She walks into the bar, as Joe Diffey once sang, one hip at a time. Nobody could miss her.
He sure didn’t.
He couldn’t believe his luck. She sashays over to the bar stool next to his and sits down.
She was a looker. Long, coal-black hair. Great figure. Ample cleavage. Even better, she turned and smiled.
“Hi.” The smile was quick. Infectious.
“Hi back.”
“What’s your name?”
“George.”
“Nice to meet you. You come here often?”
“Couple of time a week.”
“You married George. I don’t see a ring.”
“Nope.”
“Involved.”
“Not at the moment.”
Outside the Arlington, Virginia, brewpub where George is making time with the sweet young thing, his fiancee gasps as she hears him say he’s not involved. The gasp is followed by tears, then anger.
“That son-of-a-bitch. He’s on the make.”
Jonathan Wilkins nods and adjusts the receiver as both listen to George continue small talk. Wilkins has just bagged another fiancee who is about to become an ex-fiancee. George has been caught. . .hook, line and sinker.
Wilkins is a specialist, a private investigator who checks out the man or woman in someone’s life to see if he or she is all they claim to me.
Most of the time, they aren’t.
“Most people have something to hide,” Wilkins says. “I just find out what it is.”
Sarah hired Wilkins two days earlier because she expected George was playing around on her. She wanted to find out before they tied the knot.
It didn’t take long. George doesn’t know it yet, but he is out on his ass.
“That lying bastard,” she keeps saying between sobs.
Inside the brewpup, George is about to take the final, fatal plunge.
“Listen,” the young thing says to him, “my place is just up the street. Why don’t we go back there and have some fun.”
“Sure,” George says, motioning for his check. He pays and they leave together.
Outside, instead of a night of sexual nirvana, George finds Sarah waiting.
“Here you horny S.O.B,” she says, flinging his engagement rink back at him. “Don’t ever come near me again.”
George leans down to pick up the ring before he realizes that he is alone on the sidewalk. Both of the girls of his dreams have vanished.
Susan Kailto, the long, tall beauty who just left George standing alone on both on the sidewalk and his life is in the backseat of Wilkins’ car, accepting her $200 for a few minutes work.
“This one was easy,” she tells Wilkins.
“They always are,” he says.
Wilkins has been practicing his “specialty” for more than two years now and ways just about all men fall for the come-on.
“Susan is real good and I’ve got three others who are just as convincing. When they come on to a guy, they usually respond. I’ve only had three men turn them down out of 31 in the last two years,” Wilkins says.
Sarah, once she calms down, thanks Wilkins and writes out a check for $750, the remaining part of the $1,500 fee for finding out that her fiancee was a louse.
It was, she says, worth every penny.
“Better to find out what he is now than find it out later,” she adds.
Wilkins says he work is one of the fastest-growing areas of private investigation.
“Like I said, everyone has something to hide. Usually, it’s something like this or it’s a guy who says he’s not married, but really is. Sometimes, it’s much worse, like a criminal record and a past history of conning people. There’s a lot of dishonest people out there and it pays to know who they are.”
Which means Wilkins and others stay busy.
“These days, it don’t pay to trust anyone. I follow a simple rule: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
–Doug Thompson
Washington, DC