A Killing in Antiques (3 page)

Its weathered wood has never been painted, if you don’t count the two blobs of bright red paint that I dabbed on one side when I was testing colors for my shutters at the Cape. Despite the fact that it looks, when full, as if I am wheeling a small storage shed around, it’s a dream to push. The pièce de résistance is the hinged counter that pulls down along one side, convenient for lunches, conferences, or writing checks or receipts.

Of all the conveyances, carts, and carriers you see at Brimfield, either handmade or commercially made— and there are plenty of both—Supercart permits the biggest loads to be carried with the least effort. The fact that people find it funny-looking when it’s full still bothers my son, Philip, but not me.

Philip takes everything seriously. He once told me that we live in a dysfunctional family. I think he meant crowded. He just married a woman he’s known for three weeks. Don’t get me started on the possibilities for dysfunction. They’re living with us.

The crowds, the disorder, and the confusion of Brimfield have never unnerved me. I find it more peaceful than the crowds, the disorder, and the confusion of home.

My next field keeps close tabs on its sellers. Now I wanted to shop in a place that hadn’t been cleaned out by someone like me. After all, I had just acquired the art pottery from a guy who was selling before his field opened.

 

A crowd had gathered at the gate, and though the formation of a line would have ensured them an evenhanded entrance, they jostled and jockeyed and formed an unruly mob instead. Through the judicious use of Supercart, I found myself at the front as the first scant rays of light touched the edge of the sky. It was five a.m. and dark turned to light. In less time than it took them to open the gate, it became daybreak. Brimfield had officially opened.

I abandoned Supercart as soon as I was inside the fence. I left it next to the gatekeeper, and I ran into the field, scanning each booth. I moved as fast as I was able, stopping only for the unique, the pristine, the exquisitely designed objects.

This early run is not when I look for special bargains, nor when I do heavy negotiating or dickering. That comes later, on the second run-through. Right now my purpose was to find, and buy, extraordinary antiques and premium collector’s items. If lucky, I might also find a museum-quality piece or two.

Each time my arms were full, I returned to Supercart and spent a minute packing the treasures I’d culled. I wasted no time; still, I couldn’t help but admire again a perfect Grueby paperweight, a Weller pitcher delicately painted with dew-drenched blackberries, and the signed Dresden lamp that had never been converted to electricity. These, and most of my harvest so far, are the quick turnover stuff in my shop. I arranged things and rolled on.

Some of my purchases had to be left behind. A China cabinet with a curved glass door and a chunky oak kitchen table were too large and too heavy for Supercart. If I continued accumulating treasures at this rate, I’d hire a mover to help me pack and move everything into my temporary storage nearby, in a friend’s barn.

I had no helper today. TJ, my latest and most unlikely Sherpa, was back at the Cape. He’d drive up to Brimfield twice this week, tomorrow and Friday. We’d load up a big rental truck, packing it tight for the trip back to the Cape. Then, on a quiet day next week, with Brimfield over, we’d return once again and empty the barn.

It wasn’t until I was once again gathering and safely repacking my booty in Supercart that I noticed the sound of sirens coming from the other side of Route 20. In fact, it dawned on me that the sirens had been there for some time, but I had been communing so perfectly with my greed that I had blocked nearly everything else out.

 

It was time to head for the van and unload. I wanted Supercart empty for the six o’clock opening. Three fields opened at six o’clock this morning, and I had found premium goods at each at one time or another.

But first I stopped at a truck that had been tantalizing me with its aromas. I decided to join the parking attendant for breakfast, and chose an exquisite pair of Italian sausage subs smothered with onions and peppers. An unusual offering for this hour of the morning, but the maître d’ had no trouble accommodating the crowd, many of whom had been working here since before midnight.

An animated crowd had gathered at the nearby coffee truck, and there was no mistaking its excited chatter for the usual buzz. Something big was happening. Since I suffer from terminal nosiness, I moved toward a fellow whose histrionics had attracted a crowd of listeners.

“The guy was murdered,” he said. “At the back of that field.” He was pointing in the direction of a field across Route 20, slightly south of us.

Several others joined the crowd, and he turned to face us. His gestures became even more exaggerated as he attempted to dramatize a struggle that included strangling himself until his eyes bulged. Then, in a hoarse whisper, he delivered his trump line. “He was strangled with a piece of lace.”

“Lace?”

I was dumbfounded. Few places felt safer than Brimfield. There have been some flare-ups through the years, but no real violence.

The leading man seemed to have exhausted himself and his information. A woman nearby pulled a mahogany Regency chair out of her cart. She offered it to him. He sat down, breathed deeply, and some color came back into his face.

Meanwhile, bits of information trickled through the gathering.

“He was found at daybreak,” someone put in.

And then I heard who it was. My God, Monty Rondo. I felt the breath get knocked right out of me, and I must have teetered, because the woman with the Regency chair said, “Do you need a chair, too? I only have the one, but I think this fellow has recovered.”

M
onty Rondo. Dead. I stood, gaping. The two huge sausage and pepper sandwiches trembled in my hands. This can’t be. Monty murdered. The jolt was too terrible to absorb. What should I do?

What I
did
do is try to deal with the sandwiches. I made a nest for them in Supercart’s cache. My hands shook as I tucked paper around them, and I made a pretty good mess of the job. I pushed Supercart to the parking lot, and all of a sudden it weighed a thousand pounds.

I stopped and leaned against it.

“Was he a friend of yours?”

It was the parking attendant. Word of the murder had spread, and the kid seemed to realize that I was shaken.

Was Monty my friend? I hadn’t thought about it. He’d been part of my life for fifteen years. We’d done business together. We’d come to know each other, know
about
each other. I’d looked forward to his offbeat chatter, to the prizes he’d picked for me. He was more than just a business connection.

“Yes,” I said. I just hadn’t realized it before.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“Someone strangled him with lace.”

The kid looked at me, eyes wide, mouth a perfect circle. “Lace? You mean, like, a tablecloth?”

“More like a strip of lace. It could have come from a tablecloth, maybe the edge of an old tablecloth, I suppose.”

“But wouldn’t an old piece of lace fall apart when you pulled on it?”

“Old lace looks fragile, and with some kinds you can pull one thread and have it unravel, but a strip of lace itself is as sturdy as a rope, even after it’s been laundered and bleached for years.”

He assimilated that information, and I handed him both sandwiches, apologizing for forgetting the coffee, but he stopped me.

“I’ll help you load your stuff into the van, and you can tell me about it. I’ll get coffee later.”

I nodded. The kid—he called himself Coylie—moved my things out of Supercart, and I arranged them in the van. I told him about Monty.

The first thing you noticed about Monty was his voice. His thundering voice. “Even when you couldn’t see him, his booming voice announced his arrival,” I said. He talked nonstop, and at full volume. “He had stories for every situation.”

The kid nodded; I think he listened the way my kids sometimes listen. Nodding and saying “uh-huh” occasionally. But I went on anyway. “He could be so irritating, you could strangle the guy sometimes.” I stopped, realizing what I had said. The kid looked up and smiled. Just as well if he wasn’t paying too much attention.

When Supercart was empty we closed the van. Coylie slid his cap off and fanned his face with it. He ran the other hand through a mass of orange ringlets that sprang to life and caught the sunlight. He motioned me toward the lawn chairs he had set up at the entrance of the parking lot. There, he picked up both sandwiches and held one out for me. I shook my head but sat down in the other lawn chair. While Coylie ate, I babbled on; I couldn’t help myself.

“He was very kind to me when I was starting out,” I said.

“So why’d someone want to kill the guy?” Coylie asked as he started on a sandwich.

“He could be a nuisance sometimes,” I said. “He never knew when to stop. He had no sense of what was playful teasing and what was a pain in the neck.”

“You think someone’d kill him for that?” Coylie asked.

“No, it was probably his cash. There’s a lot of cash around here today.”

“Not in my pocket,” he said. Then he nodded and started the second sandwich. He checked his watch and reminded me that I wanted to be at a six o’clock opening. I pulled myself to my feet and headed toward Route 20. It would be good to keep busy. I rolled my empty cart in that direction.

 

In spite of his colorful ways, or perhaps because of them, I had enjoyed Monty’s company. He had acquired a partner of sorts, called Silent Billy. The man was as quiet as Monty was noisy. Monty was highspirited, traveling in his own uproar. Silent Billy was devoted to him. I met Monty shortly after I opened my first little antiques shop in Worcester.

That was when I still thought there was no more to the antiques business than opening a little shop and giving it a cute name. I wanted one of those darling little shops, a sort of antique boutique. I had been a collector of antiques since childhood, but I soon learned that the business was a whole different ball game from collecting pretty things.

When the youngest of my brood entered high school, I opened my first shop, Olde Stuff. It was wonderful. I loved that shop. I thought of it as the fulfillment of a dream in my lifelong pursuit of antiques. But it was just the beginning.

Monty was an early caller. He admired my shop vigorously, which brought his good taste to my attention. He also welcomed me into the antiques trade, and though he may have had an ulterior motive, it was nice of him and made me feel good.

“I, myself, am in the junk trade,” he boomed.

“Junk trade?”

“Yes. Junk is the first level of the antiques business,” he said. “I, myself, find many beautiful objects that I bring to the auction houses and the antique shops. Yes, you people love to see me coming.”

Well, well, well. What an interesting point of view.

“I buy contents,” he said. “You got a cellar? I buy the contents. You got an attic? I buy the contents. You got a barn? I buy the contents.” He flung his arms around my splendidly crowded little shop. “I, myself, clean out your junk pile. The bitter with the sweet. I’ll even pay you to let me take it away.

“People love me,” he said with a slight bow of his head and shoulders. He said it often, and it always made me smile. But not everyone smiled at Monty’s diamond-in-the-rough candor. Some found him irritating, and others found him downright rude. That first day he explained in great detail how he purchased various contents, “and in tough times, I, myself, have even been known to buy out garage sales.”

His practice was then to sift through the contents for the treasures. After all, how did I think that all of those wonderful antiques were found in the first place? It was Monty, he himself, who found them, and sold them to the breathlessly waiting antiques dealers.

Ah! Monty was a picker. At the time I didn’t even realize that pickers existed. He was a good one. He knew who was selling what. He made it his business to bring exactly the right thing to the right dealer. Monty rarely missed a sale; he delivered the kind of thing that his customers enjoyed handling.

His day-to-day business occupied a small warehouse from which he sold the rest of the contents as used furniture. Though named Warehouse Used Furniture, it was known unofficially in the trade as Monty’s Contents.

The warehouse had two particularly interesting features. One was the little workshop in which the repair and restoration work went on, and the other was the room in which he stored antiques not yet passed on to dealers. The used furniture business was open only three days a week, but it was busy and looked to be thriving. The workshop and the antiques rooms were not open to the public; they were entered by invitation only, and Monty was surprisingly selective about invitations.

I came to understand that he had a system for choosing which dealers were to buy his wares. His system seemed, to me, more selective than his method for acquiring the antiques. I didn’t know the process, exactly, but I did know that when a chosen buyer failed to live up to Monty’s expectations, he was in for a long and complicated procedure before earning his way back.

The first few times that Monty visited my shop, I couldn’t wait to go home and report his pronouncements to Hamp and the kids. Hamp didn’t find my Monty stories as fascinating as I did, and the kids soon referred to me as being in the junk trade. So I curtailed the stories, but I was overjoyed when I met Natalie and we discovered that we both took great pleasure in knowing him.

Natalie and I came to view Monty as a stroke of luck. Our early dealings with him had met with his approval, and there was a big payoff for that approval. He took an interest in us, brought us special items, nurtured us. I suspect that my part in all this was to ride Natalie’s coattails. Monty had a soft spot for her. He’d been instrumental in redirecting her efforts toward more profitable ends. Natalie had understood and transformed her odd little business into the success it has become. Monty enjoyed Natalie’s good fortune, and basked in her rapt attention.