Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

by Stephen Leather

  I did a quick trip around the bars that were open for the afternoon trade but no one knew of an owner called Kim. I figured I’d have more joy later at night but then I had a brainwave and phoned Ann. It was about one o’clock in the morning in New York and I’d obviously woken her up and the fact that it was a collect call did seem to annoy her somewhat, but she was able to answer my question-which flight did Joe travel to Thailand on? It was Japan Airlines. Flight JAL 006, two weeks ago on Tuesday.

  I phoned the airline and told the girl who answered that I was the boss of a tour company based in Bangkok and that I’d lost track of a client that I’d taken to Hua Hin. Had my client by any chance phoned in to reconfirm his ticket? I gave her Joe’s full name and the details of his flight to Bangkok.

  Indeed the ticked had been reconfirmed. By a travel agency in Hua Hin. And Joe had also changed his ticket to an open booking, with no flight home. The travel agency wasn’t far from the Hilton so I had a plate of fried noodles and an ice cold Heineken at a street stall and wandered over. The agency was a tiny shop wedged between two bars, both of which had a quartet of fairly attractive girls who all declared that I was a ‘handsum man’ and that I should spend some of my time-and money-with them. I resisted the calls of the sultry sirens and went inside the travel agency.

  There was only one girl working in the office, so I played the stupid farang and said that I was a friend of Joe’s and that we were driving back to Bangkok together but that I’d forgotten what hotel he was staying at. She checked her computer and gave me the name and address of his hotel. It was called Kim’s Hotel, which I figured was a good sign.

  Kim’s Hotel wasn’t as prestigious as the Hilton and it didn’t have a sea view but it did have a decent-sized pool and I guessed that was where a diminutive body builder might spend his afternoons. I was right. Standing by the diving board was the man himself, wearing nothing but a black thong, flexing his muscles in front of two teenage girls. I watched his show as he went through a full work out, his oiled muscles glistening under the afternoon sun. The two girls were giggling and kept offering him a two-for-one special, staring at 2,000 baht but dropping to half that pretty quickly. Joe just laughed and said that he wasn’t up for an afternooner but that he’d catch up with them later.

  After about half an hour, Joe finished his workout and showered at the poolside shower. In view of the nature of the case, I didn’t think there would be any harm in being up front with the NewYorker. I waited until he had towelled himself dry before going over and introducing myself. I told him that I was a private eye and that his wife had paid me to track him down and to find out why he hadn’t gone home.

  Joe grinned and nodded at the two sexy girls. ‘That’s why,’ he said.

  We went over to a table and sat under a large umbrella and drank beers as Joe gave me his side of the story. I had a Heineken, Joe had a Charng Beer. Another sign of the newbie, that, drinking the local beer. He might as well have had a neon sign over his head flashing ‘I’ve just got off the plane’. Pretty much the only Thais who drank Charng were construction workers. Anyway, Joe told me that he didn’t love Ann. He wasn’t even sure why he’d married her. In New York, his lack of height and hair meant that he didn’t have much luck with women. Ann was pretty much the only woman who’d expressed any interest in him, and it had been her idea to get married. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t especially bright, but Joe had said yes because being married to her was better than being on his own. Then he’d come to Thailand and suddenly short, balding Joe was a ‘handsum man’. Within the space of his first week in Thailand he’d had more sex than he’d had in his whole life in the States. And he wasn’t sleeping with dogs either. Every girl he’d bedded had been drop-dead gorgeous, he boasted. And the supply of beautiful girls waiting to have sex with him seemed to be never-ending. Joe was like a kid in a sweetshop, a pig in shit, and all those other clichA©s. And the way he told it, he was NEVER going back to the United States. He’d already met a couple of body-builders who ran a gym in Bangkok and they had offered him a job. Joe had never really wanted to be an accountant, he’d never loved Ann, and had never enjoyed living in New York. He was taking control of his life, Joe told me. He was starting again in Thailand.

  He was, in my humble opinion, making a huge mistake. Like a lot of newbies, he was starting to believe his own publicity. Joe wasn’t a ‘handsum man’, he was just a short, balding, thick-necked Yank with more money than sense. The girls weren’t flocking to him because of his muscles or his personality, it was because he had money and they wanted it. They were bargirls, their job was to make punters feel good so that they would hand over their money. The smiles, the kisses, the sex, were all part of the act. But newbies like Joe sometimes forgot that it was all about money and started to believe that they were somehow more attractive and desirable than they were back home. And providing that he continued to shell out the bucks, they’d continue to live out their fantasy. But as soon as they stopped paying, the girls would stop playing, and reality would hit home. If often hit hard, too, and there are probably hundreds of farang suicides every year in the Land of Smiles, as guys like Joe realised that their fantasy lives were just that-fantasies. And once a guy has got used to being surrounded by attentive, beautiful women who behave like submissive pornstars between the sheets, it was hard, maybe impossible, to go back to the real world.

  I always say that when a newbie first starts to hang out with Thai bargirls, the newbie has the money and the bargirls have the experience. At the end of it, the bargirls have the money and the newbie has had the experience.

  Anyway, Ann wasn’t paying me to burst Joe’s bubble. She just wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Now I could tell her, it was up to her what she did next. I got Joe to promise me that he’d phone or email his wife. It seemed the least he could do, under the circumstances.

  Case number three was an American woman living in Japan, whose husband Gary was a marine who seemed to be spending more than his fair share of shore leave in Hua Hin. After a little do-it-yourself snooping Carol had discovered a couple of email addresses, one of them belonging to a girl called Mem, Thai phone numbers and a photograph of a pretty young thing working in an opticians store. Carol had also found a bank account number in Hua Hin with details of a 5,000-dollar transfer and had jumped to the obvious conclusion. She told me that she was a reasonable woman and wanted to make absolutely certain that her husband was fooling around. What she didn’t say, of course, was that any evidence I got that incriminated Gary would be useful when it came to thrashing out the divorce settlement. If I could show that Gary was supporting a Thai mistress, an American divorce court would skin him alive.

  The name and the number of the bank account was a big help. It would have been a fairly simple matter to get a home address but it would require a large ‘donation’ to a friendly bank clerk so I thought I’d try a cheaper alternative first. The name of the opticians shop was in the photograph and there were only two branches in Hua Hin. I walked by both outlets several times during the day but didn’t see anyone who looked like the girl in the photograph.

  Mem was in her mid-twenties and looked fit, not bargirl material but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. I decided to use the old ‘I’m from the embassy and I’m here about Mem’s visa application’ scam. I got my clipboard and a US Immigration application form from my rental car, put on my serious face and marched into the store nearest the Hilton. I gave them my standard speech about Miss Kongyou (Mem’s Thai name) applying for a US visa. The shop girls knew Mem but said that she had quit her job a few months earlier. I put on my worried face and said that there were a couple of things I had to clear up about her visa application and did they know where she was living.

  I spoke in English. One of the girls asked the other ‘ Mem you kup Ning chai mai?’ which let me know that she was staying with someone called Ning.

  I put on my helpful face and suggested that Mem had mentioned that she might
be staying with her good friend Miss Ning but that I didn’t have her address. Two minutes later I had the name of the apartment block Mem was staying at, in Thai and English, with a hand-drawn map thrown in for good measure.

  According to the shop girls, Mem was staying with her friend Ning, who’d just had a baby. The apartment building was a fifteen-minute walk from the opticians. It was a tidy, middle-class type of block and I figured a small apartment there would probably cost 4,000 baht or so a month, about what Miss Mem would earn as a salesgirl.

  I found the office and asked the middle-aged Thai Chinese manageress if Ning or Mem were in. She wanted to know what room so I played the idiot tourist and said that my friend Gary had left Thailand suddenly with some money to give Mem. Mentioning money to landlords is a sure-fire way of getting their help. If their tenants have got money, the rent is going to be paid, and the one thing that keeps a landlord sweet is rent money paid on time. She picked up a phone, buzzed a room, then handed me the receiver. It was Ning, and I heard a baby crying in the background. The manageress was out of earshot so I switched back into embassy official mode and told Ning that I had some papers for Mem to sign. Ning said that Mem had gone back to her home in Khon Kaen for a week but that she would come down and see me.

  She was a plain girl and looked worn out, and the baby she had cradled in her arm wouldn’t stop crying. I asked Ning if she knew whether or not Mem still wanted to go to the US and Ning shrugged and said that she didn’t think she did. I decided to change my story and said that I didn’t actually work for the embassy, but for a visa service that handled visa applications for various countries.

  ‘Like Switzerland?’ asked Ning. ‘I want to go to Switzerland.’

  It turned out that the father of Ning’s baby was Swiss and he had told her it was next to impossible to get a visa for Switzerland. That’s not true, which made me think that perhaps Mr Swiss had a wife back in the land of cuckoo clocks and chocolate, but I put on my happy face and promised her that I’d send around the necessary Swiss forms. Ning said that Mem would probably want the Swiss forms too, as she was seeing a friend of Mr Swiss and that he was paying for her to go to school and was planning to marry her. ‘Mem finish Mr Gary,’ said Ning. ‘He butterfly too much.’

  ‘So she won’t want to see Mr Gary again?’

  Ning shook her head. ‘She happy now,’ she said. ‘Her boyfriend good guy. Good heart.’ Good heart generally means generous with money. Over-generous.

  I wondered if Gary knew that he’d been kicked into touch in favour of a more reliable sponsor. I guessed that he didn’t, but that his wife would take great pleasure in telling him, probably at the exact moment she served him with divorce papers.

  So that was that. I went to an Internet cafA© and sent off three emails. Mission accomplished. Three cases, three fees, three sets of expenses, all in one day. A private eye can’t ask for much more. And I had the rest of the evening to enjoy myself at the expense of my clients. All three of them.

  THE CASE OF THE MAGIC FINGERS

  The Thais, it has to be said, are not great inventors. There are no Thai-designed cars or planes, or electronics, or computer programs. They are famous for two things, really. A spicy soup called tom yam gung, and the body massage. And, truth be told, they didn’t actually invent either. Until the Chinese moved into Thailand, all Thai cuisine was dry. Meat, seafood, vegetables, rice, all of the above, but no soup. And massage, well that came from India. But the Thais are great at taking someone else’s invention and putting a Thai spin on it. There’s no soup in Chinese cuisine that comes close to tom yam gung. And the Thai body massage is the closest thing you can get to sexual nirvana.

  There are massage parlours all over Thailand. Most of them cater to a Thai clientele, but there are many, especially in Bangkok and Pattaya, that are geared for Westerners. I’ve never understood why any self-respecting man would fall for a massage parlour girl. They’re really only one step up from the girls who work in the blowjob bars. A go-go dancer can choose who she sleeps with. She always has the option of saying no. And I’ve known two go-go dancers who never went with customers. They were both married and had kids, and earned enough money from dancing and lady drinks, to support themselves and their families. They didn’t go with customers, period. But massage parlour girls don’t get to choose their customers. They sit in ranks with numbered badges and customers look at them through a window. Literally, a goldfish bowl. The guys decide who they want, their numbers are called, and the girls take them along to a room for a soapy massage and sex. The girls don’t have a choice. And they have sex at least once a day, often as many as three or four times, whereas go-go dancers might only go with a customer a few times a week.

  I’ve always understood the attraction of go-go dancers. Over the years I’ve probably sampled the delights of several hundred pole-dancers, and every now and again I’d even think about settling down with one. But I’ve never even entertained the idea of settling down with a massage parlour girl. A massage girl who’s been in the business for a year has probably had sex with more than a thousand guys. A thousand random guys. Fat guys. Thin guys. Good-looking guys. Ugly guys. Black guys. White guys. Healthy guys. Sick guys. I wouldn’t be able to look at her in the morning without thinking of all the guys who’d been there before me.

  Not all massage girls are prostitutes, of course. All over Thailand there are places offering therapeutic massage, and the girls who work there wouldn’t dream of doing anything in the least bit naughty. Derek, an Australian based in Dubai, who had built up an import-export company and was a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles, had fallen for the charms of a foot massage girl. He’d met Wanna at a ‘Reflex’ massage outlet, a fairly reputable chain around Thailand, where the girls are all well trained, and as far as I know, stick to the basic straight massage. And at Wanna’s salon, foot massages took place on the ground floor by the window so there was no chance of anything naughty going on.

  Wanna hadn’t been an easy conquest. He’d courted her for six months before she agreed to go back with him to his hotel, and even then she didn’t have sex with him. They’d since become lovers, and now he was preparing to take the next step-marriage. When he was back in Dubai she sent him text messages every day and he was sure that she was a ‘good’ girl, he just wanted me to make sure. He emailed me a photograph and she seemed like a good sort. Mid-twenties, long hair, cute button nose, sexy smile. I could see the attraction. Derek had asked her to stop work but she said that she preferred to support herself, which was a good sign. But he sent her a monthly allowance and showered her with expensive gifts, which was a bad sign.

  I told him I’d need a three-day retainer. For that I’d check that she went straight home after work and that she didn’t have a boyfriend or husband waiting for her, I’d check that she arrived at work on her own, and then I’d get a massage from her and check that ‘extras’ weren’t on the menu. Derek sent the money through to my bank and I was on the case. Early indications were that Derek had got a decent girl. She left work at ten o’clock each night, ate some Thai food on the street with her workmates, then caught a bus to her studio flat in Sukhumvit 71. She lived there alone, and every morning caught the bus to her place of work. After three days of following her to and from work, I went in and asked for a massage from Miss Wanna. I told the cashier that Wanna had been recommended by a friend, and that I wanted a full body massage. I was shown upstairs to a small cubicle where I swapped my T-shirt and jeans for white wraparound baggy pants and jacket. Miss Wanna came in, looking professional in black trousers and a green polo shirt with the name of the company on the pocket. Up close she didn’t look as attractive as her photo. That’s par for the course in Thailand. Most photographic studios run their portraits through Photoshop, lightening skin, wiping out wrinkles and reducing fat, and they had certainly done the business with Wanna’s photograph. She was a bit better looking than the average therapeutic massage girl, though, and had a fair enough figure. />
  I lay down on the massage table while she went to work on me. She had strong fingers and knew what she was doing. In between grunts and groans I chatted away in Thai. I started by telling her that I had a sore back because I’d been driving my wife and daughter to Nong Khai and back, and it was easy to go from there to asking her about her family.

  She told me that she had a four-year-old son-something that Derek wasn’t aware of-and that he was being cared for by her parents in Sisaket. Her Thai husband had run off when the baby was born and hadn’t been heard of since. She had to work to support her son and her parents and she made a reasonably good living doing massage. The boss of the shop gave her half of the fee, plus she got to keep all the tips. Most of the customers were farangs, and generally farangs are better tippers than Thais, she said.

  It was easy to start chatting about farangs, and I suggested that she wouldn’t have a problem finding a Westerner to take care of her. She laughed. I asked her if she had any special farang friends and she said that there was an American that she liked but there was no mention of an Australian and certainly no mention of Derek. As we got towards the end of the massage I asked her if there were any extras on the menu and she just laughed and suggested I try one of the soapy massage parlours. ‘They have girls there that can take care of you,’ she said, ‘I am sorry but I cannot.’ Fair enough, I thought.

  After an hour of pinching and pummelling I tipped her handsomely and went home. I emailed a report to Derek, saying that she wasn’t going with customers, and was doing nothing more than regular therapeutic massages. I pointed out that she had a son, and that she hadn’t mentioned him.

  He emailed me back within minutes so he must have been online. He asked me if I was sure. He phoned her every day and she always said that she loved him. She sent him several texts a day proclaiming her love. Derek suggested that perhaps I’d got the wrong girl so he wanted me to go back and get another massage and for me to tape the conversation. He offered to pay me another day’s retainer. I figured he was throwing good money after bad, and I was aching so much after the first massage that I was tempted to pass, but my rent was due so I told him to transfer the money and I’d go back the following day.