Authors: Mary Kay Andrews
“A flea market
in Metairie, when I could be wandering the streets of the French Quarter? No,
chère
, no way.”
Austin had mysteriously picked up a Cajun accent just as we hit the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. The accent only got thicker as we treated ourselves to beignets and café au lait at the Morning Call in a nondescript shopping center near our motel in Metairie.
“Me, I cannot do another flea market,” he said, as he sipped his coffee and watched the waiters wielding their long-spouted pitchers of hot milk. I sighed and bit into yet another beignet. My face and shirt were covered in powdered sugar, but everybody in the place was also covered with powdered sugar. I wondered if white lung was an occupational hazard for the Morning Call’s waiters.
I tried flattery. “You’re so good at this. Look at that painting you found back in Mobile.” I tried whining. “It’s no fun without you.” I tried idle threats. “If you don’t come with me, I’m never speaking to you again.”
But Austin would not be moved. In the end, I dropped him back at the motel, with cab money to go into the city.
I had heard about the flea market on Veteran’s Highway in Metairie, but never experienced it for myself. And since I’d hit it so big in Mobile, I decided to try my luck again in the New Orleans suburbs.
Judging by appearances, the Metairie market didn’t look promising. The first wave of booths I scouted was depressing. It looked to me as though the dealers had picked up their merchandise from the garage sale rejects offered by the Mobile dealers. After an hour of traipsing up and down the aisles, I was tempted to turn around and follow Austin into New Orleans.
But as I soldiered on, things began to look brighter. At a booth full of nightmarish seventies and eighties lamps and light fixtures I found a pair of bronze and crystal French wall sconces, probably from just after the turn of the century. The paper tag fluttering in the breeze was written in ink so faded I couldn’t read it.
“Those are nice, aren’t they?” I turned to find a slender man with a Fu Manchu mustache and close-cropped graying hair peering over my shoulder. He looked to be in his mid-fifties. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and a tiny diamond stud in his left ear.
“Are you the dealer?”
“That’s me,” he said. “These were candleholders when I bought them, so I did the wiring myself.”
“French?” I asked.
He laughed. “I got them out of the estate of a couple of old queens over in St. Francisville. They had stuff from all over, but yeah, I thought they looked French.”
“I like these a lot,” I said. “But I’m an interior designer and I’m doing a restoration of an antebellum plantation house in Georgia. I still need a lot of other stuff yet, so my budget is stretched kind of tight.”
“How tight?”
“Tight,” I said, giving him my winning smile, which I had a feeling was wasted on him, since he was definitely playing for the other team.
“Why don’t you look around and see if you can find anything else, and I’ll make you a better deal,” he suggested.
“No offense, but the rest of the stuff here just won’t fit into my plan.”
“Oh,” he said, nonchalantly, “I didn’t mean just in here. No, this stuff won’t do for you. This stuff is for my boys who are into that whole
That ’70s Show
look. You wouldn’t believe the crap those boys like. Lava lamps! I can’t keep ’em in stock. No, what I meant was, the next three spaces in this row are all mine. And I’ve got a warehouse
too. I take it you’re going for the whole Grand Tour look? English, French, like that?”
I nodded. “I wouldn’t mind having some good American pieces too. The owner’s girlfriend is very brand conscious. If I could find, like, a Belter piece, something like that, she’d probably wet her pants.”
“If
I
could find a Belter piece I’d wet
my
pants,” he drawled. “But I’ve got things that are just as nice, over in the warehouse. I don’t like to bring them out here, because you never can tell about the weather. Tell you what. Look around here, figure out what works for you, and we’ll talk. And if you can wait until my helper shows up, in an hour or so, I can run you over to the warehouse, if you like.”
“Really?” I said, feeling my mood lift. “That would be awesome.” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Keeley Murdock.”
“Nice to meet you, Keeley,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Robert. Now run along and shop.”
For the next hour I poked around in Robert’s adjoining booths, where the merchandise was, as he promised, more my style.
Artful merchandising was not Robert’s strong suit. Everything had been thrown out haphazardly on tables or stacked, still wrapped in old newspaper, in crumbling cardboard boxes. Still, with prodigious digging and sleuthing, I found a series of six nice architectural drawings in cheap frames, which I thought would appeal to the engineer in Will, a heavily battered mahogany Empire card table that would need extensive refinishing, a pair of heavy Georgian sterling silver candlesticks, and a box of hand-etched crystal wineglasses, which, though unmarked, looked English.
I dutifully stacked everything in a pile under a table at the back of Robert’s booth. His helper, who turned out to be a delicate blond woman wearing a black leather bustier and cutoffs, turned up at the appointed time, and Robert and I hopped into my van.
The warehouse, it turned out, was a closed-up barbecue restaurant
only a block away from my motel. The plate-glass windows were caked with grime, and a rusted-out Buick stood on rotted tires near the front door.
“Scary, huh?” Robert said, seeing the skeptical look on my face as I parked the van. “The police presence around here isn’t the greatest. I keep it this way on purpose. Wouldn’t want anybody to think there’s anything in here worth breaking in for.”
He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and flipped a light switch.
“Wow,” I said, following him inside. The place was packed with antiques, floor-to-ceiling. Rows of chandeliers hung from pipes running the length of the old restaurant. Dozens and dozens of chairs hung from hooks on the walls, and tables and breakfronts and dressers and sofas were stacked cheek-to-jowl along the walls, with more cardboard boxes stacked on every available surface.
Robert busied himself locking the door behind us, and for a fleeting moment I wondered if I’d gotten myself abducted by some insane slasher rapist. Nah, I decided. Nobody with taste this great could possibly be a criminal.
“Let me show you some things,” Robert said. He shoved an overstuffed 1940s armchair out of the way, and we threaded our way to the back of the restaurant. A pair of ornate rosewood rococo revival sofas were stacked high with plastic milk cartons full of old copies of
Antiques
magazines.
“Ta-da!” he exclaimed. “Now, they’re certainly not Belter or Mallard. They’re not marked at all, and believe me I looked. They look like twins, but if you look closer, you’ll see slight differences.”
I moved the boxes to the floor and edged between the sofas to get a better look. The old green velvet upholstery on both was in shreds, and bits of horsehair stuffing sprung up through the holes. The rosewood carvings were intact, although caked with layers of blackened varnish. I could already picture them in one of the parlors, refinished, upholstered in a wonderful silk damask.
“How much?”
Robert smiled. “One price for all. Come on, I’ve got some other stuff to show you.”
The other stuff included an elaborately carved six-foot-tall mahogany bookshelf with leaded glass doors, a pair of oversized Queen Anne–style armchairs, two Oriental runners, an Empire daybed, and the prize of the day, an immense marble-topped three-tiered sideboard.
“Now, this,” Robert said dramatically, patting the cracked marble top, “is by Prudent Francis Mallard, whom you know. Very famous French cabinetmaker. La-di-damn-dah, right?”
“Oh yes,” I assured him. I knelt to the floor and opened the cupboard doors. Inside were stacks of fine old Limoges dishes. “Does it come with the china?” I asked.
Robert knelt down beside me and took a look. “I’d forgotten that stuff was in there,” he said. “Yeah, if you want it, I can throw it in. There’s probably, I don’t remember exactly, maybe ten, eleven place settings? And some assorted serving pieces.”
“Is there a story behind this?” I asked him, wincing as I stood up. My back ached from all the walking and stooping and driving of the past several days.
“There’s a story behind all of it,” he said. “So, do we have a deal?”
“Depends on the price,” I said. “But yeah, I think we probably have a deal. I feel like I’ve hit the mother lode.”
“You have,” he said.
I followed him back to the front of the restaurant. He sat down on a rickety pressed oak armchair and I perched on the edge of a chintz sofa from the 1980s while he tallied up my shopping list on a piece of cardboard he ripped from a box of silver-plated trays and bowls.
“Let’s see,” he said, mumbling to himself. “Umm. Looks like fifteen thousand dollars? That sound right to you?”
It sounded like he’d lost his mind. We both knew the Mallard sideboard alone was worth much, much more than that.
“That sounds fine,” I said, and then, deciding to push my luck, asked, “does that include the stuff from the flea market?”
He laughed. “I love a woman with balls. Sure, you can have the stuff from the flea market too.”
I cocked my head and looked at him carefully. He wore a gold pinkie ring on his left hand, with a sizable diamond in it, and the diamond stud earring was at least half a carat. Robert did not look hard-up. He also did not look like an amateur at the antiques business.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said, getting up and dusting the seat of his pants. “Ask away.”
“How come you’re making me such a great deal on all this stuff? That Mallard. I mean, that’s quite a nice piece. Seriously, seriously underpriced. And the rest of the things I’m taking, well, all of it would bring big money at a shop on Magazine Street.”
“I know,” Robert said. “Most of this stuff came out of a shop on Magazine.”
“Whose?”
“Mine,” he said. He gestured toward the door. “We’ll have to recruit some help to load you. It took three fellas just to get that sideboard in here. And none of them included me.”
My cell phone rang as I was unlocking the van.
“Keeley?” It was Austin. He didn’t sound too happy. I could hear the faint sounds of music and laughter in the background. “Having fun?” I asked.
“Not so much,” he said. “I’ve been robbed.”
“No! Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. Just out three hundred dollars and my pride,” he said. “I don’t even have cab fare. Do you think you could come get me?”
“I’m on my way,” I promised. “But where?”
He gave me directions to a bar called Shadrack’s, on Decatur Street, across the street from Jackson Square.
I hung up and told Robert what had happened. “Shadrack’s?” Robert looked surprised. “Is your friend gay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
He shook his head. “Shadrack’s is a cesspool. It’s a wonder he didn’t get hurt in there. How well do you know New Orleans?”
“Not that well. The French Quarter I don’t really know at all.”
“I’d better go with you then,” Robert said, settling back in his seat.
When we got to Decatur Street, Austin was standing on the corner, leaning up against one of the famous French Quarter street signs, looking like he’d lost his last friend. I pulled up to the curb and tooted the horn.
Robert slid nimbly into the back of the van and Austin hopped into the front seat.
“Thank God,” Austin said. He made a production of locking the door. “Let’s get out of here. I hope I never see New Orleans again.”
Robert laughed, and Austin turned around to see where the sound was coming from. “Don’t be so hard on us,” Robert said. “New Orleans isn’t all bad. You just happened to pick the worst pickup bar in the Quarter is all. I’ve never understood how those people keep their liquor license, with all the tourists who get victimized in there.”
Austin raised one eyebrow and tried to look haughty. “I was
not
trying to get picked up. I just wanted a drink. And who, may I ask, are you? And how do you know so much about a place like that?”
Now I was laughing. “Austin, this is Robert. He’s an antiques dealer I met at the flea market in Metairie. And he’s the only reason I didn’t get lost coming to get you, so don’t be getting all pissy with the man.”
“You’d be pissy too, if you just had all your fun money lifted,” Austin muttered. “I was just standing at the bar, minding my own business, and these two
boys
were standing beside me, and the next thing I know, they’re screaming and pulling each other’s hair. It was an absolute melee! But it was over in a couple minutes. The bartender
told them to leave. And then, when I went to pay for my drink, my wallet was gone. Did you ever?”
“Oldest game around,” Robert said. “The bartender was probably in on it. When you told him your wallet was gone, he didn’t make a stink about paying for your drink, did he?”
“No,” Austin said. “He even bought me another one. Hey!…”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll reimburse you for what you lost. I just saved so much money shopping with Robert that I’m feeling very, very generous. Why don’t we go get some dinner?” I asked, looking around at Robert to let him know he was included.
“I’m not hungry,” Austin said peevishly.
“Well I am, and I’m driving,” I said. “And I’m not leaving New Orleans until I get some seafood. Where to, Robert?”
“Back to Metairie,” Robert said. “The best seafood in New Orleans isn’t even in New Orleans. It’s right back in Metairie. Ever hear of a place called Drago’s?”
“Sounds like a dive,” Austin said. I punched him in the arm, and we drove back to Metairie to what was, as Robert promised, the best seafood I’d ever had.
“Oysters are what you come here for,” Robert told us, between bites of shrimp Arnaud and deviled crab. “Drago supplies oysters to some of the best restaurants in New Orleans. Call me old-fashioned, but I won’t be ordering them again until the weather cools off.”