Yves got the owner to send young Boo over to his table and within seconds he was infatuated with her. He offered to let her stay in his penthouse apartment in Silom, and wanted to pay her to stop working. She’d only been dancing for three weeks and the bar owner was none-too-pleased at Yves taking his best-looking dancer away, but a 10,000-baht backhander got everything sorted.
Boo didn’t fully move into Yves’s apartment, but she did spend a lot of time there. They went out most nights, usually to the bar where she used to work. They’d barfine a few of her friends and visit the city’s top nightclubs. Usually at some point he’d slip her some money and she’d return with a few tablets of Ecstasy and then they’d go home where, before too long, he’d crash out. He was twice her age and I figured she was wearing him out. It was funny, Yves didn’t look the type to be doing E. Just shows that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Anyway, usually when Yves woke up, she was gone.
Then he hit me with the big one, the fact that took my breath away. In order to formalise his relationship with her, he had given her a million baht. One million baht! When I heard that my eyebrows shot skyward and my jaw dropped. A million baht!
Let me put that into perspective. A million baht isn’t a million pounds. Or a million dollars. But it is one hell of a lot of cash in Thailand. It would take a Thai schoolteacher the best part of five years to earn a million baht. The sweet little salesgirls in Robinson’s Department Store would have to work for a decade, maybe more, to earn a million baht. Even a star pole-dancer in a top Nana Plaza bar who spent every evening on her back with her legs open would be lucky to take home 50,000 baht a month. So a million baht would be almost two years’ salary. And Yves had given it to Boo. Given it to her. I shook my head in disbelief but Yves took out a bank statement and showed it to me. Sure enough, there was the bank transfer. One million baht, straight from his account to hers.
I made a mental note to charge him double my usual rate because Yves clearly had money to burn. I tried to work out how many times I could have sex with a million baht, assuming that I was paying the going rate. Six hundred baht for a bar fine, fifteen hundred baht for the girl. Four hundred baht for a short-time hotel. Total outlay, two thousand five hundred baht. Divided into one million was one hell of a lot of sex.
Yves made it clear that he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He never actually said that he loved her, but she was the mother of his children plus I figured he knew that a divorce would be bloody expensive in France. He wanted Boo to be his mia noi, his minor wife. A full-time mistress who would be a wife in all but name.
He went to her village in Isaan to meet her mother and Boo had given her 800,000 baht to build a house on some land they owned. That immediately set alarm bells ringing for me because that was three or four times the going rate for building a house there. Labour is dirt cheap in Isaan, and materials are well below Bangkok prices, so I was sure that Yves was being ripped off.
He’d come to the same conclusion shortly after returning to the city from Isaan. But it wasn’t the house that made him think twice about his dream girl. A ‘sister’ appeared, a girl who was a few years older than Boo but with a hundred times more experience by the look of her. Thais are pretty flexible about who they refer to as their ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and the term doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the same mother and father. In the case of Boo’s ‘sister’, Yves got the impression that she was just a friend from her village, probably the girl who had enticed Boo into the bar business. The ‘sister’ started going out with Yves, Boo and her friends on their nightly rounds. She was draped in gold- thick necklaces, rings on most of her fingers and heavy bracelets. The ‘sister’ suggested that Yves buy Boo some gold and that got Boo all excited so Yves agreed to go along to a gold shop with them.
Now, Yves was no stranger to gold shops, and he knew how they worked. The gold jewellery is pretty much pure metal and is sold by weight, with a few hundred baht thrown in to cover design and workmanship. The daily gold price is usually on a sign in the window, one price for selling and a slightly lower price for buying. In Thailand, gold is as good as money and it’s a standard con for a bargirl to take her beloved into a gold shop to buy a token of his love, only to have the girl return alone the next day and exchange it for cash.
Yves went into a gold shop near Soi Cowboy with Boo and the ‘sister’ and a middle-aged Thai-Chinese woman started the hard-sell. Yves asked the price of a few items, and soon realised that he was being taken for a ride. He figured that the ‘sister’ had done a deal with the shop and arranged a hefty commission for anything that Yves bought. He refused to buy anything from the shop, and walked out with a tearful Boo.
Now that his suspicions were raised, Yves started taking a closer look at the lovely Miss Boo. He went through his bank statements and discovered that somebody had regularly been withdrawing 20,000 baht from one of his accounts. Yves got most of his spending money from the petty cash float in his office, so it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to fgure out who was hitting the ATM. Yves went to his local police station but the cops told him that they wouldn’t act without proof and that they didn’t have the enthusiasm to mount an investigation. I smiled when he told me that. The police were hoping he would offer them a reward, in which case they would have immediately swung into action, but instead he had taken them at their word and contacted me. Still, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good and I was as happy as Boo to take Yves’s money.
Yves wanted revenge. If it was me I’d have just walked away. Hell, if it had been me I wouldn’t have given her a million baht in the first place. Yves wanted her in jail, behind bars, he wanted her punished. It seemed petty to me, she was just a bargirl doing what bargirls do. I don’t see why he’d expected anything else. Money to bargirls is like water, it’s easy to get and easy to spend. Give a bargirl a hundred baht and she’ll spend it. Give her a hundred thousand and she’ll spend that. When Yves offered her a million, what else was she supposed to have done other than said ‘thank you’ and taken it?
Anyway, rule number one of the private-eye game is that the customer is always right, even when he’s wrong, so I quoted him a daily rate and he passed me a thick wad of notes in a company envelope.
I got him to fax me a signed authority and a copy of the bank account that had been accessed with the ATM card and I took them along to the branch with a couple of boxes of chocolate almonds. I chose the plainest female cashier, gave her a winning smile and the sweets and five minutes later I had the information I needed and a phone number that I most definitely didn’t. All the withdrawals had been from the same ATM, close to Yves’s penthouse apartment, and they had all been made between five and seven o’clock in the morning, while Yves was sleeping off the effects of the alcohol, Ecstasy and sex.
I phoned Yves and told him what I’d discovered. We agreed that he’d carry on as usual, and I’d stake out the ATM. He’d text me when he got home and I’d wait with my trusty digital camera. Three days later and I got what I wanted. Yves and Boo got home at just after three after a night on the town. I was sitting outside a 7-Eleven opposite the ATM by four with a motorcycle taxi close by, and at six-thirty a decidedly sexy Miss Boo tottered down the road in skin-tight jeans and high heels and slotted in an ATM card. I fired off half a dozen shots. The last one was a beauty, Boo grinning from ear to ear as she counted a fistful of notes.
She put the money into the back pocket of her jeans and tottered back to Yves’s place. True to form she reappeared again at just after seven and hailed a taxi. I was already on the back of the motorcycle taxi and we followed her across town. It was well before rush hour so we had no problem keeping her in sight. The guy I was using was Panu, one of my regulars. He had a disconcerting habit of picking his nose while driving at speed, but he was reliable and knew the city like the back of his hand.
Miss Boo’s taxi drove along Rama VII road and eventually stopped outside a six-storey apartment block in a busy side street. I told Panu t
o follow her inside. No one looked twice at a motorcycle taxi guy whereas farangs attract attention wherever they go.
Panu returned a few minutes later. Miss Boo was holed up in Room 702.
A few days later Yves and I went back to the police station with the photographs and a bank statement showing Miss Boo’s latest unofficial withdrawal. And this time I’d primed Yves to offer a 10,000 baht sweetener, just to encourage the boys in brown to do their thing.
The next day at about noon the cops went in. They got Miss Boo and, as it turned out, her husband, who had recently given up his job as a labourer in Isaan and moved to Bangkok to help his wife spend Yves’s money. The police also found a dozen yah ba tablets in the room.
Miss Boo and her husband were hauled off to the station where Yves identified the girl and signed forms in triplicate confirming that he wanted to press charges. The cops were prepared to let Boo go with just a ‘fine’ but Yves insisted that she be charged. The theft charge and the drugs were good enough to put Miss Boo behind bars for a hundred days. And a hundred days in a Thai jail is the equivalent of a year or so in the civilised world. The husband came up with a decent bribe, which coupled with the fact that it was his first offence meant that he walked. He caught the next bus back to Isaan.
Yves was happy with the result. He got his revenge, but he didn’t get his million baht back. To be honest, I don’t think it was ever about the money. Yves had money enough to burn. It was about being lied to by a girl half his age and about him having to face the fact that the sexy, young, Miss Boo wanted just one thing from him: cold, hard cash. He wasn’t the handsome, debonair man-of-the-world that he liked to think he was; he was a punter, and she was a hooker. And they were facts that Yves didn’t want to face. C’est la vie, as the French say. Serves him right, is what I say.
THE CASE OF THE PATTAYA PLAY-AWAYS
By and large, I avoid Pattaya like the proverbial plague. It’s a scummy place unless you’re a sex tourist and it brings together the worst sort of farangs and the worst sort of Thais. It’s a Wild West town with go-go bars where tattooed guys with shaved heads and beer bellies drive around on Harleys with hookers half their age clinging to their backs, where drugs, booze and hookers are on tap twenty-four hours a day, and where there’s a murder/suicide pretty much every week. A murder/suicide? Yeah, that’s where a guy is found in his room, a plastic bag tied around his neck and his hands tied behind his back. The cops always write it off as a suicide but I’ve never heard of anyone killing themselves like that outside of the Land of Smiles. The other preferred way of ending it all is for a tourist to throw himself out of his hotel room window. That usually gets classified as a suicide too, even if the tourist’s wallet is empty and his watch and mobile phone are missing. You see, murder is bad for business. And Pattaya is all about business. The local press play ball, too, and most of the murder/suicides are never reported.
At any one time there are probably as many as 20,000 hookers in Pattaya, and frankly most of them are well past their sell-by date. That’s just my humble opinion. Most of the overage, overweight, overdrinking sex tourists who prowl the beach road at night would probably disagree. A big chunk of the bargirl investigations I get are from guys who’ve fallen for the charms of a Pattaya hooker. They meet her on a two-week vacation, fall in love, and before they go back to farangland they beg the girl to stop working and promise to send her a monthly salary. After a few weeks they start to wonder if the girl is sticking to her end of the deal and that’s when they get in touch with me. Frankly, it’s money for old rope. Rule Number One when it comes to bargirls: if their lips are moving, they’re lying. Rule Number Two: if their lips aren’t moving, they’re planning their next lie.
Time after time I hear the same refrain. ‘My girl is different.’ And ‘I know she loves me.’ And ‘She never really wanted to work in the bar in the first place.’ Whatever. I tell them my daily rate and when I’ve got a few cases lined up I take a run down the coast in a rental car. Over the years I’ve probably investigated 300 bargirls who’ve sworn love and devotion to farang boyfriends. And how many have turned out to be loyal, faithful girlfriends, patiently sitting in their rooms waiting for their boyfriend to return? Err, let me think about that for a while. Err, none. Not one. Like I said, money for old rope.
To be honest, I don’t enjoy bargirl investigations. They are generally pointless and I’m forever telling clients what they don’t want to hear. There’s also the risk of violence. Bargirls take no prisoners and they fight mean. I’ve seen a girl weighing forty kilograms soaking wet take out a guy three times her size by walloping him on the temple with the heel of her shoe. I always try to get in and out without the girl finding out who grassed her up because to a Thai bargirl revenge is a dish best served up cold, hot, spiced with chilli or wrapped up in a pancake with a bowl of sweet sauce on the side.
Anyway, for this trip to Sleaze-By-The-Sea I had two cases and I was feeling good because neither of them involved checking up on bargirls. Case number one involved a Brit by the name of Ronnie who was working for an oil company in Malaysia. Ronnie had married a girl from Pattaya-Gradai, her name was, she used to work in a beauty parlour, he said-and she’d gone back home to supervise the building of a new family home. Building work had slowed and Ronnie got the feeling that his wife was starting to give him the runaround. Case number two was a Singaporean girl called Cindee (she stressed the spelling three times so it obviously meant a lot to her) who was wondering why her husband was spending so much time in Pattaya. As soon as she told me the name of the hotel he was staying at I had a pretty good idea what he was up to. The Penthouse in Pattaya Soi 8 was a well known sex-tourist hangout. If she’d just checked out their website she’d have realised that it wasn’t a Hilton or Hyatt. Taking bargirls to rooms wasn’t just allowed, it was practically compulsory. Still, if she wanted to pay me to confirm the blindingly obvious, I was happy to take her money.
So with two retainers in the bank, I rented a nondescript Toyota and drove south and booked into the Penthouse. It took me all of five minutes to locate Mr Singapore. The Penthouse has a convenient CCTV system hooked into the hotel’s TVs so that punters can check out the girls in the bar downstairs. Mr Singapore and his best buddy-as described to me by Cindee-were sitting there watching the girls dancing. I showered, changed into fresh Chinos and a polo shirt, and headed downstairs. By the time I walked into the bar, Mr Singapore was playing pool with four or five reasonably cute bargirls, all of them drinking heavily, apparently on his bar tab.
I perched myself on a bar stool smiled at a lanky bargirl and before I could say ‘I’m fresh off the plane from Auckland’ she was by my side with her hand on my thigh, tossing her hair and pointing her surgically-enhanced but nonetheless tempting breasts at me. Her name was Du and she had only been working in the bar for two weeks, she said. The tattoo of a scorpion on her shoulder and the three-baht gold chain on her wrist suggested she’d been at the game a bit longer than that, but I just nodded and smiled, patted her on her very impressive backside and told her to get me a Jack Daniels and herself whatever she wanted. A few rounds later and I had the full story on Mr Singapore. He was a regular who came for a week every few months, she said, which pretty much put paid to her story of only being there for two weeks. That’s typical of a Thai bargirl-cunning as a fox, with the mind of a goldfsh.
Miss Du kept pestering me to take her for a short-time romp upstairs but I put her off by telling her that my herpes had just flared up and I was probably infectious for a few days. She flounced off which gave me the chance to challenge Mr Singapore to a game of pool. He turned out to be a really nice guy. His name was Alan and he ran a successful business in Singapore, organizing golf trips around the region, and just wanted to have a few days R amp;R in Thailand at a tenth of the cost of similar shenanigans in the Lion City. After a couple of hours of drinks and pool I had his namecard and an invite for a night out on the town next time I was in Singapore. He made no move to take any
of the girls for short-time rumpy-pumpy, so as darkness fell I made my excuses and headed out of the hotel. I found a nearby internet cafA© and sent a carefully worded email to Cindee. The thing was, I liked the guy. And he was just doing what a million guys do, and millions more would do if they could: to blow off a bit of steam with a few good-looking girls in tow. It was natural, it wasn’t as if I’d caught him with a mistress or a toy-boy. He was just a guy, having fun. So I told Cindee that I’d seen her husband and his friend playing pool with a few girls, but that I didn’t think there was anything serious going on. I still felt like a rat when I hit the ‘send’ button.
So, off to the other job. Ronnie had been married for almost ten years. He’d moved to Kuala Lumpur as a regional manager with a big oil company with his Thai wife and child. He was on a full expat package-big salary, flights home, nice house, maids, international school for the kid, the works. After a couple of years the wife had said that she was homesick and he’d agreed that she should return to Thailand, which is were he planned to retire to anyway. They bought a large plot of land on the outskirts of Pattaya and he paid an architect to design a ten-room mansion with a pool and a three-car garage. Ronnie spent most of his time in Kuala Lumpur where his son went to one of the top international schools. He had a nanny and a couple of maids and a driver so it wasn’t exactly a hardship posting, and every few months he flew back to Pattaya to spend time with his wife. The arrangement worked well for the first year, but then progress on the house slowed to a crawl. And Ronnie’s suspicions were raised when his wife started talking about starting up a band and owning a restaurant, two long-term dreams of hers. He go in touch via my website and after a few emails I agreed to go and check her out. He faxed me a map to get me to his dream house and I drove out for a look-see. It was easy enough to find, and easy enough to see that building had stopped some time ago. The house had been half-completed but much of what had been done was now overgrown by weeds. There was bamboo scaffolding around the basic framework of the house, but there was no sign of a roof and there were no windows or doors. There was a large rectangular hole where the pool was going to be, and another hole which I guessed was where the garage foundations would go, but there was no building equipment around, no cement mixers or shovels or pickaxes. According to the schedule that the architect had given Ronnie, the house was due to be finished within eight weeks but there was clearly no chance of the builders meeting the deadline. I took a few snapshots with the trusty digital camera so that Ronnie could see for himself.
Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson Page 10