Slugfest

I was expecting another delivery for the prejudged specimen plant categories and braced myself for the notorious trade show issue of drayage. A word that seldom crops up in most conversations. To cut short the six pages of convention mumbo jumbo, your boxes, like Elvis, may be in the building, but until some guy who looks like a member of ZZ Top says so, it’s anyone’s guess when you’ll see them. And new exhibitors were low men on the totem pole who had to dangle candy, free goods, and occasionally cash to light a fire under them. You made your peace with it and thanked them profusely when your merchandise arrived.

I stopped at the concession stand to refuel. The barista had just arrived and it would be five or ten minutes before the coffee was ready, so I took a spin around the floor. Nursery pots and electrical cables had been camouflaged with literally tons of pine bark mulch. Timed mistings kept everything moist, and consequently the entire building smelled like a national park or the woods after a spring rain. Incongruously, the air was also filled with the incessant beeping of service vehicles backing up. When had that become mandatory? If you can see the vehicle, you don’t need that hideous noise; and if you can’t, how will it help?

The beeping died down, first one chirping machine, then another, like quitting time at a factory. Then it stopped entirely and was replaced by footsteps and a flurry of activity. Two men with walkie-talkies materialized and sprinted to a set of escalators at the rear of the convention center. Rolanda and three other guards barreled past me, wearing their game faces and trying not to look alarmed. I followed at a discreet distance. Whatever it was, it was bound to be more interesting than waiting for coffee to brew. Had a deer been spotted? A vole?

A dozen or so onlookers were clustered at the top of the escalator. Below, near an exhibit of storage sheds, more gawkers stood outside a red ten-by-ten unit with faux gingerbread detailing and vinyl hanging planters on the windows. Thirty-seven hundred bucks—I’d talked a client out of buying one by telling her she’d also have to hire seven dwarves to go with it to get the full effect. The white resin planters outside the shed were slightly askew and a trio of smaller pots overturned.

When the guards reached the lower level, the crowd parted and that gave me a somewhat better view down the nonworking escalator. All I saw were two Timberland boots, feet splayed in an awkward pose that didn’t look comfortable and didn’t look healthy.

The convention center’s emergency staff, two handymen with a defibrillator, were quick on the scene, but they looked nervous, inexperienced, and in over their heads. Onlookers stepped aside to let them do their work, but when the real deal arrived in the form of a New York City emergency medical team, the Wagner staff was visibly relieved and moved on to crowd control, a role for which they were better suited. I bumped into Nikki on the way back to our aisle.

“What’s the hubbub this time?” she asked.

“Doesn’t look good. Someone collapsed or maybe had an accident on the escalator.” I considered telling her what I really thought—that the person was as dead as Connie Anzalone’s veronicas—but why jinx him if he was still alive? And why upset her if he wasn’t? I’d seen a man fall over dead during a keynote speech at another trade show once. It wasn’t that dull a talk. He was whisked away and the speaker went right on yakking. Most people didn’t even know about it until they read about someone who’d taken ill in the show daily the next morning. As heartless as it sounded, one monkey don’t stop no show. A brief announcement over the loudspeakers stated the rear escalators were not in service. No reason was given, but Nikki Bingham already had a theory.

“Connie’s husband probably found out who nuked her veronicas and had the person killed.”

Fifteen

“That’s a little harsh,” I said.

“I didn’t mean it. I guess I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy this morning.” I’d just met the woman two days ago. Please tell me she isn’t going to pour her heart out to me.

“Pay no attention to me,” she said. “Momentary lapse.”

We reached our aisle and Nikki got to work, rearranging everything she’d pronounced perfect the day before. David arrived bearing gifts—a Box o’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts and an aluminum-foil-covered platter that held a homemade frittata he’d warmed in the microwave in the members’ lounge.

“I could get to like this,” I said, helping myself to a slice. Nikki looked hurt. First I’d refused her crumb cake, then her attempt to get something off her chest, now I was scarfing down someone else’s culinary accomplishment. I’d have to remember to skip breakfast tomorrow and gush over whatever Nikki brought to keep the peace.

Babe had said three more pieces were coming but I couldn’t do much until the final shipment arrived, so I busied myself tweaking my laptop presentation. The computer battery needed recharging, so I crouched down to find the ridiculously expensive power source we’d had to order. I was on my hands and knees, peeling back corners of the rented carpet trying to find it, and half listening to David discuss what some exhibitors were now calling the Javits Curse.

They had decided it was the late New York senator’s way of steering business to the sleek, glass structure farther north that bore his name instead of the building we were in that honored a former mayor. If the flower show’s organizers took the bait and left or, worse, succumbed, it could be the final nail in the coffin for the Wagner Center and it could put a lot of people out of work. And invite the wrecking ball so a newer, bigger structure would take its place. It was prize real estate. Needless to say, there were interested parties on both sides.

“If it’s not the curse,” David said, “and it’s just another mishap, that makes six. The members’ lounge was buzzing this morning. Mostly that viper Allegra Douglas. She’s already pointing fingers.” According to David, more than a few longtime flower show denizens didn’t approve of the new crop of exhibitors, although most weren’t as vocal as Allegra.

“There’s one of the old-timers now,” he said. His voice dropped. “Uh-oh, she’s coming this way. Big pencil at eleven o’clock … and something tells me she’s not looking for pinecone nightlights. Command performance, ladies.”

I hadn’t heard the term big pencil to denote a big buyer since my days in the video business, and from my crouched position I craned my neck to see. The low whirr of a machine was followed by a shaky voice behind me. “Redecorating?” I bolted upright, and made eye contact with … no one until I shifted my gaze downward to Jean Moffitt’s wheelchair.

“Just joking. Don’t get up on my account.”

She wore a cherry red suit tricked out with more gold buttons and braid than a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan production, and her thin, storklike legs were partially wrapped in a luscious shawl I pegged as Loro Piana. Very Italian and very expensive. At the chair’s controls was a young man with watery blue eyes and sandy blond hair cropped in very short, almost military fashion. A light-colored polo shirt stretched across a well-defined set of pecs, and his chinos looked as if they’d been ironed. Definitely military. He was comfortable enough with the old woman to have been a relative but maybe not. There was also a little reserve.

“Rick and I should come back when you’ve finished setting up,” Mrs. Moffitt said.

Perhaps this was how it was done. The on-the-floor business was window dressing; all the big deals were made at off-hours. “No, no, just testing my computer presentation,” I said, kicking into salesman mode. “May I show it to you?” She looked at me as if I’d suggested she view my vacation pictures from the last ten years.

I’d seen the Moffitt name on a dozen items at the flower show from containers to window boxes to specimen plants—each entry adorned with a ribbon. David had told us about her. Jean Moffitt’s late husband was a wealthy industrialist who’d been a big supporter of the show. No one ever said that’s why she always won, but there were some who thought she was guaranteed a certain number of prizes every year. If the show had been around for a hundred years, Jean Moffitt had been there for most of them, and her sitting room was lined with glass cases filled with blue ribbons to prove it.

This year’s theme was “A New York State of Mind,” and Mrs. Moffitt’s entry, A Sleepy Hollow Garden, was the odds-on favorite to take first prize Friday night when the biggest awards were given for best overall display garden. The Moffitt garden was a masterpiece worthy of a Las Vegas theme park. Playing on the Washington Irving short story, it featured marble tombstones, rotting tree trunks, and numerous specimens of Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, which looked like dead, gnarled limbs but were very much alive. She had planned to have a headless horseman galloping through the Friday night reception but at the eleventh hour had learned it would be a building code violation. Her attorneys were still working on getting the variance, and hoped it would come through before the final