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We pulled into the parking lot of The Lick Skillet Roadside Café at six o'clock. It was about fifteen minutes due west of St. Charles. The parking lot was nearly full. The building looked like they made it out of aluminum. The inside décor was right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, only with less attractive people. The table tops were chipped and worn, made of faded brown Formica. Lined up alongside the counter were nine green swivel stools mounted to the floor on tarnished chrome pedestals. The tiled floor was a dizzying pattern of black, white and orange squares. The owners painted the walls in mustard yellow and burnt orange, adorned with black and white photos of Louisiana sports stars. The only one I recognized was Karl Malone, and I thought he played out west some place a long time ago. Perhaps I'm mistaken.
We sat in a green leather booth that had seen better days, and those better days dated back to when Lynyrd Skynyrd rode through town on their way to Gainesville. Attached to the wall was a mini-jukebox. I skimmed through the titles and pulled out a dime, selecting the only song I recognized as being from this century, “Ol' Red,” by Blake Shelton. The contraption ate my quarter and produced no music—typical.
“I love this place,” Gertie declared. “They have the best peach pie in Louisiana.”
“You've been here before?” I asked, “and you came back?”
“Many times, dear,” she said, smiling at me.
“I prefer the pecan pie,” Ida Belle said, “but to start, I'm having the chicken-fried chicken and a biscuit with peach marmalade.”
“I'm having pot roast, with mashed potatoes and butter,” Gertie said.
“No gravy?” Ida Belle asked.
“I prefer butter,” she said.
I shook my head. “How is it you two have lived this long?”
“Low stress,” Gertie said.
“Video games keep the mind active,” added Ida Belle. “I love Call of Duty.”
While Ida Belle and Gertie argued over whether the sweet tea was horrible the last time they were in, I made a note of an attractive woman entering the café alone. I smelled her before I saw her. She was attractive, wearing an expensive scent I recognized from the Anthropologie, just hours earlier. She looked like she was in her mid-forties in her face, but I could tell by her hands and the spots on her skin she was at least sixty. Her medium-length red hair was colored and styled recently and she wore just the right amount of makeup and jewelry. Her outfit and shoes were tasteful if not outright elegant. The whole package seemed grossly out of place for an establishment named The Lick Skillet, a diner I heard one trucker refer to as a choke and puke as we entered. The only imperfection on the woman I noticed was a small gap between her two front teeth. She sat in a booth across the aisle, the only one open.
During my time with the CIA I developed a radar of sorts for trouble. That radar went off the moment I saw her. There was something about her... I couldn't put my finger on it, but something...
Ida Belle was waxing eloquent about the culinary delight that is Lick Skillet pot roast. I pretended to be interested but was listening to the conversation between the woman, who was now sitting across the aisle from me, and her waitress. For all her outward appearance of beauty and grace, her demeanor was mean-spirited and dismissive as the server tried to explain the evening's specials. The poor employee looked completely deflated as she turned away from the conversation and headed to our table.
She approached us with three glasses of water and place settings. She was in her mid-forties and carried a considerable excess around her mid-section. She sported a bad bouffant, heavy red lipstick and rather unfortunate skin.
“Hey Maggie,” Ida Belle said. “You look like your dog just died.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes, nodding back toward the well-kept woman. Leaning forward she whispered, “Let's just say some customers are way more difficult than others. Some you can never please.”
“I heard some of that conversation,” Ida Belle said. “She's pretty on the outside...”
“And pretty foul on the inside,” Gertie added.
“Who's your friend?” Maggie inquired, smiling at me.
“This is Fortune,” Gertie replied, “and we told her your peach pie was the best around.”
“Pecan pie,” Ida Belle corrected.
Maggie laughed. “I'll bring a little taste of both and let her decide for herself. Chicken fried chicken for Gertie and pot roast for Ida Belle?”
My mouth fell open, and I raised my eyebrows. “You eat here so often they know what you want?”
Maggie laughed. “Every month when they go to New Orleans, like clockwork. How about you, darling? Do you know what you want?”
“Do you have banana pudding?” I asked.
“Nope,” she replied. “You need to go to Sinful for that.”
“Do you have anything that is not deep fried?” I asked.
“House salad,” she replied.
I nodded considering the lack of options. “What's in it?” I asked.
“Lettuce, tomato...”
“Hold the tomato,” I said.
She looked at me. “Ok then; lettuce, cheese...”
“No cheese,” I interrupted. “Do you have carrots and radishes?”
“We're out of carrots,” she replied, “and I wouldn't eat the radishes here. They're a little brown. Do you want croutons?”
“No,” I said.
She shrugged and nodded. “All right then, one bowl of lettuce coming up.”
“I'll take it,” I responded. “Do you have low-cal salad dressing?”
“Not really,” she said.
“Fine, just bring me a little Thousand Island on the side. Oh, and can I have a piece of dry wheat toast?”
“You got it, hon,” she replied. “No butter or jam?”
I shook my head. She flashed me a mildly disapproving look. I ignored it. I leaned in toward Maggie and whispered, “Who is that woman? She was downright rude.”
Ida Belle and Gertie both leaned in and cast a curious glance in the woman’s direction.
Maggie sighed. “Oh, that's Georgia,” she said in a low tone.
“Georgia?” I repeated, “like the state?”
“It's not an uncommon name here in the south,” Gertie whispered.
“She's been coming in once or twice a month for the last three months. She's so awful that we all draw straws to see who has to put up with her. Guess who drew the short straw tonight?”
“Does she always come in alone?” I asked.
Maggie nodded. “Yes, but she won't be alone for long. Some man will join her soon, you wait.”
“She meets a man here?” Ida Belle asked.
“Men, plural,” she said. “Several. One at a time.”
“Really?” Gertie said.
“Yep, she likes them rich and old,” Maggie said. “It's rarely the same one. You mark my word. In a few minutes an old geyser will come in, but he'll drive a BMW or Cadillac.”
Gertie leaned in and whispered, “You say she's done this before?”
“A few times, yes,” Maggie acknowledged.
“She's a gold-digger,” Ida Belle said. “So what? If the men are so stupid they let it happen, well that's too bad for them. That's what I say.”
“Excuse me,” Georgia called out in a terse tone. “Do you think you'll be bringing my coffee sometime today?”
Maggie looked at me and rolled her eyes. She leaned over and whispered to Ida Belle and Gertie, “Her Highness awaits—gotta go.”
I nodded.
She winked at me and turned away, answering Georgia, “Yes, ma'am, coming up.”
Maggie disappeared behind the counter.
Gertie and Ida Belle continued their debate about pie as an elderly man walked through the café door. He was easily over seventy-five; maybe even eighty; short with a substantial paunch around his middle. He wore black slacks that rode a little too high over his waist and a neatly pressed plaid shirt buttoned all the way to the top. His thin gray hair had was trimmed and slicked back, parted on the left side. There were large, dark liver spots on his face and hands. When he saw Georgia, he smiled. What teeth he had left were badly yellowed.
I looked out the window into the parking lot but Ida Belle was ahead of me, “Silver Mercedes,” she said.
“Late model sedan—probably means big bucks.” Gertie nodded knowingly.
Something rang a bell with me but I couldn't place it. Gold-digger... Georgia... something.
“This should be a short conversation,” Ida Belle whispered, “unless she really is only after money.”
“How would you know?” I asked.
“Because she's an eight, and he's a two,” Gertie interrupted.
Ida Belle nodded. “The man can barely even walk. He's a one. Fortune, you're a beautiful woman. You know as well as I do, tens go out with tens, eights go out with eights, and ones sit home alone. That's the way of the world.”
“It’s true,” Gertie agreed, “unless you have money and lots of it. Money is the great equalizer.”
“Being funny is another equalizer,” I said.
“It helps but you still need money,” Gertie scoffed. “Perhaps not quite as much.”
“Shhh, listen,” I said.
Georgia's entire demeanor changed when the old man sat. I heard him say his name was Willard. Her temperament, cold and rude just moments before Willard arrived, turned warm and inviting as she spoke with the elderly man. She flirted, cooed and giggled at his corny jokes. I had to cover my mouth to squelch a snicker when she said his hair reminded her of Clark Gable.
The ease in which she transformed from raging bitch to Princess Priss-pot was very disturbing.
“That old boy does not see the train coming down the track,” Gertie whispered.
“Or the wreck it will cause,” Ida Belle finished.
Our dinner came. Ida Belle and Gertie tore into their pot roast and chicken fried whatever with vigor. They each boasted that their dinner was better than the one the other was eating. I was drawing stares from people around me as I ate my bowl of lettuce.
Meanwhile, Georgia and Willard were hitting it off just fine. I found it hard to imagine how any man could not recognize the disingenuous compliments, plastic smiles and forced laughter. Georgia was laying it on thick. If poor Willard ever had a bullshit meter, the batteries had long since worn out. By the end of the meal she was lightly touching his hand and arm. He was blushing like a schoolboy, falling for the entire act.
We finished our dinner, paid the check, and made our way through the parking lot to Gertie's old Caddy. I buckled my seat belt and put the key into the ignition. I sat there frozen for a moment, deep in thought.
“Fortune, are you ok?” Gertie asked, when I hadn't started the car.
I heard her speaking, but it wasn't registering. I was stewing, thinking about what that woman was doing to poor Willard and trying to remember what seemed so familiar.
After another minute, Ida Belle leaned over and said, “Fortune, dear, you see the way it works is, the car moves, not the parking lot.”
“I can't help thinking about that poor man,” I replied.
“It's not our problem,” Gertie said. “The man is eighty-years old if he's a day. He's been around the block way more than once. All the signals are there plain as day. If he can't see the train coming down the track, there isn't much we can do.”
“I know,” I admitted, “but there's something familiar about all this. The gold-digger... the name Georgia... small town in Louisiana... something.”
I finally turned the engine over as I saw Willard walking Georgia to her car. She was driving a white Lexus SUV, a reasonably nice car but worn looking and at least ten years old. She pulled a pen and a piece of paper from her purse and handed it to Willard. He wrote something on the paper, presumably his phone number, and handed it to Georgia. She smiled and kissed his cheek lightly while stroking his arm. I could almost hear the old man’s hormones surging through his hardening veins.
The SUV bore Louisiana plates, so she must be local, I gathered. Instinctively, I made a mental note of her plate number.
Gertie, I noticed, had grabbed the newspaper she'd been reading from the floorboard.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Looking in the personals again,” she said. She turned the pages.
“The chances of you finding an ad placed by this woman is minuscule,” I said. “Besides, most people do the dating thing online these days and...”
“This ad said respondent must be HWP. What's HWP?” Gertie asked.
“Height and weight proportional,” I said.
“What did you think it meant?” Ida Belle asked.
“Hispanic, white or Filipino?” she replied.
“That makes little sense,” Ida Belle said, “and Filipino starts with an F.”
“True?” Gertie replied. She scrunched her face.
“Why do you think the ad would be in the paper and not online?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation.
“She's fishing in an old pond,” Gertie replied. “I don't think our boy Willard has Instagram or a Match.com account.”
“I still don't understand why you are so convinced this woman is such bad news,” Ida Belle asked.
”It's just a feeling I have,” I said. “The wicked look in her eye; the way she treated poor Maggie and how she transformed into Miss Congeniality when Willard sat. There's something really off about her.”
“It is odd she took his number rather than giving him hers,” Gertie said. “Men don't do that in the south, particularly in his age group.”
“She doesn't want him to have her number,” I said. “And did you see her kissing him? It was downright creepy.”
Ida Belle shook her head, “Well, the last time I checked, being creepy isn't illegal. I feel bad for that poor old boy, but we haven't got a dog in this hunt. Can we go home?”
I sighed, frustrated that I couldn't think of why my internal alarms were going off.
True to their word, Ida Belle and Gertie were quiet for the rest of the trip home. Not that they were respecting their commitment, they had both fallen fast asleep. Gertie was snoring, sounding like a distant foghorn on the Staten Island Ferry, only much more annoying. Ida Belle had a little drool on the corner of her mouth, which was now open as widely as physically possible without the use of dental instruments.
I dropped Gertie and Ida Belle off and went home, thoroughly exhausted myself. I wanted a hot shower, but I wanted sleep even more. I slipped out of my shorts, shirt and bra and threw on an oversized t-shirt. The front of the shirt read, Goat ropers need love, too, whatever that meant.
I let Bones into the house. He wagged his tail slowly, the ancient bloodhound's way of letting me know he was happy to see me, and even happier his dinner was on the way. Bones was a sweet old dog. It was he who had dug up the human bone when I first arrived in Sinful. The subsequent investigation started a cascading effect I've not been able to avert since. As I thought about what a sweet dog and good company he was, he dragged his butt along my carpet. Nice.
My cell phone rang. It was Deputy Carter Leblanc, a strikingly handsome law enforcement officer who took his job seriously. During my brief time in Sinful, we had developed a... complicated relationship. It was probably due to him believing the murder involved me... for a short while. Or it could have been that I ignored his repeated requests to not interfere with the investigation. If those weren’t the primary reasons for the complex nature of our relationship, he frequently caught me in various stages of undress—that may have also played a role. Carter was a tightly wound package but a superb guy.
When events surrounding the recent investigation into the murder of an aspiring actress named Pansy Arceneaux caused me to end up in the hospital, it was Carter who stayed with me throughout my recovery, even though I was unconscious the whole time. Things between him and I are... in a developmental stage that could be described as two steps forward, one step back... or sometimes... often even, the reverse.
“Hello,” I said.
“I was just calling to check in on you all,” he said. “I heard you made a sojourn to New Orleans with Gertie and Ida Belle. How did that go?”
“It went well, other than the food on the way home,” I said.
“Ah, I take it they exposed you to the culinary delights of The Lick Skillet,” he said. “How was the meal?”
“I'm not sure. Should lettuce have bones?” I replied.
Carter chuckled. His laugh made me smile. He was charming at times. Unfortunately, those times were too few and too far in between. “I would have called them,” he said, “but I suspect that they were probably sound asleep an hour before you got home.”
“You know them well. I'm surprised you didn't just pop over. When you want to talk you usually knock on my door.”
“I usually see you half naked in the middle of the day,” he said. “At night, I didn't know what to expect.”
“Fair enough,” I acknowledged. Was he flirting? I wondered?
“Tell me, Carter, does the name Georgia have any special meaning to you?” I asked.
“I love the Atlanta Braves,” he said.
“No, I mean like a woman's name,” I replied, “like a gold-digger, a woman fleecing an older man of his money?”
“I know what a gold-digger is. No, it doesn't ring a bell. Should it?”
“I don't know. Probably not.”
Carter paused for a few, uncomfortable seconds.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah... uh, I was wondering... uh...”
Was he about to ask me out?
“Wondering what?”
I could hear him breathing. Just ask. I'll say yes.
“Oh, nothing,” he said finally. “Listen, I have another call coming in. I have to take it. Good night.”
I tossed my phone aside. Such was my relationship with Carter. It was becoming increasingly obvious that if I ever decided I wanted things to go to the next level, it would be me that started the ball rolling.
As tired as I was, I couldn't sleep. I sat up and powered up my laptop. I Googled 'gold-digger' and 'Georgia' and 'Louisiana' and 'rich old men.'
The name Georgia pulled up a bunch of state references. I learned that they called Atlanta Terminus early on, Forrest Gump was filmed in Savannah, and Coca-Cola was invented there in 1886. Even though Georgia is called the Peach State, it is not the largest producer of the fruit. Georgia produces the most peanuts, however. I guess they thought the Peanut State didn’t have the same flair. And I’m sure that Gertie would be pleased to know, in Athens, it’s illegal to use a sling-shot made in Alabama.
None of this helped me. I tried several other combinations but found nothing of substance.
Shake it off girl, I thought. You're imagining things. Let it go. It took another hour, but I finally fell asleep.