to heat and cool.

Herman says never mind about passive solar. He and Annie Sue and Reese will wire a house for me at cost.

My nephew Reese, who’s closer to my age than his father is, says I just ought to pull in a double-wide on the back side of that Stephenson land, well away from the rest of the family, and make sure it has a king-sized water bed.

Reese has a point.

Since Kidd’s the reason I do finally want a private place of my own, maybe I should start with the bedroom and branch out from there.

But just looking at the variety of beds along this hallway made my head spin: old-fashioned four-posters or modern versions with posts that were a foot square and eight feet tall? Mahogany Chippendale headboard or oak Moderne? Organdy ruffled canopy or tapestried tester? Or, hmm-m. What had we here?

The showroom was locked, but lights had been left on inside. Above the door hung a wide white board that was lettered in shiny black enamel: Stanberry Collection. A leafy green vine with generic purple berries twined through the letters.

Although there were several hand-painted three- and four-panel folding screens scattered around the small showroom and clustered across the rear corner, the Stanberry Collection seemed to consist mainly of headboards, headboards of a design I’d never seen before. These were like upright wooden boxes that slanted back at a slight pitch and had a wide ledge at the top. With a few pillows, you could lean back at a comfortable angle to read or watch television and the ledge would still be a few inches higher than your head so that your pillows wouldn’t bump into your books or pictures or whatever personal knick-knacks you wanted to display. The slanted headboard was hinged at the bottom and magnetic latches at the top allowed access to a concealed space that could store extra pillows or hide the family silver. The box extended around on either side of the mattress where it jutted forward to become built-in bedside tables wide enough to hold reading lamps, radios, and bedtime snacks. Some were a series of open shelves, others had a couple of drawers built in below. Some were constructed of fine-grained natural woods, but most were painted and then stenciled in sophisticated colors and patterns.

They really were quite striking and extremely practical and I was not the only one drawn to the Stanberry Collection. Another man had left his briefcase on the floor beside me and was roaming up and down the long windows, occasionally pressing his face right up against the glass and cupping his hands around his eyes as if to see past any reflected glare.

All of a sudden, I heard a muted roar from inside the showroom and saw a man, his face contorted with fury, dart out from behind those screens at the rear and rush toward the door.

Instantly, my fellow viewer jerked back from the window and hurried over to collect his briefcase, which was now behind me.

I tried to zig as he zagged and we wound up in that embarrassing tango of two strangers trying to pass each other, until he quit trying and barreled right into me. I went flying into the projecting corner of the hall with such force that my shoulder hit the sharp edge and I gasped in pain. In his haste, he stumbled over his briefcase and sprawled full length on the floor. He scrambled up almost immediately but that slight delay was just enough to let the second man fling open the door and pounce on him.

“Okay, asshole! Gimme the film,” he snarled.

The first man tried to bluster, but even though he was a couple of inches taller and several pounds heavier, the showroom proprietor wasn’t intimidated.

“Give me the film or I’ll stomp your camera.”

Defeated, the man took a tiny camera out of his pocket, snapped it open, and extracted the film.

“I see you or anybody from your company back here again, I’ll stomp your camera and smash your face. You got it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” muttered the other man as he slunk away.

Hie second man finished exposing the roll of film and turned to me with a big smile. “Hey, you okay?”

“I guess so,” I said, rubbing my bruised shoulder. “What was all that about?”

“Bastard was trying to steal our designs.”

“Jeff?”

The woman who came out to join us was about my age and height, but her almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair showed an Asian heritage even though she spoke with no discernible accent. She carried a battery-operated vacuum cleaner and gave me a friendly smile as her husband explained why he’d rushed out like that. “And if this lady hadn’t been there to slow him down, he’d have got away.”

“We’re Mai and Jeff Stanberry,” the woman said. “If you’re interested, we’ll be glad to show you our line.”

According to the clock on the wall behind her, I had enough time and soon I was happily wandering through the Stanberry Collection, opening drawers, admiring the capacious storage space in each headboard, and picturing my mother’s Made in Occupied Japan porcelain shepherdess and a few other personal treasures clustered on the top ledge of a painted headboard while the Stanberrys proudly explained that theirs was a fairly new company.

“Originally, we were just going to build screens. I’m an artist and Jeff’s an engineer. He knows about hinges and strapping and ratios of board feet to finished product, and I know découpage and stenciling. We brought two dozen to our first show three years ago and sold out, but there’s not much profit in them.”

Their line of headboards grew out of a lack of finances to buy a ready-made one, coupled with their fondness for reading in bed.

“So Jeff started out with a slanted backrest.”

“And Mai realized that a piano hinge at the bottom would let us utilize the empty space behind for storage.”

“Then Jeff wanted a place for his cassette player—”

“I like to listen to old Nichols and May routines when I’m going to sleep.”

“—and I wanted my clock radio and a box of Kleenex.”

“And that was the first prototype of these.”

“Last year we brought three-dozen screens and a dozen headboards and went home with enough orders to hire two people to help us,” Mai said proudly. “A carpenter and a painter.”

“And if we do good this year,” said Jeff, “we can maybe move out of the garage and get a real workshop.” They told me that this was the first time they’d rented an official showroom.

“Before, we’ve had open booth spaces across the street at Market Square. This year we can afford a real showroom. We may be small, but our quality is high and we don’t make promises we can’t deliver on.”

They gave me their brochure and an order form and I found the model number of the headboard I was sure would be perfect for my new house, whatever that house turned out to be.

“This is my first Market,” I said, circling the model number, “so I don’t quite understand why you think that guy was stealing your designs. Don’t you have a patent?”

They laughed and Jeff Stanberry said, “You are new, aren’t you? We do what we can to protect ourselves, but if a big company wants to do a knockoff of our designs, their pockets are a lot deeper than ours if we tried to sue.”

“All we can do,” said Mai Stanberry, “is try to land as many new accounts as we can before the big boys notice us.” She gave a winsome smile. “So! Does Home-Lite do a large volume in sleep products?”

Guiltily, I realized that my badge had misled them into thinking I was a buyer. “I’m afraid I’m not exactly a commercial customer.”

Jeff Stanberry gave me a wary look. “Hey, you’re not another exhibitor looking to knock us off, are you?”

“Nothing to do with the Market at all,” I assured him. “Someone gave me this badge so I could get into one of the parties upstairs. I’m actually a district court judge. And I really do like that headboard. Does anybody in the Raleigh area carry it?”

“Not yet,” said Mai. “But we’ve had nibbles.”

“If you land one, would you please have the store drop me a note? Or can I order from you directly?”

“Tell you what,” said Jeff. “If you’re going to be around till the end of the show next week, we’ll be selling these samples at wholesale so we don’t have to cart them back to the mountains with us. If you like, I’ll red dot the one you want and you can pick it up then.”

Before one of us could change our mind, I sent Reese a mental thank-you and reached into my tote bag for my checkbook.

Instead of my purse, though, my hand closed around a plastic bag of fried chicken.