Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson (3 page)

The client’s horses were okay, but in most cases were just a few generations removed from Mongolian ponies and they weren’t a patch on the thoroughbreds I’d worked with in New Zealand. The problem was, for a horse to race in Thailand, it had to be born in the country. It didn’t take me long to spot the loophole in that regulation, so I flew over a pregnant mare and trained up her foal. She was a little beauty and on her first big race she was a firm favourite. Then, in typical Thai fashion, disaster struck. A jing jok, a tiny lizard that loves to climb across ceilings, fell on top of our jockey. The Thais regard that as just about the worst possible bad luck, equivalent to a farang breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder. The jockey rushed of to the local temple on the back of a motorcycle but crashed on the way back. He was still able to ride but crashed his horse into the back of one of the front runners and shattered her knee. She had to be put down and my client came in for all sorts of flak from his friends along the lines of ‘you’ve got an expensive farang trainer but your horse still dies’. Needless to say it was a massive loss of face and the only solution was to let me go.

By then I was pretty much addicted to the Thai nightlife so decided that I’d stay in the country. I decided to put my newly acquired Thai language skills to use and landed a job as marketing manager of a hotel in Surin, a largish town not far from Cambodia. I was mainly teaching the staff basic English, updating brochures and menus, and marketing the hotel around the world. It was a monster of a hotel, the biggest in Isaan, with 600 rooms, a ballroom, a nightclub, karaoke bar, three restaurants and two enormous conference centres, where most regional government and police meetings were held. And the kicker for me was the massage parlour with eighty beautiful girls. Forget the sweetshop. Now I was the kid in the sweet factory.

The Surin job meant that I also picked up Khamen, the Cambodian language spoken in the Thai border provinces of Surin, Buriram and Si Saket, and that came in handy when I started working as a private eye as many bargirls come from those provinces, and it’s a big advantage being able to speak to them in their own language. Then, once again, disaster struck, in true Thai fashion. My employer’s family were openly known as Isaan mafia and had a nice sideline importing Russian prostitutes with the help of the local head of police, who had his own suite at the hotel. Back then middle class Thais had money to spend and they’d only ever seen big blonde women on the movie screen. The girls were charging 3,000 baht for short time and there were queues down the corridors all day. My bosses were planning to bring in more girls and send them on a tour around the region’s hotels, splitting the profits with the other hotel owners. Anyway, two of the family members became infatuated with the same Russian girl. One was an old guy, the other was much younger, but both were rich and neither wanted to back down. Eventually the younger guy had the older one murdered and the shit hit the fan. The local police chief had no chance of keeping a lid on the scandal, the family sold the hotel and moved to the United States, and I found myself out of a job. I went back to Bangkok and booked into a cheap hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 8. I took a long, hard look at myself. I didn’t want to work with horses again, and I was fed up with the hotel business. I was fairly proficient at speaking Thai and Khamen, and I knew pretty much all there was to know about bargirls. I didn’t fancy running a bar, but after a few tourists asked me to check up on their temporary girlfriends after they’d gone home, I had the idea of setting up a private detective agency. I figured that way I’d be paid to do what I did best: to hang around with bargirls and drink Jack Daniels.

When I’d set up as a private eye, I had no idea that my first paying customer would be a middle-aged Thai lady who wouldn’t dream of setting foot inside a go-go bar. But I was determined to do my best for her. The problem was, all I could do was to wait. And wait.

It was a month before the Thonglor police phoned me to say that the Reverend Armitage was in custody in Nong Khai and that they’d sent a pick up truck to bring him back to Bangkok. I phoned Khun Bua to give her the good news, then I went down to an internet café and fired off emails to the two brothers, telling them that Marcus was in custody and that he would be facing serious jail time. I gave them a few details of what life was like in a Thai prison—based on my own experience, since you ask—and told them that the only way to avoid a long spell in a cell with an open toilet and wall-to-wall mosquitoes was for Marcus to pay back the money he’d stolen.

The next day Armitage was in a holding cell at Thonglor police station. I went in to have a look at him. He didn’t look like a man of the cloth. He was wearing faded blue denim jeans, a Chang Beer T-shirt and a baseball cap, and there were shackles on his legs. He was complaining to anyone who would listen to him that he was going to complain to his embassy, that he was a Canadian citizen, that they had no way to treat him like this, and so on. The fact that the three guys he was sharing the cell with and most of the officers at the station spoke absolutely no English meant that he was wasting his breath. And even if he was able to make himself understood no one there would have given a damn. Armitage was a farang and the Thai legal system showed farangs no favours. Innocent until proven guilty had no standing under Thai law. He would stay in custody until his trial. He would be found guilty for sure, and he’d get three years in the Bangkok Hilton—the infamous Thai prison—unless he bought his way out.

At first Armitage thought I was from the Embassy but as soon as he heard my New Zealand accent he started getting cagey, telling me that he wouldn’t speak to anyone but his lawyer. I told him that Khun Bua was well in with a Supreme Court judge and that there wasn’t a lawyer in Thailand who could keep him out of prison. And once the court heard how he’d defrauded a good Christian woman they would throw away the key. Thai prisons are seriously nasty places. Up to forty men sharing a cell with an open toilet, the lights on all day and night, prisoners sleeping like sardines on the floor, no airconditioning, rampant disease and god-awful food. Armitage was facing a long sentence and I told him that I didn’t think he’d survive more than a few months.

There was only one way he was going to stay out of prison, and that was to pay back the money he’d stolen. Immediately. At the moment he was in a holding cell. Police could be paid off, Khun Bua could be persuaded not to press charges, and Armitage could walk away. But once Armitage was charged he’d be in the system and there would be nothing he could do to save himself. It was his choice, I told him.

He started to say that he didn’t have the money, that his bank account was almost empty, his companies had all been losing money, but I held up my hand to silence him.

‘I don’t care either way, pal,’ I said. ‘The only reason I’m even wasting my breath on you is because Khun Bua is a nice lady and I don’t want her living out the rest of her years in poverty. If it was up to me you’d rot in prison, but that’s not going to help her. The guys in here will let you use a phone. Call one of your brothers and get them to fly over with the cash.’

Armitage’s face tightened but I could see that he had taken on board what I’d said.

‘If you’re going to make that call you’d better do it today,’ I said, tightening the screw. ‘You’ll be charged tomorrow then it’s off to the Bangkok Hilton and they won’t let you near a phone there.’

Armitage made the call and the next morning his brother flew over from Singapore with enough money to pay Khun Bua what she was owed, plus sweeteners for the police and the immigration officers up in Nong Kha. Plus my fee, of course.

Once the money had been paid and the police had pocketed their sweeteners the atmosphere changed. The shackles were taken off, Armitage was given a coffee and croissant and taken to Don Muang Airport in the back of the police chief’s Mercedes where he and his brother were escorted on to the next plane to Singapore. Armitage’s passport was stamped persona non grata and he was told never to darken Thailand’s doorstep again.

My first case, and I’d come out smelling of roses. I’d made money and I’d helped someone; a private eye couldn’t ask for a better result.

THE CASE OF THE RELUCTANT VIRGIN

It was love at first sight, at least that’s how the client described it. He’d seen her across a crowded dancefloor in a trendy Phuket nightclub. She was slim and sexy, long black hair, great legs, and was one hell of a dancer. The client was an accountant from Glasgow in Scotland with an accent so impenetrable that I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. He was in his late forties, which made him almost twice the age of the love of his life. He was average looking, definitely not movie-star material but he had his own hair and most of his own teeth and the gold Rolex on his wrist suggested that he was making good money and that alone would make him attractive to the average bar-going Thai girl. Not that Joy was a bargirl. She worked in a hair salon in Patong, the island’s major tourist area but she liked to let her hair down in the evenings.

The client, Bill MacKay, had offered to buy Joy a drink as she rested between bouts of dancing, and the following day she’d acted as a tour guide, showing him around the island. MacKay showed me photographs of them at a monkey show, riding elephants, posing on beaches. The perfect couple. MacKay had gone to Phuket with three golfing buddies, but after he met Joy he didn’t spend much time on the links. He and Joy became inseparable and by the time his three-week vacation was over he’d proposed to her, on bended knee in a crowded seafood restaurant as the band played ‘My Way’. He’d asked for the theme from Titanic but something had got lost in translation. Not that MacKay cared. Joy said yes and that was all that mattered.

They went to Joy’s home town of Chiang Mai and he met her parents. They were a middle-class Thai couple with six children of whom Joy was the second youngest. They owned a small noodle shop and seemed thrilled to have MacKay as a potential son-in-law. They’d discussed the sin sot—the Thai dowry that’s usually paid to a girl’s parents—and they’d agreed on a very reasonable 100,000 baht. Reasonable for a farang, that is. Thais usually paid about 20,000 in poorer families.

MacKay was sure that his bride-to-be was a good girl and not involved in the island’s thriving sex industry. Estimates of the number of prostitutes working in Phuket vary from 4,000 to 20,000, but Joy had never danced in a go-go bar or worked up a lather in a massage parlour. But even good girls can be won over by handsome strangers so he didn’t want her to stay in Phuket while he was back in Scotland. I guess he figured that if he could win her heart in just a few short weeks, another visitor might just be as lucky. He had given her 50,000 baht and told her to quit her job and stay with her parents while he was away. MacKay planned to be in Scotland for two months, and then return with his parents for a big Thai wedding. He’d do the paperwork with the embassy and if all went well he and Joy would return to Glasgow to start a new life together. He owned a big house on the outskirts of the city and planned to set Joy up with her own beauty parlour and then live happily ever after. But he’d heard all the horror stories about men being ripped off by Thai brides, taken for a ride while a husband or boyfriend waited in the background, maybe with a kid or two. So the day before MacKay was due to fly back to Scotland, he came around to my office and plonked down the holiday snaps and a 30,000-baht retainer on my desk.

‘I want to know if she’s got any skeletons in her closet,’ he said.

‘Like a husband?’ I said.

‘Anything,’ said MacKay. ‘I’m sure I’ve got nothing to worry about, but better safe than sorry, as my mother always says.’

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ I said. ‘Has she ever given you any reason to suspect that there might be a problem?’

MacKay shook his head emphatically. ‘She’s never asked me for money, never given me any reason to suspect that she might be hiding anything.’ He leaned across my desk and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘And so far as I know, she’s still a virgin.’

My eyebrows headed skyward. Joy wasn’t a sex worker but she’d clearly had no reservations about going out with a farang, and that suggested she had at least some sexual experience. I’d never met a Westerner before who’d claimed that his girlfriend was a virgin. But I’ve never seen the Taj Mahal and everyone tells me that exists, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

‘You haven’t slept together?’

He flashed me an embarrassed smile. ‘We’ve slept together loads of times, but we’ve never …’ He nodded like a woodpecker getting busy on an oak. ‘You know …’

I nodded. I knew. But it sounded unlikely. Lots of Thai girls were virgins when they married. In Thai society, it was pretty much the norm. But Thai girls weren’t usually so coy with Westerners. And real virgins generally didn’t share a bed with their boyfriends.

‘She does things …’ he said. ‘You know …’ He nodded encouragingly. ‘Things.’

‘Things?’

‘You know. Oral.’

I winced. More information than I needed.

‘She loves oral. It’s just that she says she doesn’t want to go the whole way, not until we’re married.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I get the picture.’

‘She’s really good at it. I mean, the fact that we haven’t had sex yet doesn’t worry me. She says she loves me.’

‘Got it,’ I said.

‘Spends hours going down on me, that’s not a problem, but she won’t allow, you know, penetration.’

Far more information than I needed. I stood up and shook his hand and ushered him out of the office, promising to call him once I’d run a check on the lovely Joy.

First things first. I bought a Thai Airways ticket from Bangkok to Phuket, Phuket to Chiang Mai, and Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then flew down south and wandered into the beauty parlour where she worked. There was no sign of her and when I asked for her I was told that she’d gone back home, to Chiang Mai. So far, so good.

I had a haircut and a face massage, a manicure and a pedicure. All at the client’s expense, of course. I walked out smelling like a tart’s boudoir with the full background on Joy. She’d met a farang called Bill, fallen in love with him and had gone back home to stay with her parents until they got married. So far as the beauty parlour girls knew. Joy had never had a serious boyfriend and had never been married. She’d always enjoyed dancing and discos, and had gone out with several farangs, but there had been nobody regular and she didn’t have anyone sending her money from overseas. It was starting to look as if Joy really was on the level and that Bill had found the rarest of jewels, a Thai girl who was a virgin and who loved him.

I caught a taxi to the airport and got the next flight to Chiang Mai. It was late evening by the time I arrived so I checked into a small hotel and drank the best part of a bottle of Jack Daniels before retiring to bed. Three times during the night small cards mysteriously appeared under my door offering visiting massage services but a good nights sleep was all the relaxation I needed.

Joy had told Bill that she was from Chiang Mai, but in fact she’d been born in a small town about forty miles away. There is nothing unusual or suspicious about that, most Thais would give the nearest big city as their place of birth. But it meant that I’d have to go to the local municipal office rather than the big one in Chiang Mai.

I had the hotel’s buffet breakfast and then went out on to the street to negotiate with a taxi driver. I promised him 500 baht for a half day, plus another 200 to take me to the airport once I’d finished.

For starters we took a drive past the house where Joy was living. I didn’t stop because a farang visitor would have attracted too much attention. It was a three-storey shophouse with the noodle shop in the ground floor. I saw a Thai man in his sixties, who I guessed was the girl’s father, ladling soup into a line of chipped bowls, but there was no sign of Joy.

The driver took me to the municipal office, the Tee Wah Garn, a grey concrete building with two Thai flags and a life-size painting of the King above the main entrance. On the way we stopped off at a supermarket and I bought two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky, making sure that I kept the receipt.

The driver offered to go inside with me but I told him to wait outside. There are times when it pays to play the naïve foreigner, so I wasn’t planning to let on that I spoke pretty fluent Thai and I didn’t need an interpreter. The information on the government computers is supposedly confidential but a couple of bottles of imported whisky and a lot of smiling tends to get me what I need.

There was a reception desk that stretched across the main room behind which were a couple of dozen men and women tapping away at computer terminals. On the public side of the room were lines of plastic chairs where a handful of farmers waited patiently for whatever business they were hoping to transact. Overhead a couple of fans tried in vain to stir the stifing air.

I caught the eye of a middle-aged man with slicked-back hair and circular glasses, gave him a beaming smile, and went into my prepared speech. My brother, I said, was about to marry a local girl but his family was worried that she might be taking advantage of him. I passed over the carrier bag containing the two bottles of whisky, which disappeared under the counter without a word. I gave him another beaming smile and explained that I just wanted to know if the bride-to-be had been married or if she had registered any children.

‘No problem,’ the man said. ‘I’ll need her full name and date of birth.’

I had the name written in Thai and English, and her birth date. He frowned. ‘No record,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘She’s definitely from here.’

‘The family name is correct?’

‘I’m sure it is.’ Bill MacKay had given me both the Thai and the English spellings.

‘Let me see,’ said the man. A few taps on the terminal and the helpful Government official had Joy’s details on screen. A smile spread slowly across his face. ‘There was a mistake on her birth date,’ he said. ‘The day and month is okay but the year was wrong. She was born five years earlier than she says.’

I nodded. So Joy wasn’t the perfect bride after all. She’d lied about her age. But MacKay was no spring chicken and there’d still be almost two decades between them, so I didn’t think he’d mind too much.

The man’s smile widened. ‘Your brother has married already?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘I think so, yes,’ said the official.

‘She’s married already?’

The man shook his had, still grinning. ‘No. No husband. No children.’

Now I was confused. Other than shaving off a few years from her age, Joy seemed to have been as true as her word.

He twisted his terminal around and jabbed a finger at the screen. The wording was in Thai but I had no problem in reading what was there. There were details of Joy’s date and place of birth, her residential address, and the details of the rest of the family who lived in the home. Mother. Father. Two of her brothers. Three sisters. Then I saw what he was pointing out. The man laughed as I frowned. Two young men came over and the older man explained what was going on. I asked for a print-out of the information on the screen. As I left the building the laughter was spreading around the building.

I could have gone straight back to the airport but I wanted to see for myself so I had the taxi driver park around the corner from the noodle shop. I walked inside and ordered a Sprite and a bowl of noodles with pork. The old man I’d seen earlier had gone but I figured the woman who prepared the noodles was Joy’s mother. She was in her fifties with short hair that was still jet black, and wrinkled skin the colour of weathered teak. When she smiled at me she showed two gold teeth at the front of her mouth. She switched on an overhead fan and put a bucket of ice on the table to keep my beer cold.

I spooned chilli powder into my bowl of noodles and added a couple of spoonfuls of fish sauce. Lovely. I must have overdone the chilli because I had tears in my eyes by the third mouthful. I was on my second bottle of Sprite when Joy appeared at the back of the shop. I guess she’d come down from the living quarters above the shop. Tight jeans, a white T-shirt with a teddy bear on the front showing off several inches of a drum-taut stomach, her long hair tied back in a ponytail. She was wearing less make up than she had on in the pictures that MacKay had shown me, and as she went over to the old woman I could see a glittering diamond ring on her wedding finger. Joy was pretty in the pictures, and up close she was still pretty, but the signs were there for anyone to see. Anyone who knew what to look for, of course. Large hands, large feet, broad shoulders, a bump of an Adam’s apple. Taller than the average Thai girl. The love of MacKay’s life was a katoey. A ladyboy. And while I’d been in Thailand for long enough to be able to spot the difference between a ladyboy and the genuine thing, MacKay was a relative newcomer. The high cheekbones, long hair, long legs and large breasts were probably all he was looking at.

The Government computer had shown that Joy had been born a man. The question I wanted answering was how much of his original equipment remained. The fact that Joy was so tall suggested that she’d been on hormones from an early age, and she’d clearly had breast implants. The fact that Joy wouldn’t have full sex with MacKay might have more to do with her still having a penis and less to do with retaining her virginity. It’s always a tough call deciding how to refer to ladyboys. ‘He’ doesn’t sound right, not considering the long hair, proud breasts and pouting lips. But ‘she’ isn’t strictly accurate, not if they’ve got the full block and tackle, if you get my drift. And ‘it’ just sounds offensive. I was going to settle for ‘she’.

More often than not I can tell a ladyboy just by looking at her. The height is a clue, they have deep voices, large feet and hands, and unless they’ve had it surgically reduced, a large Adam’s apple. But if all else fails, I have a foolproof method that has never failed me. You get them into a conversation about Thai boxing and have them show you how they throw a punch. A man’s arm will go straight, but a woman’s arm will actually bend beyond the 180 degrees at the elbow. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is, and it’s an infallible way of differentiating between a man and woman. But the presence of a penis is a pretty good indicator, too.