The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10

by Richard Stevenson

  “What does Geoff do in Thailand?”

  “He’s retired,” Romeo said. “His family in Chicago made a fortune in grain futures years ago. A while back, Geoff inherited forty or fifty mil, and bingo, off he flew.”

  I asked if anybody had checked with Pringle about Griswold’s current situation. Wasn’t this guy likely to know something?

  “We tried,” Horn said. “But Geoffrey won’t really talk to us.

  Apparently he and Gary had some kind of falling-out. I got Geoff on the phone in Bangkok about a month ago. He said he didn’t know where Gary was, and he ‘couldn’t care less,’ his words. Geoff also told me in no uncertain terms that the day I phoned him was not an auspicious date for him to be taking a transoceanic telephone call, and he just hoped that I had not fucked up his entire month.”

  Romeo laughed and said, “And Geoff didn’t even land on his head, as far as we know.”

  Some food arrived, an aromatic bounteous antipasti for the table.

  “Don’t be dainty,” Romeo said. “Shovel it down. There’s more where that came from. Plus, the pasta dishes.”

  As we dug in, Horn said, “The numerology thing with Gary was especially uncomfortable for all of us whenever nine-eleven came up. Gary had bought into a theory bouncing around the Internet about the date, eleven, and the shape of the two New York towers, and some supposed prediction by Nostradamus made in the fourteenth century that historians say was fake.

  30 Richard Stevenson

  There was even more to it — something about the flight numbers of the crashed planes adding up to something significant — and Gary took it all very seriously.”

  “After a while, of course, Gary didn’t really talk to us about any of that,” Romeo said. “When we were casually dismissive, or just unresponsive, he tended to drop the subject for a while.

  We didn’t want to insult him or hurt him. But we weren’t about to indulge this looniness, either. What do you do? What do you say? We loved Gary, but we were just flabbergasted. Some people are susceptible to these notions and some aren’t, and we happen to fall into the latter category. It just got terribly awkward.”

  “He obviously cared what you thought of him,” I said. “And after he moved to Thailand, he stayed in touch. But you said, Lou, that Gary gave indications that things were starting to go wrong. What were those indications?”

  They looked at each other. Horn said, “You know about Mango, right? From Ellen Griswold.”

  “I do. Apparently Gary was head over heels for the guy.”

  “He was,” Janice said, “and then later he wasn’t. In one email he sent me late last summer — I’ve got a hard copy for you to take with you — Gary said Mango might not be who he said he was. This was extremely distressing for Gary. He had trusted this guy, he said. Gary had also been to a seer — that’s the word he used. And what the seer predicted was ‘bloodshed’ in Gary’s life, and ‘great sorrow for people close to him.’ Again, the seer’s words.”

  That’s all? No specifics?”

  “No.”

  “Did Gary tell anybody the seer’s name?”

  “No.”

  “Not death, just bloodshed? That was the word? And sorrow?”

  “It is tantalizingly and unhelpfully vague,” Horn said.

  I asked Janice how she had replied to Griswold’s unnerving e-mail, and she looked sheepish. “I never really responded, really. What I thought was, this is supermarket tabloid stuff.

  Gary didn’t have to go all the way to Thailand for this. He could have picked up forecasts like that for a couple of bucks at the Winn-Dixie checkout. He said the seer was some kind of renowned figure in Thailand, but it sounded like a racket to me.

  I wasn’t about to say that, though, so I just let it go. About a week later, I sent him some chirpy message about nothing at all.

  I stupidly just ignored this thing that obviously was terribly important to Gary.”

  “Well, if it was a scam,” Weems said, “Gary could afford it.

  He had more money than God and Buddha put together.

  Anyway, what could you possibly have said? Sometimes when people are acting screwy, silence from friends is the only kind and useful response.”

  I asked if Griswold had informed any of the three that he had transferred his entire fortune to a Bangkok bank and that he planned on a large investment with an early big payoff. No, they said, they had not known about this until I had told Horn on the phone. “You scared the bejesus out us of with that one,”

  Weems said.

  “We’re just hoping that something really horrible hasn’t happened,” Horn said. “Gary has all that money over there in a part of the world that I assume can be dangerous. And then there’s the Griswold family history of violent death. It almost makes you believe in fate or karma or people being doomed by forces beyond their control or understanding. Notice I said

  ‘almost.’”

  I said, “What Griswold family history of violent death? I don’t know about that.”

  “I suppose there’s no reason Ellen would have mentioned it,” Horn said. “But Gary’s parents died in a small-plane crash fifteen or so years ago. This was just a year or two before Bill’s ex-wife, Sheila, sailed off on a Caribbean cruise and disappeared at sea. Presumably, she fell overboard, though nobody knows for sure.”

  32 Richard Stevenson

  So the JAP was actually the late JAP. “This is news.”

  “It does help show,” Horn said, “why Gary might take predictions of bloodshed by a fortune-teller more seriously than a lot of us would.”

  “It seems,” I said, “as though Gary was closer to his former wife than to his brother Bill. Why might that be true? Or am I wrong?”

  “There was never any love lost between Gary and Bill,”

  Horn said. “They were just two different types of animal. It was partly the gay thing. The Griswolds only accepted that grudgingly, and it just wasn’t discussed. But there were other big differences. The steel and building supply businesses never really interested Gary. He was in it for fifteen years to prove something to his family and to himself, I guess. And then he walked away from the company without giving it a second thought.”

  “Plus,” Romeo said, “Gary’s brother was some kind of big Bushophile. That was certainly an issue. It was another topic that could never be mentioned among the Griswolds.”

  “Gary hated the militarism of the Bush people,” Horn said.

  “He was constantly giving money to peace groups and to human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. A big part of Thailand’s draw for him was the Buddhism and the philosophy of nonviolence.”

  I told them I wasn’t surprised that the reality of Thailand for Griswold may have turned out to be something other than a travel-poster Buddhist paradise. “I am also fond of the place,” I said. “But if you don’t like militarism, it’s hardly the place to go.

  Thailand has had a dozen or more military coups since it started electing governments in the nineteen thirties. The generals, of course, always go to the country’s beloved King Bhumibol to ask his permission to overthrow the elected government. If he ever said, ‘No, sorry, you can’t do that,’ I’m not aware of it. The place also has a thoroughly corrupt police force that’s been known to simply execute suspected drug dealers, as I recall.

  And drive-by shootings are sometimes used to resolve business disputes, I’ve heard.”

  The three were now looking at me queasily. I guessed I should have told them, as with Timothy, only about the reclining Buddhas. I said, “But the Thai people generally are gentle and humor-filled. And deeply spiritual. And they have a highly developed sense of fun — sanuk, they call it. Sanuk infects just about everything the Thais do.”

  “Like their drive-by shootings?” Romeo asked.

  The waitress arrived to clear away the antipasti platter, which we had picked clean. Griswold’s three friends, subdued now and a bit shaken, decided this wo
uld be a good time to order another round of drinks.

  “Look,” I said, “I think you’re right to worry about Griswold. It’s reasonable to think that anybody vanishing in Southeast Asia with thirty-eight million dollars at his disposal has either met foul play or is in hiding in order to avoid foul play. Or — and I know you’d much rather not think about this

  — Griswold has himself done something illegal, and he is in hiding not from criminal bad guys but from Thai-cop bad guys.

  Which are sometimes one and the same thing, I’m sorry to say.”

  They all set down their glasses of Ketel One and looked at me soberly.

  After a moment, Horn said, “I guess we were hoping you would tell us things about Thailand that were more reassuring.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Well, then,” Weems said. “It’s good you’re going over.

  When do you leave?”

  “In a couple of days, I think. I’ve booked space on both Thursday and Friday.”

  “Are you going alone? Or do you have a staff?”

  “I may have help. That’s unclear.”

  “Poor Gary,” Horn said. “I can’t believe, really, that he’s done anything wrong himself. The guy is just so decent. So, something really bad must have happened to him. Oh, God.”

  Our pasta dishes arrived, and we talked quietly about what Horn, Weems and Romeo all saw as the good life in Key West.

  34 Richard Stevenson

  There were rising costs and overpopulation and the threat of catastrophic hurricanes. But low-pressure island life was still the best, they all agreed and wished that Gary Griswold had not lost his capacity to be happy in this place that his friends all loved.

  We were well into our lasagna and fettuccine when an acquaintance the three hadn’t seen for a while stopped by the table to greet them. Nadine Bisbee, an angular, middle-aged woman in a sarong and fourteen pounds of turquoise and silver jewelry, was introduced to me as another friend of Griswold who was quite concerned about him. Horn told her I was a private investigator preparing to fly to Thailand to search for Griswold.

  “Oh,” Bisbee said, “I don’t think we need to worry about Gary anymore. Elise Flanagan saw him two weeks ago in Cambodia.”

  Horn and Romeo said it at the same time. “She did?”

  “It was at a border crossing. Elise was on a tour bus on her way from Bangkok to Angkor Wat with her Antioch-alum architecture history group, and there was Gary at Thai passport control heading back into Thailand from Cambodia. She yelled at him, she said, but he either didn’t hear Elise or for some reason he didn’t want to run into anybody he knew. Elise said she thought maybe he had some underage youth in tow and was embarrassed by it.”

  I said, “Does Gary have a history of underage youths as a sexual interest?”

  Romeo said, “Just Lou.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  “No,” Weems said. “It had to be something else. Was Elise sure it was Gary she saw?”

  “Elise said it was definitely Gary. Elise has been getting forgetful in recent years, but she certainly knows Gary as well as any of us. I mean, she bought art from Gary and Lou for years and was in the gallery at least once a month, wasn’t she, Lou?”

  “Elise would certainly know Gary,” Horn said somberly.

  “Maybe this means he’s been in Cambodia for six months, and that’s why nobody has heard from him.”

  Romeo said, “For chrissakes, Cambodia surely has telephones and post offices. Even the Internet, I’ll bet. Am I right, Don?”

  “In the Khmer Rouge era, it didn’t. But now Cambodia is not so cut off, no.”

  “So, what’s going on with Gary?” Weems said, and they all looked at me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Despite creeping gentrification, Stock Island, just east of Key West, had one of the few remaining low-rent districts in the lower keys. It had dockage for fishing and pleasure boats, some warehouses, and a few good seafood restaurants. But it wasn’t yet, Horn told me, one of the fashionable, high-cost addresses for habitation.

  Sandy Tessig lived in one of the island’s two-story plain-concrete multiunit townhouses built on stilts to be safe from storm surges. So far, the design had worked; the place had not been swept away by rampaging seas. Tessig had no big sign up, just a discreet notice next to her door buzzer that read Sandy -

  Past, Present, and Future Knowledge — The Freedom to Know and to Be.

  Tessig had agreed on the phone to talk to me, and Lou Horn dropped me off at ten in the morning, planning to pick me up in an hour. Tessig had said she was worried about Griswold too, and was willing to help if she could. And, she said, maybe while I was there I would like a reading.

  Sandy’s apartment didn’t give me the kind of willies I was expecting, and neither did she. There were a couple of astrological charts on the living room wall over the couch, but no rooms painted black and no sinister aromatherapy. I could see Disney-character decals on the side of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the only smell was of the orange Doritos in a dish on the coffee table. The CD box on the player next to the goldfish bowl was an early Barbra Streisand collection.

  I relaxed on the couch and Sandy brought me a cup of Nescafe. She was pleasantly beefy in tight jeans and a Conch Nation T-shirt. She had clear skin, a big expressive face, and streaked hair cut short.

  She perched on a hassock across the coffee table from me and told me she was excited to have me in the same room with her.

  38 Richard Stevenson

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You’ve been everywhere. You’ve done everything. Oh, my God!”

  I knew what was coming, but I said, “I was in the army, and I’ve always enjoyed travel.”

  “Wait. Don’t tell me. Lithuania?”

  “Nope. Never Lithuania.”

  “No, no. Fifteenth century. The royal court.”

  “I’m not aware of this.”

  “No, but I am. I have the gift. That’s why Gary came to me.

  It’s why you’re here, Donnie.”

  “Nobody has called me Donnie for a number of years. You must have me mixed up with someone else,” I said in a kidding way, trying to get her off this track.

  “Are you saying you are not that person anymore? You will always be little Donnie. Always were, always will be. And many other little Donnies in time and space too.”

  “You’re sounding a little too much like my mother, Sandy,”

  I said, trying again for a jocularity that did not come across as too disrespectful. “Can we talk about Gary Griswold? You said you were as worried about him as so many of his other friends have been.” I told her that a Key West woman apparently had seen Griswold alive at the Thai-Cambodian border two weeks earlier, but that his noncommunicativeness and apparent secretiveness were still a serious cause for concern.

  “Gary is home where he belongs. Home is where the heart is.”

  “True enough.”

  “He told me after he got back from his first trip to Thailand that I had been right to urge him to go there, and that he had found his spiritual and ancestral true home. Here he suffered from dislocation. I’m not knocking Key West; don’t get me wrong. I grew up a quarter of a mile from where we’re sitting, and it’s fine that I’m here now, because I’ve been in Monroe THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 39

  County for most of my past lives. This place has been good to me, except for once in the thirteen forties.”

  “That’s pre-Columbian,” I said.

  “What? You think there were no people in Monroe County before Columbus got here?”

  “No, in fact I’m impressed. And who can argue with firsthand experience?”

  She gave me a smile that appeared genuine. “You’re a doubter, I can see. But that’s okay. Your skepticism in no way alters reality.”

  “That’s been my experience.”

  “But you’re missing out on something fantastic, Donnie.

  Full self-knowledge. It’s li
berating. Knowing not just who you are but who you were enables you to see yourself in your natural place in the cosmos. Once you grasp this, you’ll never feel dislocated again. Or alone.”

  I said, “How come people in your line of endeavor, Sandy, tend to locate clients in a cozy royal court? Couldn’t I have been a rural Lithuanian Jew getting speared in the neck by marauding Cossacks?”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s what happened to me in 1343, until forty-six. Not in Lithuania but here in Florida. It wasn’t Cossacks, it was Seminoles. It accounts for a good deal of my present back pain. But I sense strongly that you were either royalty or were close to royalty. You have also lived many other lives, of course, some of them perhaps replete with rage and physical agony. But rediscovering those lives would require time and effort.”

  “I’m afraid my immediate concern has to be Gary Griswold.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. It would be so, so sad if Gary’s bliss had gone by.”

  I said, “So it was you who suggested that Gary vacation in Thailand? I was under the impression that former Key West resident Geoff Pringle had invited him for a visit.”

  40 Richard Stevenson

  She adjusted her back — were the Seminoles the problem, or the hassock? — and let loose a grin of pure satisfaction. “I knew Geoff was over there. He, too, is a client of mine. But it was Gary’s journey back to his young life at the nineteenth-century court of King Mongkut that made him realize his bliss awaited him in Siam.”

  “So, Gary was royalty too?”

  “Gary himself was not of the Chakra dynasty. He was the child of a minor court official. But one of his classmates in the court school run by the incredible Anna Leonowens was the future King Chulalongkorn, and Gary later became King Chulalongkorn’s palace art curator. So, you see? Running an art gallery in Key West was really nothing new for Gary.”

  “You know,” I said, “most of that Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I saga was hooey. Leonowens made nearly all of it up, and later Rodgers and Hammerstein ran with it.

  Tunefully, to be sure. But I know that the Thais think it’s a crock.”