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

by Stephen Leather

  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 naA?ve 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.

  Anyway, I took my bowl over to the old woman and asked for more noodles. I smiled at Joy and said ‘ Sawasdee krup.’

  We started chatting in Thai and I asked her if it was engagement ring on her finger. She beamed and said that yes, she was getting married to a farang, a guy from Scotland called Bill. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and hurried back up stairs.

  The old woman handed me my bowl of noodles with another flash of gold teeth.

  ‘She is very beautiful,’ I said.

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘The farang doesn’t mind that she’s a katoey?’ I asked.

  The old woman had the grace to blush. ‘He doesn’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Isn’t he going to find out sometime?’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘My son is going to have the operation soon,’ she said. She made a scissor cutting motion with her fingers. ‘As soon as the farang sends the money.’ She cackled and stirred her soup with a long metal ladle.

  I took my bowl of noodles back to my table. It
can be a funny old world at times.

  I waited until I was back in Bangkok before faxing my report to the client. I suppose I should have phoned but I couldn’t face telling him, even over the phone. I sent him a typewritten report and a copy of the print out I’d got from the Government office and a translation. And I faxed a copy of my bill. Four days later I got a cheque through the post. No note, just a cheque. I figured there was nothing he wanted to say. They way I see it, he had a lucky escape. Sooner or later he would have found out, even with Joy’s skill at oral sex, and even with all her family in on the secret. That’s what blew me away. He’d met the folks, he’d discussed a dowry with them, all the time thinking that he was getting a beautiful girl, and a virgin to boot. And no one had said a thing. Maybe they were hoping that MacKay would send them enough money to pay for the operation before the wedding. Then I had a thought that made me shudder. If I hadn’t found out what was going on, and if Joy had had the final cut, and if she could come up with an excuse for why she wasn’t getting pregnant, than MacKay might never have discovered the truth.

  THE CASE OF THE LESBIAN LOVER

  Greig Knight was one of the few real success stories among Thailand’s expat community. The Thais don’t make it easy for foreigners to succeed in business, but Greig had bucked the trend and made a decent-sized fortune building up a chain of American-style restaurants. You know the sort of thing: racks of ribs, barbecued chickens smeared in hickory sauce, burgers covered in cheese and bacon with French fries the size of a labourer’s fingers. Not that they were called French fries in Knight’s restaurants. Ever since 9/11 they were Freedom fries in all his establishments and there wasn’t a bottle of French wine on the menu. Knight had served in the military-he’d been one of the first soldiers into Kuwait-before deciding that he’d rather take his chances in the Land of Smiles. He landed at Don Muang without being able to speak a word of Thai and a cheque from the US Government in his back pocket. He found a decent hotel, decent beer, but couldn’t find a decent burger despite looking the length and breadth of the city. He figured the only way he was going to get the sort of food he wanted was to cook it himself, so he set up a small burger joint in a soi close to Patpong. He never looked back and now he owns a huge house in one of the more heavily fortified areas of town and flies himself to Hong Kong to watch his racehorses run.

  He didn’t tell me who he was when he phoned. He just said that he needed a private detective and asked me to meet him at Starbucks in Soi Thonglor. He said he’d be reading a copy of the Asian Wall Street Journal but his choice of reading material wasn’t important because he was the only farang in the place. I recognised him immediately from photographs in the glossy magazines they leave around in my dentist’s. Usually he was holding court at the opening of one of his restaurants, or attending a function to honour some visiting American dignitary or other, standing with his arm around a leggy Thai beauty queen or a gay DJ raising a glass of champagne to the camera, grinning with a set of teeth so white that they had to have been capped. He was well over six foot tall, greying at the temples with flint-grey eyes that looked at me inquisitively as I walked over to his table. He unwound himself from his chair. He was thin with a runner’s build, and as I knew for a fact that he ate in one of his own restaurants every night, he must have had the metabolism of a humming bird.

  ‘Greig Knight,’ he said. He nodded at the muscular Thai man who was sitting in the armchair opposite his. ‘This is Gung. My driver.’

  Gung stood up and waied me with a cold smile. He didn’t look like a driver. He looked more like a bodyguard and from the way he held himself I figured he was former military or police.

  Knight wound himself back into his armchair and waved for me to take Gung’s place. Gung stood slightly to the left of Knight, his arms crossed. He didn’t look like the sort of man you’d want to meet in a dark alley.

  ‘As you’ve probably guessed, it’s a woman,’ said Knight.

  ‘It usually is.’ I said.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘Black.’

  ‘You don’t want a cappuccino or a latte?’

  ‘I’m a traditional sort of guy,’ I said.’

  ‘Cappuccino is for wimps?’

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  Knight grinned and nodded at Gung. ‘Mr Olson will have the same as me,’ he said. ‘Same as we like our heavyweight boxers.’

  Gung frowned.

  ‘Strong and black,’ said Knight, and he tapped the table in front of him with a large ring on his left hand.

  I chuckled but Gung’s frown just deepened. He nodded and walked over to the counter.

  ‘He’s been with me for ten years,’ said Knight. ‘Just so you know, I trust him completely.’

  ‘Former army?’

  Knight nodded. ‘Captain in the Thahan Phran.’

  I raised an eyebrow. The Thahan Phran are Thailand’s paramilitary border guards. Hard bastards. You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of one, dark alley or not.

  He steepled his fingers under his chin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve got a live-in girlfriend. Ying.’ He smiled. ‘Beautiful girl. Sexy as hell.’

  ‘You’re a very lucky man,’ I said.

  ‘If I thought that, I wouldn’t be having this conversation,’ he said. He sighed. ‘I was in a Humvee, a few years back. Had a sergeant who thought he was Michael Schumacher. Took it as an insult to his manhood if he had to put his foot on the brake. We were heading into Kuwait City, full-pelt. I don’t know what it was, but I just had a feeling that something was wrong. I told the sergeant to stop. He moaned like hell but he pulled over. I went ahead on foot. Fifty feet in front of where we stopped was a landmine. A biggie.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Wow is right. Humvees are damn big vehicles but the mine would have blown it to kingdom come. But if the hairs on the back of my neck hadn’t stood to attention, my army career would have come to an abrupt end there and then.’

  ‘And this Ying is making your hair stand to attention, is that it?’

  Knight made a gun out of his right hand and faked shooting me in the face. ‘Got it in one. There’s nothing I can put my finger on, it’s just a feeling.’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a couple of photographs and handed them to me. I tried to look at them without drooling. She was beautiful all right. Shampoo commercial hair, toothpaste commercial teeth, moisturiser commercial skin, you get the picture. Drop dead lovely, but as Greig Knight was one of the richest farangs in Thailand, it was only to be expected. The only dogs he’d go near would be at the greyhound track in Macau.

  ‘I’ve written her Thai name, date of birth and ID card number on the back of one of the pictures,’ said Knight. ‘Look, I pay all her bills, I’ve bought her a BMW, a house for her parents in Surin, and I’ve given her a gold Amex card. She gets an allowance of 200,000 baht a month and I’ve lost count of the gold jewellery I’ve bought for her.’

  I tried not to turn green with envy but he was giving her twice what I made in a good month. And I didn’t have a BMW. Or a gold Amex card. But then I didn’t have a body to die for and a face to kill for.

  ‘She’s as loving as she ever was,’ Knight continued. ‘The sex is great, there are no mysterious late-night phone calls, nothing I can put my finger on.’

  ‘Just a feeling?’

  Knight nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  I didn’t say anything to Knight but in my experience once a guy feels that his wife or girlfriend is up to no good, she probably is.

  ‘I’m flying to Hong Kong this weekend. I asked Ying to go with me but she said she was busy, she’s got a conference in Pattaya that she has to go to.’

  ‘A conference?’

  ‘She works for a pharmaceuticals company. Sales director. She doesn’t need to, I’ve told her that, but she wants her independence.’

  I wanted to point out that she didn’t want her independence enough to turn down 200,000 baht a mont
h or give him back the BMW, but I kept my mouth shut. Discretion being the better part of not pissing off the client and all that.

  ‘Anyway, I’m off to Hong Kong, she’ll be in Pattaya, so I want you to follow her. You can do that?’

  I smiled confidently. ‘No problem. I’ll need her car registration number.’

  ‘It’s on the back of the photograph,’ said Knight. He pulled out a thick wallet and flicked his thumbnail across a stack of 1,000-baht bills, counted out thirty and handed them to me. ‘This is on account,’ he said. ‘But money’s no object, I just want to know the truth, one way or another.’

  I pocketed the cash and nodded over at the bodyguard. ‘Is Gung going with you?’

  ‘No, he’s looking after my house.’ I’d seen Knight’s house in one of the glossy magazines. It was in an expensive area of Sukhumvit, a mix of old Thai teak and white minimalist chic, full of modern Asian art and ancient Buddha figures looted from Burma.

  ‘Get Gung to call me when she leaves the house, and if you can get any details of what hotel she’s staying at, so much the better.’

  ‘Whatever you need,’ said Knight. He scribbled on the back of an embossed business card and handed it to me. ‘My private number is on there. Gung’s too.’

  I shook his hand and headed out. The money was burning a hole in my pocket, I had several bills that were past their sell-by date and I owed my maid last month’s salary.

  By Friday afternoon I was all set. Knight was on a three o’clock Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong so he left his house at just before midday, sitting in the back of a. large Mercedes. I was in a rental car, an inconspicuous Honda Civic, down the road. He didn’t see me. As a rule, guys in the back of big Mercs didn’t notice men in small Japanese cars.