The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10

by Richard Stevenson

  Tessig was unruffled by this additional evidence that I was just another doubter. She said, “Gary remembers Anna as being a wonderful woman. If she embellished, that’s only natural.

  After all, she loved a king and was loved in return by His Majesty.”

  “Thai scholars say the woman was demented. There was no romance. And Mongkut never hopped around blurting ‘Is a puzzlement!’”

  She smiled even more serenely, impervious. “Talk to Gary.

  He can tell you.”

  “I’d like to. I’m flying to Thailand later this week.” I reiterated the fears Griswold’s family in Albany and friends in Key West had for him, not having heard from Griswold for six months.

  “Yes, Gary stopped e-mailing me too,” Tessig said. “It was perplexing, and then I began to worry. His last few messages had been replete with foreboding. A Thai soothsayer had given him a bad reading, and his sign of Jupiter had entered the seventh house. Gary was also disappointed in a man he had been involved with named Mango. Apparently the guy had turned out to be dishonest, and a flaming A-hole to boot.”

  “Did he mention what Mango had done to upset him?”

  “No, just that Mango apparently had misrepresented himself in some serious way. So, who saw Gary in Cambodia? At least that’s promising news.”

  “Elise Flanagan,” I said. “She’s here in Key West. Do you know her?”

  Now Tessig really lit up. “Elise! She’s a client of mine! But she didn’t speak to Gary?”

  “He seemed not to want to interact with her or even to be recognized. So, does Elise Flanagan also have past-life connections with Southeast Asia? Or was she just a tourist?”

  “I don’t know, but I sure plan on finding out. Elise will be here Friday morning. I know she was Mongolian. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with Elise, though. She sometimes gets confused, since her diagnosis.”

  “Diagnosis for what?” I asked, wary.

  “Early Alzheimer’s. She does sometimes confuse people she knows with other people she knows. So it’s probably best not to make too much of her spotting Gary, supposedly. Oh, that’s really too bad it was Elise and not somebody more reliable. Her long-term memory is still sharp, though. She’s especially clearheaded on the great migration across the Bering Straits from East Asia to the Americas.”

  I glanced out Tessig’s living room window to see if perhaps Lou Horn had parked outside and was waiting to drive me back into Key West. I recognized his old red Camry, and as soon as I politely could, made a beeline.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I phoned Timmy from Atlanta and told him my connecting flight to Albany would be over an hour late, getting in close to midnight, and I would not leave for Thailand until Friday. I said I had some things I needed to check with the Griswolds — and about the Griswolds.

  I gave Timmy a quick summary of my Key West visit with Horn, Weems and Romeo, my informative session with Sandy Tessig, and my brief visit early that afternoon with Elise Flanagan. Lou Horn had driven me over to her house so that we might get a firsthand account of her sighting of Griswold on the Thai-Cambodian border. Wan and sinewy in a gauzy dun-colored sack of some kind, Mrs. Flanagan at first insisted that the man she saw had to have been Gary Griswold. He had been her dear friend for years. But then, she said, the man she saw did look a lot like Raul Castro, and that was confusing. As she went on, I could see Horn’s now-faint hopes fade even further.

  I told Timmy I had booked just one seat on the JFK Bangkok flight a day and a half later, but that it probably wasn’t too late for him to join me.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Timothy,” I said, “when did you become such a travel wuss? You’re Mister Peace Corps. This isn’t India, I know, but you loved India way back when. And, like me with Southeast Asia, you’ve talked about going back someday. We could wrap up this strange Griswold business in Bangkok and then stop over in your old village in Andhra Pradesh on the way home.

  Most of it would be on Ellen Griswold’s dime. It’s the travel opportunity of a lifetime.”

  He laughed. “Mo Driscoll, one of the guys in my India group, went back to his village in Maharashtra last year. Some people actually remembered him. He said word spread all around that the guy who wiped his ass with paper was back.”

  “Sargent Shriver would be touched.”

  44 Richard Stevenson

  “It’s actually a telling Peace Corps story. Yes, we made some nice connections while we were there, and may even have done some useful work in India. But we were always convinced that basically the villagers thought of us as Martians.”

  “Were any of Driscoll’s chickens still flapping around when he went back?”

  “He wasn’t in poultry development,” Timmy said. “Mo was in the family-planning program.”

  “Apparently it didn’t work.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure.”

  “Yeah, if it hadn’t been for the Peace Corps, India’s population today might be one-point-three billion people instead of one-point-two.”

  He laughed, but not heartily. Timmy and his Peace Corps pals could themselves be cavalier when discussing their youthful development work. But when others cast doubt, they often became stern. I deeply envied him his Asia experience, though.

  Peace beats war any day.

  “Of course, I want to go back to India,” he said. “I just don’t want to be a nervous wreck when I get there. Or show up with a bloody hole in my head. Or a boyfriend with a hole in his.”

  “I don’t know why you’re fixating on the Bangkok drive-by shooting statistics. We don’t know that anything remotely like that has happened to Griswold, or is likely to. Sure, there’s reason to worry about the guy. But let’s not leap to any conclusions. My own plan is to take it one cautious step at a time.”

  “Is it possible,” he said, “that one reason you want so badly for me to come with you is that you don’t quite trust yourself over there alone? That you’re a little afraid that you’ll fall in love with the place the way Gary Griswold did? The place, and of course all those happy-go-lucky, silky-skinned, sanuk-loving Mangos? And if I go along, then you’re much more likely to retain some grip on reality and come back to where you belong in a timely manner? Since I don’t know Bangkok at all, I THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 45 wouldn’t be all that useful over there. Surely you know that. So I’m just trying to figure out what it is that’s actually going on here.”

  After a long moment, I said, “Well. So you think maybe I want you to come along so that you can be my mother?”

  “No, not your mother. Just your boyfriend of many years gone by, as well as many years to come. Anyway, that’s certainly what it sounds like to me.”

  “Okay,” I said, “what if I do maybe want to re-fall in love with Thailand — Thailand in peacetime — and maybe I want you to come along so that you can fall in love with Thailand too? We can re-fall in love with the Land of Smiles — yes, drive-by shootings too, but mainly the Land of Smiles — together. Doesn’t that sound just as plausible as what you just said? Whatever the hell it was you just said.”

  Now Timmy was quiet. Then he said, “That I would have to think about.”

  When I got home just after one in the morning, Timmy was snoring exuberantly — “calling the hogs,” as his Aunt Moira called it — and I went online to see if I could get Google to cough up some answers.

  The deaths of Max and Bertha Griswold got considerable play in the Albany Times Union in early June of 1993. He had been a business leader, and both were benefactors of the arts and numerous Jewish and other charities. So it was shocking to many when the couple, who were in their early sixties, died in the crash of a Piper Comanche piloted by the aircraft’s owner, Dave Kane, who was also killed. The plane had gone down in a pasture as it flew from the Albany County Airport to Rochester, where the Griswolds were to have received an award in recognition of Algonquin Steel’s in-kind contributions to a concert hall restoration project.

  Follow-up st
ories said FAA investigators had found no mechanical problems with the aircraft, but that an autopsy showed the pilot, sixty-eight years old, had died of a heart 46 Richard Stevenson attack, probably before the plane went down, causing it to crash.

  Somewhat less prominently reported was the disappearance just under a year later, in May 1994, of Sheila Griswold of Clifton Park, former wife of Algonquin Steel president and CEO

  William Griswold. The initial story made page one below the fold, but follow-ups soon fell into the B section before vanishing altogether.

  Mrs. Griswold, who had no children and had not remarried, apparently fell overboard from the Norwegian cruise liner Oslo Comfort on the night of May 21, somewhere off St. Kitts.

  Shipmates had seen Mrs. Griswold in the dining room earlier.

  She was reported missing the next morning when she failed to meet dining room companions for a book signing with mystery author Deidre McCubbertson and crew members discovered that her bed had not been slept in. Family members speculated, the paper said, that “alcohol could have been a factor in the tragedy,” though the speculating family members were not identified.

  There were three daily English-language newspapers in Bangkok, the Post, the Nation, and the Daily Express, and I scanned their archives for mention of a Gary Griswold. None turned up.

  Ellen Griswold had given me the name of the Bangkok bank Griswold had had his thirty-eight million wired to. It was just after noon Thursday in Thailand, and I got the Commercial Bank of Siam on the phone. I said I was Gary Griswold and needed an account balance. Mrs. Griswold had told me the account number, and I recited it. After some minutes, a man came on the line and told me in English that was a little hard for me to follow that the account had been closed. I said, oh, that’s right, I had the money moved to an interest-bearing account but I had forgotten the number, and may I please have it along with the balance? No, the man said, sounding a bit wary now, there was no other account in the name of Griswold at the Commercial Bank of Siam.

  It didn’t seem as if it would help if I screamed, “Then, where the bloody hell is my thirty-eight million?” So I said,

  “Oh, God, where did I transfer that cash to? Was it Bangkok Bank?”

  This was taking a chance — was there such a thing? — but the man said, yes, I had done exactly that.

  “When?”

  “You no remember?”

  “Please pardon me. I’m so disorganized.”

  A long silence. It wasn’t even staticky. Modern telecommunications are such a marvel.

  “I can no help you, sir. You must phone Bangkok Bank.

  Okay?”

  “Oh, jeez, what’s my account number there? You must have had it for the transfer.”

  What he gave me instead, and then quickly rang off, was a telephone number for Bangkok Bank. I called them, but they required an account number in order for our conversation to proceed. All this would have to wait until Saturday, when I would arrive in the Thai capital to work my magic in the flesh.

  Lunch on Thursday with Ellen Griswold at her house in Loudonville got off to a bad start when I suggested why her former husband might be susceptible to dire forecasts by fortune-tellers. I said it could have something to do with the Griswold family history of people dying violently.

  “Where did you get that information?” she demanded to know. “What exactly are you referring to, and what’s that got to do with anything?”

  I told her Gary’s friends in Key West had brought it up — the plane crash and the Caribbean cruise disappearance — only in the context of Gary’s heightened sense of foreboding and karmic doom, nothing more than that.

  “Oh God. Well, you know, there were people at the time who thought Bill had something to do with Sheila’s death — had her shoved overboard or God knows what. She had been squeezing him really hard financially. This was when Max and Bertha’s estate was tied up in probate. When Sheila died — or presumably died — it did take a lot of the pressure off Bill.

  There were people, I know, who saw that as a little too convenient. In a way it’s funny, and yet it’s kind of pathetic.”

  “So Sheila was eventually declared legally dead?”

  “It took four or five years. For-bleeping-ever. Bill got nothing back. Sheila’s maid and her cats got some, and the state got the rest. But at least she wasn’t constantly dragging him into court anymore. Sheila was so aggressive for so many years, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if she strolled up through the herb garden right now and rapped on the window and waved a summons in our faces.”

  We were seated at a nicely designed table with a sculpted aluminum base and a white polypropylene top in the Griswold’s sunporch. The bright room overlooked an herb garden and a broad expanse of trees and lawn stretching for some distance beyond. Most of the herbs were still covered, but some daffodils had sprung up and looked about to bloom in their cheerful, ephemeral way.

  I had dug right into the crab salad and crusty baguette Ellen had brought out, and so had she. She had her worries, but they hadn’t hurt her appetite. She was drinking tap water with lemon, as was I, another healthful choice for midday. I rather liked Mrs.

  Griswold — her confidence, her direct approach, her draping only mild refinement over peasant appetites — and I wasn’t sure why I didn’t quite trust her.

  I said, “You know, the Thais believe in ghosts. It’s good that your husband isn’t the Griswold who’s over there now, or he might run into his first wife’s restless spirit. Has he ever been to Southeast Asia? Have you?”

  “No, never had the pleasure.”

  “You mentioned you had lived and worked abroad. Where was that?”

  “I spent a month on a kibbutz when I was in college and lived in Geneva for a year doing marketing for Pepsico’s new Buzz Saw line of power drinks. I enjoyed both experiences in their entirely different ways. Though I have to admit my French became somewhat more fluent than my Hebrew.”

  “It’s hard to imagine the Swiss on all that caffeine,” I said.

  “Oh, they were scarfing it up by the time I was done with them.”

  I didn’t doubt it. I summarized my Key West findings for Mrs. Griswold and told her they basically squared with what she had told me about her ex-husband-slash-current-brother-in-law: his unsettling passionate interest in past lives, numerology, and astrological forecasts; his involvement with the wonderful and then less-than-wonderful Mango; his large-scale financial transfers followed by his apparent disappearance.

  “In fact,” I said, “Gary did not tell his Key West friends about converting his assets and wiring cash to Thailand, nor about the so-called surefire investment. When I mentioned it, that was news to them.”

  “If they’re sane — which it sounds to me like they could be

  — I’m sure they would have thought Gary was nuts, and possibly said so. Which Gary no doubt would not wish to hear.

  Bill and I only know about it because Alan Rainey was involved in selling the company shares, and he asked Gary what was going on. Gary apparently thought he had to tell us all something.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, having a thought, “Gary told Rainey he wanted the money for an investment because he thought Rainey would find that reassuring. And he really wanted the thirty-eight million for some other purpose.”

  She mulled this over. “Possibly.”

  “And if the actual reason for the transfer was known to your family, you might have waged an all-out campaign to keep Gary from doing whatever it was he was actually going to do.”

  50 Richard Stevenson

  “Oh God. Maybe that’s it. This could be even worse than we thought.”

  “Well, worse or not worse. What had Gary spent large sums of money on in the past?”

  She screwed up her face to the extent she was able to. “Not much. Art. Art books. Fancy European bicycles. His condo.

  Gary lived comfortably and liked having money. But he was no serious spender.”

  “Did he give mo
ney away?”

  “I’d say he was like his parents. Generous, but responsible. I know he gave to arts groups and to human rights organizations.

  But I would be very surprised if he ever went into capital for charitable giving. Of course,” she said, “I’m talking about before Gary started losing his marbles and babbling about past and future lives and all that garbage. God knows what was going on inside his brain six months ago when all this looniness apparently came to a head.”

  “Gary’s friends in Key West have wondered if his falling off his bike during a race and landing on his head brought about some kind of personality change. Do you know about this?”

  “What? No. How bizarre.”

  “The timing could have been coincidental.”

  “Gary never mentioned this to Bill or me. Was he hospitalized?”

  “Just briefly, with a concussion.”

  “Wasn’t he wearing a helmet?”

  “He was. But I guess the brain can still get badly rattled around in a crack-up.”

  “Well, this is a new one. So, somebody thinks Gary’s brain was injured, and he suddenly started hallucinating about past lives in Thailand, and maybe he gave his money away to the poor people of Asia or some weird thing like that?”

  “It’s far-fetched, I know.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “if Gary was going to drop thirty-eight million in a monk’s alms bowl, why would he have to disappear in order to do it? No,” she went on, “I don’t think so. Weird bump on the head or no weird bump on the head, I think something bad happened to Gary in Thailand that he was not expecting and which he had no control over. Something totally external. And that’s what I am paying you a lot of money to uncover and — if it’s what’s needed — do something about it.”

  Her summary was a sound one, I thought, and her continuing concerns about Griswold’s well-being justified.

  Both our fears were only heightened when my cell phone rang and it was Lou Horn with the news that the Key West Citizen was reporting the death of Geoffrey Pringle in Bangkok.

  The newspaper said the man Gary Griswold had visited on his initial trip to Thailand — and later apparently had had some major disagreement with — had died three days earlier in a fall from his twelfth-story condominium in Bangkok’s Sathorn district. The death appeared to have been a suicide, the newspaper reported, although Thai officials had said that was uncertain.