The Thai Amulet (24 page)

“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” I said to Praneet in as normal a voice as I could muster.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she said as she left.

“Yes,” I said. But I wasn’t. I was convinced this was my fault, and nothing anyone could say would make me feel better. I had spent my time looking for someone I knew only casually, while evil was swirling right under my nose. Will Beauchamp’s wife and daughter were worthy of some effort, yes, but not at the expense of Chat and most especially my Jennifer. I was responsible in some very fundamental way for her happiness, and I had failed her. Chat had seen something bad happening at Ayutthaya, and he’d come to me for advice. And what had I done? I’d gone off to read some diaries of a dead painter! I hadn’t been paying attention to what mattered most.

I was so angry at myself I thought I’d lose my mind. I grabbed Will’s bubble envelope full of junk and dumped it on the desk. I tore the clipping and the letter from Prasit into a million little pieces. Then I took one of the unbroken amulets and smashed it against the side of the desk. When that didn’t work, I dropped it on the floor and stomped on it. Then I took the portrait and shook it. I wanted to cut it to shreds, but I couldn’t think what I had that would do that. Then I remembered the sword and went for that.

I was poised to slash the painting when I noticed a computer floppy disk that must have fallen out of the back of the painting when I’d shaken it. I was about to grind that beneath my heel when I saw something else: a red eye winking at me from the dust that had been the amulet. I knelt down and found six rubies, beautiful ones, stunningly perfect, in the remains. I took the second amulet and broke it, to find six blue sapphires in the dust. And I realized then that the carefully wrapped pieces of broken amulet in the envelope were a message from Will. He was telling Natalie that a broken amulet meant something. No wonder the horrible man in the amulet market had wanted them back and someone had been searching my luggage. And didn’t it just explain why someone had risked trying to snatch my purse in a crowded marketplace! The computer disk, too, was a message from Will. I picked it up, went downstairs and through the etched glass doors of Ayutthaya Trading, and spoke to the first person I came to. He introduced himself as Eakrit, the new CFO. I told the little worm I wanted a computer with a printer with lots of paper in it, and I wanted it right now.

Paradise Lost

The Untold Story of Helen Ford

Copyright William Beauchamp

CIO The Bent Rowland Agency, Bangkok, Thailand

InNovember of 1949, as Loi Krathong celebrations to mark the end of the rainy season got under way, revelers floating their lotus flower-shaped boats on the Chao Phyrajust north of Bangkok made a grisly discovery. The torso of a
farang,
a
white foreigner, was found near the edge of the river. With no head nor limbs to help with identification, it seemed the murder, which clearly it was, would go unsolved.

But within weeks, through a fortuitous discovery of bone fragments and teeth in the ashes of a large fire, the body was identified as that of Thomas “Tex” Ford, an appliance salesman from the U.S. living in Bangkok. Shortly thereafter, in February of 1950, his widow, Helen Ford, was charged with his murder.

The lurid case caused a sensation in the expatriate community in Bangkok. The beautiful Mrs. Ford had been a fixture on the social scene, and many hearts had been broken when she married Ford. Some said a jealous former suitor had murdered him in the hope of marrying his widow. Others said Tex Ford had gotten involved in some shady business dealings with Thai traders and had paid with his life. Helen Ford herself said that she had thought that Ford, whom she claimed had been abusive, had deserted her, taking with him their young son. His death, she claimed, had come as a complete surprise to her.

It was clear to everyone that love, if there had ever been any between Tex and Helen, was long gone by the time he died, just over a year after they married, and four months after the birth of their son. Helen had resumed her social schedule almost immediately, and if she mourned the loss of either her husband or her child, she didn’t show it. She told everyone she planned to return to the U.S. as soon as she was permitted to do so, to start her life over.

But before she could do that, she was charged with murder and sentenced to die.

This is Helen Ford’s story. It is a tale of passion, lust, and greed. It is the story of justice perverted, of love poisoned by prejudice, of the dark side of high society.

This is the story they didn’t want you to know.

There was more, of course, 267 pages of it, to be precise. Even discounting a rather derivative title and the supermarket tabloid elements, it was a riveting tale. Helen Ford, nee Helen Fitzgerald, and her brother Robert had come to Bangkok with their parents right after the war. The father, who had been a member of U.S. special forces, had been stationed in Bangkok during the war, and succumbing to the lure of the East, moved his family there. He died shortly after, however, of wounds he had received in combat in the Pacific. The mother, too, died not much later.

There had been some money in the family, although not a lot of it, and it was important that Helen marry well. She was seen at all the best parties and apparently had a succession of suitors. But she loved someone else, someone unsuitable. In the mid-1940s, she began a liaison with a young Thai from a well-to-do family. They met clandestinely for at least two years. In a remarkable twist, given the times, it was not Helen’s family who objected to the relationship. It was his.

At some point, the man told his family he was going to marry Helen. They were horrified and would have none of it, considering Helen to be after his money. The family tried to pay Helen off, and needing money and perhaps seeing the hopelessness of her situation, she apparently accepted. The young man’s engagement to a Thai woman was announced a few months later. Shortly after that, Helen married Tom Ford. It was clearly a marriage of convenience. They had a son born eight months after the wedding. Ford was a drunk and a philanderer, according to Will. He may also have been a wife beater.

What seems clear is that Helen and her Thai lover continued to see each other. Will’s hypothesis was that Tom Ford caught them in their little love nest, a tree house in Bangkok that belonged to her brother, or that the Thai came upon Tom beating Helen. Whatever the reason for the meeting, at the end of it, Helen’s lover lay mortally wounded. He died from a stab wound before Helen could
get
help.

After that, Will’s story sinks into speculation. According to his account, Helen went berserk and did, indeed, stab her husband. Then, in an effort to ensure his body couldn’t be identified, probably with the help of her brother Robert, she hacked the body to pieces. She then killed her infant son. That body has never been found.

The story then enters the realm of public knowledge. Helen was tried, convicted, sentenced to die, appealed, won, and was instead jailed for about six years. She then disappeared from public view. It was a fascinating story at any time, but for me, at that moment it was a revelation. Because while at no time in the public record was either her lover nor, indeed, any other member of his family mentioned, Will Beauchamp felt no such compunction, naming Virat Chaiwong, Thaksin’s brother, the second young man in the family portrait, as the lover. Even then, the Chaiwong family’s power and influence must have been insurmountable. If the murder of Virat had been part of Helen’s defense, she might have gotten off with the lesser sentence right away, the justifiable homicide idea. But Will had combed the records, what there were, anyway, and could find nothing.

So there it was. If I’d thought that finding Will was a separate issue from Jennifer and the Chaiwongs, then clearly I’d been wrong. But what did it mean? The picture of Will that was emerging was contradictory at best. He had been in business with Wongvipa, a business that required two sets of financial statements for some reason, and it couldn’t be good. At the same time, or at least soon after, he wrote a book that was a damning indictment of Wongvipa’s family. The obvious conclusion was the Chaiwongs were trying to stop publication of the book and were prepared to murder Will to do it. But what about Chat? Was Helen Ford still out there somewhere, determined to take her revenge on the family through the next generation?

I went back to look at the portrait. I swear I stared at it for an hour: Helen Ford in her lovely celery suit standing behind a table on which was placed a stone Buddha, her hand seeming to reach out for it. She stared directly at me. Then I tried not looking at her, but my eyes kept coming back, not to her, but to the Buddha on the table.

“There’s something wrong with this painting,” I said aloud. It was something about the hands. She looked a bit as if she was reaching for the Buddha image, but the hands were not quite right if that was what she was doing. To me it looked more like a protective gesture of some kind, but why protect the Buddha? I picked up the phone and called David Ferguson.

“I heard about Chat,” he said. “What a terrible thing to happen. Is Jennifer all right?”

“She will be with time,” I said.

“And her dad? Have you talked to him? And you? What happened?”

“Drugs,” I said. “There must have been some mix-up. He thought he was taking painkillers for his headache.” I could almost hear his brain ticking over. He was thinking what everybody else was thinking, that Chat was a drug addict. It seemed Jennifer and I were in a very exclusive group that saw it differently. And I had no way of proving otherwise, not yet anyway.

“Look, David, I can’t talk long, and I’m nervous about using the telephone here, and yes, this is an unusual request under the circumstances, but I must know what the stuff on Will Beauchamp’s wall was. The stuff we thought might be blood. Someone must know.”

“Lara, why are you worrying about this now? You must be in shock or something.”

“Please, David,” I said.

“I’ll call you back,” he replied.

*        *        *

“Oil paint,” he said about an hour later. “The kind artists use. There’s some red pigment as well, and a thinner. The lab guy said he might have been cleaning brushes and managed to spatter it on the wall. That mean anything to you?”

“It does,” I said. “Thanks.” I grabbed the painting, had the security man call me a car, and headed into Bangkok.

“Oh, it’s you,” Robert Fitzgerald said, peering over the top of the railing. He was very pale, and his head was still bandaged, but he was home. “Come up,” he said. “I see you’ve found the painting.”

“Do you feel up to a little project?” I said.

“I think so,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t require running a marathon or anything.”

“I want to clean this area of the painting,” I said.

“The whole painting could use a little cleaning.”

“I want you to remove the Buddha,” I said, pointing. “Start right about here.”

“I don’t know that I should do that,” he said. “It’s a wonderful painting, and the artist is, after all, my father.”

“Just look at that painting for a minute,” I said. “Your father was an exceptional craftsman. His perspective was perfect. This is not perfect. Someone, maybe him, maybe somebody else, has changed this painting. Will Beauchamp thought so, too. He was starting to clean it when he was killed. See, if you look closely, you can see where he started.”

“Killed!” he said. “You didn’t say anything about him being killed. I know who Helen Ford is, by the way. I looked her up. A murderess. Why would I want to get involved in this?”

“How about because she was your father’s sister?” I said.

“What!” he exclaimed. His pallor grew more noticeable, and he lurched back on the sofa. He seemed to be wheezing. I didn’t care.

“I’m afraid so. Now, about the painting—”

“Oh my,” he said. I suddenly realized that for all his bluster, Fitzgerald at the best of times was a rather fragile individual, and these were hardly the best of times. “Could you hand me that puffer?” he said, gesturing weakly to the device on the table. “My asthma—”

“Robert,” I said, handing him the puffer but not waiting until he inhaled the medication. “This is really important, or I wouldn’t be here. I’ll explain about your aunt as we go, but you have got to
get
going on this.”

Breathing restored, he peered at the portrait carefully for a few minutes. “You may be right,” he conceded. “It could well be that someone painted over the original.”

“Can you do it?” I asked.

“I think so. Just give me a minute to get some materials.” He limped to the back while I sat in an agony of anticipation.

The face emerged slowly over the next several hours: dark hair, almond-colored eyes, tawny skin, and a gaze that matched that of the women whose hand was stretched out protectively toward it. “My God,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s a child, and it has to be hers.”

“Is your mother still in town?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Let’s go and see her,” I said.

“Can you do that without me?” he said. “I’m feeling rather strange.” He didn’t look well at all. The pallor he’d exhibited when I’d arrived had in the meantime acquired a tinge of green.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is too much when you’re not well. Just point me in the right direction.”

*        *        *

“Hello, dear,” Edna Thomas said. She was a tidy little woman with gray hair and blue eyes. Her hands were gnarled with arthritis. “You’re the nice girl who found Bobby and got the doctor, aren’t you?” she said. “Of course I will help you any way I can.” She spoke with that rather indeterminate accent many Americans acquire after they’ve spent many years in England. I found her in what could charitably be called a tourist-class hotel. The room was clean but rather depressingly spare. If her former husband had made money with his paintings, she did not appear to have benefited from them.