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

by Stephen Leather

  Usually the tourist has gone home and is staying in contact by phone or via email. More often than not there are requests for money. Sometimes the girl switches off her mobile phone at night. Or in the evenings. Sometimes a man answers her phone and claims to be her brother. Suspicions are raised, but the tourist consoles himself be thinking that his girlfriend is a ‘good’ girl. But the suspicions festers like an open wound, and that’s when they call me. They always start the conversation the same way. ‘I know I’m worrying about nothing, because she’s a good girl. She isn’t a bargirl.’

  Rule number one of the private-eye game: if you think that your girlfriend is being unfaithful, she almost certainly is. I don’t tell them that, of course. I don’t want to burst their bubble. Besides, if I did tell them the cold, hard truth there’d be no point in them wiring me a retainer, would they?

  Anyway, one day I was sitting at my desk wondering whether two o’clock in the afternoon was too early to open a bottle of Jack Daniels when my mobile rang. It was a Danish guy who said he was heading back home the following day and would appreciate a few minutes of my time. He had a Thai girlfriend, ‘a real girl, not a bargirl,’ he stressed. He planned to marry her and take her back to live in Denmark, and in the meantime had agreed to support her. His name was Lars and he said he wasn’t far from my office having coffee at a Delifrance outlet. I said I’d be there within half an hour, figuring that if nothing else I’d get a free coffee and a croissant.

  I was across the road from the Delifrance within five minutes and spent a quarter of an hour watching the place. I’d done several bargirl investigations the previous week and the last time I visited Soi Cowboy I had the distinct impression that a few of the girls were talking about me behind my back. Nothing concrete, just a prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck, but I had been looking over my shoulder a lot over the past few days. I didn’t know Lars and for all I knew a girl might be using him to set me up. I spotted him straight away-he was the only farang in the place, and by the look of it he was on his own. No Thai heavies nearby, nothing out of the ordinary. When I was absolutely sure he was alone I wandered over and introduced myself. He asked me what I wanted and I said I’d have a white coffee and a chocolate croissant.

  He was in his mid-forties, losing his hair and gaining weight, with a receding chin and ears that stuck out like teapot handles. I’m no oil painting, but I reckoned that fate hadn’t been kind to Lars in the looks department. After eight years of being told that I was a ‘handsum man’ maybe I was starting to believe my own publicity. I could understand why a man like Lars would come to Thailand looking for love. I doubted he’d have much chance of pulling anything better than a three-bag girl back in Denmark.

  I munched on my pastry as he told me his story. He was on his fifth trip to the Land of Smiles, and on his third visit he’d been drinking in a pool bar in Sukhumvit Soi 4, a regular place with no go-go dancers, short-time rooms or barfines. Just pool tables and waitresses, with maybe a few freelancers playing pool who wouldn’t say no to a short-time with a punter but who wouldn’t be too upset if they went home alone.

  Lars was with a Danish friend who had started going out with a bartender, another ‘good’ girl who wouldn’t dream of trading sex for money. Lars had told her that he was fed up with bargirls and wanted to meet a ‘real’ Thai girl, a ‘good’ girl. A girl he could love and who would love him. Miss Bartender, as it transpired, had the perfect candidate. She knew of an attractive young student who was all alone and who would very much like to meet a handsome farang such as Lars. An introduction was arranged, and Lars fell in love. Her name was Pim, she was a twenty-three year old student at Rhamkamheng University, and she had never been anywhere near a go-go bar. Lars took her on holiday to Hua Hin, then they went up to Chiang Mai for a week, and before long he had agreed to pay her 20,000 baht a month. My eyebrows headed skyward when he told me that. If she was a ‘good’ girl, why was he paying her twice the national average wage to attend university? Was that how courtship worked in Denmark? Of course it wasn’t. I didn’t say anything, though. I wasn’t in a bubble-bursting mood, and I’d yet to receive a retainer, so I just nodded and smiled and ate my Danish.

  Lars said that he had visited the girl’s small apartment, and she’d taken him to her university once, dressed in the traditional uniform of black skirt and white blouse. Miss Pim was set to graduate the following year but Lars had decided not to wait and that he was set to marry her within the next few weeks and take her back to Denmark. Pim had done nothing to arouse his suspicions, but Lars had been visiting a few websites devoted to Thailand and Thai ways, including a site that was full of horror stories of the ‘farang boy meets Thai girl, farang boy falls in love with Thai girl, Thai girl steals everything the farang boy has and runs off with her Thai husband’ type. Lars was sure that Pim was a good girl, and that she loved him, and that she would make the perfect wife, but he wanted me to run a few basic checks, just to make absolutely sure. The next night he was due to go back to Denmark for a month and that seemed the perfect opportunity to put me on the case. If the mouse did play she was more likely to do it while the cat was 6,000 miles away. He paid me a three-day retainer in cash and gave me her address and her landline phone number. She had a mobile but Lars always called her on the landline at night so he always knew where she was. That made good sense. A common sight in the city’s red-light districts is a bargirl huddled in a corner, a hand cupped around their mobile phones, assuring their sponsor that they were at home, tucked up in bed, already sleep.

  Lars showed me a photograph of Miss Pim but it was a small passport type and I doubted that I’d be able to recognize her from it. Lars was staying at the Amari Boulevard and she was coming around to see him the following afternoon so we agreed that I’d wait in the lobby and see her in the flesh. I was there, reading the Bangkok Post , when Miss Pim arrived in her university uniform. She looked like any of the other thousands of students you can see in Bangkok any day of the week. Tidy, a little over five foot, slim, hair tied back in a ponytail. Not too pretty, but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. The only thing out of the ordinary was the confident way she walked across the lobby to the elevators. Most young Thai girls would have been too shy to walk into a major tourist hotel and go up to a man’s room, but Miss Pim clearly had no reservations.

  I sent Lars a text saying mission accomplished and that I’d keep in touch by email.

  According to Lars, Miss Pim went to university every day, taking the bus from her apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 77 at about eight o’clock and getting home just after four. So Monday morning at seven I took the Skytrain to On Nut and a motorcycle down Soi 77 to where she lived. There were four massive apartment blocks, creatively named A, B, C and D. It was a working-class Thai area and I was the only farang for miles. I sat down at one of the many pavement foodstalls and ordered my staple kow man gai and a Coke. With breakfast at thirty-five baht I was keeping expenses down, which would make Lars happy. Hundreds of students in black skirts and white blouses walked by, others whizzed by sitting side-saddle on the back of motorcycles. Eight o’clock came and went with no sign of Miss Pim, and by the time my watch read 9am I realised that she was either still at home or I’d missed her.

  Pim’s apartment was number 305C, which I figured was Block C, third floor, apartment five. I waited around the entrance to the block until a group of students came out, and I hurried inside before the door closed. There were no elevators and the temperature was heading towards the predicted low-forties so I took off my jacket and headed for the stairs. There was a metal grille across the door to apartment five on the third floor. On the door itself were the numbers 305 so I figured I had the right place. The grille was padlocked on the outside, so there was obviously no one inside which meant that I’d missed her. Or that she hadn’t gone home that night.

  I left it until four o’clock in the afternoon before returning to the roadside foodstall. The mid-forties forecast had been breached,
and it was hellishly humid, and the boiled chicken had been sitting in the sun all day so I gave the kow man gai a miss and just ordered a Coke and a ten-baht bag of fresh pineapple. I ate my pineapple and sipped my Coke and scrutinised the faces of the passing students for any sign of Miss Pim. Five o’clock came and went and there was no sign of her, but as the majority were whizzing by on the back of motorcycles at five baht a time, I figured I could easily have missed her.

  I got a motorcycle back to the Skytrain, then went home for a shower and a nap. I had a bargirl investigation that I’d been meaning to do for a while so after dark I caught a taxi to Soi Cowboy and parked myself in a dark corner of the After School Bar with a JD and Coke. The girl I was looking for was the fiancA© of a Swiss guy currently in receipt of a 30,000-baht-a-month retainer until her visa came through. Her name was Ann and there was no sign of her on the stage or sitting next to the half dozen or so customers scattered around the bar.

  I started chatting in Khamen to one of the prettier girls. Yu-ee her name was, and she was determined to get me over to the Naughty Boys’ Corner but the only oral I was interested in was the sort that produced answers to my questions. I offered to buy her a cola but she said she’d prefer a Heineken beer and a tequila chaser. She told me she was eighteen but I figured she was a few years older than that. But even if she was in her early twenties that was still a pretty impressive drinks order for eight o’clock in the evening.

  She slipped her hand on my knee and than ran it slowly along my thigh and asked me again to visit the Naughty Boys’ Corner with me. Five hundred baht and I was guaranteed a smile on my face. I told her that I was actually there to see a girl called Anne because a friend of mine had barfined her last month and he wanted her mobile phone number so that he could call her from Australia. I was pleasantly surprised when Yu-ee told me that Anne had stopped work, that she had a rich farang taking care of her, and that she was planning to start a new life in Zurich. She pronounced Zurich to rhyme with rich, which was cute.

  I bought her another beer and chaser and spent another ten minutes having my thigh rubbed before I figured that the Naughty Boys’ Corner wasn’t that bad an idea after all. I left the bar at midnight with a smile on my face, and not just because I’d finally found a bargirl who was doing the right thing by her sponsor.

  I went over to the motorcycle taxi boys and was about to tell them to take me home, when I remembered Lars. I decided to pay a night-time visit to Miss Pim’s apartment. I negotiated a round-trip fare with a guy with a 100cc Honda and got him to wait for me outside Block C. It was cooler than during the day, but it was still a hot evening and many rooms had their doors open, TVs on full blast, radios playing. The door to Miss Pim’s room was shut. The grille was unlocked, though, so someone was obviously inside. I bent down, pretending to tie my shoelace, but I couldn’t hear anything inside. But I did see two pairs of cheap flip-fops in the corridor outside the door, and one of the pairs was way too big for a girl. It’s the Thai way to leave their shoes outside the front door, and I’ve cracked more than a few cases by checking footwear outside an apartment at night. There were a number of reasons that could explain away the man-size pair of flip-flops outside her door. Her father might be visiting. She might have called a repairman out to fix her fridge. Or she might be on the other side of the door having torrid sex with her boyfriend or husband. If I was a betting man, which I am, I’d be betting the farm on the latter.

  I got my motorcycle taxi guy to run me home. On the way I stopped off at a late-night internet cafA© and fired off an email to Lars laying out the shoe situation for him.

  He phoned me three hours later, forgetting about the time difference in his haste to hear about the shoes from the horse’s mouth. I gave him a run down on what I’d seen, and suddenly he didn’t sound so sure of himself. Once when he’d phoned Pim on her landline a man had answered. Pim had hurriedly taken the phone and explained that it was her brother visiting. Lars said it was probably her brother again, but I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. I said I could easily check if she had a brother, though it would mean a trip to her home town.

  Lars asked if I’d keep her under surveillance and promised to send me more money. I spent a couple of hours at the kow man gai stall the following morning, but I still couldn’t spot Miss Pim. There were just too many students on the move. I was starting to think about knocking on her door and giving her the old ‘I’m from the Danish Embassy’ speech and taking it from there. The temperature was heading towards the mid-forties again so I moved into a small shop where a dozen motorcycle taxi guys were watching a football match on a big screen TV. There was a small fan mounted on the wall and I positioned myself so that I could watch the game, keep an eye on the entrance to Block C, and enjoy a cool breeze. A couple of the guys were munching on fried grasshoppers and chatting away in a Laotian dialect so I nodded at the bag of insects and said ‘ sapp-e-lee?’, the Laos phrase for delicious. They roared with laughter and asked me if I’d like to try. I’ve eaten bugs before so in the interests of a bit of male bonding I took one. I’d like to say it tasted like chicken, but I’d be lying. It tasted like a fried insect. A bit like a slightly bitter cashew nut, with legs. I ordered a bottle of Sangsom whiskey and some soda for my new-found friends and they found me a plastic chair. I figured I’d missed Miss Pim for the day so I might as well enjoy the football.

  It turned out that one of the guys came from my wife’s village, so we did plenty of glass-clinking and shouting ‘ chon-gel’ which sort of means ‘cheers’. A few hours later and I figured I’d better head home to freshen up and dig out a suit to catch Miss Pim in my embassy guise later that evening.

  My new best friend said that he was knocking off for the day and that he’d give me a lift to the Skytrain station at On Nut. It was one hell of a ride due to the combination of the whisky I’d bought him and the amphetamines he’d been popping. We zig-zagged through the traffic, me with white knuckles and clenched teeth, him with a manic look in his eyes and a tendency to scratch his groin with his gear-changing hand whenever we overtook a smoke-belching bus. By the time he pulled up in front of the Skytrain station I was feeling fairly light-headed.

  The guy wouldn’t take any money from me. I was just about to head up the stairs to the platform when I thought I’d try a long shot. I pulled out Miss Pim’s picture and showed it to him. It was probably all the whiskey I’d drunk but I didn’t bother with a cover story, I just told him the truth, that Miss Pim’s boyfriend was worried that she might be being unfaithful and that I hadn’t been able to find out whether or not she was fooling around. The motorcycle taxi guy grinned the moment he looked at the photograph, then he beamed, then he burst out laughing. ‘I know her,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded. ‘If I tell you something, you mustn’t say it was me that told you, okay?’

  ‘Big okay,’ I said. And I promised him 500 baht to seal the deal. He asked me if I remembered a big guy who was sitting right in front of the television, drinking beer from an ice bucket through a straw. I remembered. He was an ugly brute with a huge mole on his top lip that looked as if it was about to turn cancerous. He’d glared at me when I spoke Laotian as if I had no right to be using his language, and he’d jumped to his feet every time a goal looked likely.

  I nodded. The guy laughed again and jabbed a dirty fingernail at the photograph. ‘That’s his wife,’ said the guy gleefully.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The guy nodded emphatically. He told me that the guy with the mole was the boss of the local motorcycle taxi rank, that he was a nasty piece of work and that nobody liked him. Like most ranks they operated on a rota system but the boss had a habit of grabbing the best jobs for himself, best meaning young, pretty and female. But what had really got up his men’s noses was that the boss had started boasting that he was able to get drunk every night on a farang’s money and that he was about to buy a new
high-powered motorcycle as his wife was due to receive a stack of money from Denmark and an airfare. Pim was most definitely his wife, my guy had seen them together, and he lived with her in Block C. They had a two-year-old son who was being cared for by her mother back in Chonburi.

  I gave the guy 500 baht and stumbled up the stairs to the platform, marvelling at my luck. The Chinese have a saying that pretty much covers it: even a blind cat can stumble over a dead mouse sometimes.

  The next day I emailed Lars with the details of Miss Pim’s web of lies. I never enjoy breaking bad news, but at least I’d be saving him a lot of heartbreak down the line. I just hoped that he didn’t ask for proof, which a lot of my clients did. ‘Just a photograph,’ they say. ‘So I can see for myself.’

  I’ve never understood that. They pay me to get the information they want, then when I get it they want more. It’s as if they want to torture themselves. Or maybe they don’t believe me. Or don’t want to believe me.

  Often they start firing questions at me, as if somehow I know all there is to know about all things Thai. How could she lie to me? How could she sleep with me when she has a husband? How could a husband allow his wife to sleep with another man? All good questions. And to be honest, I don’t have the answers. I’m a private eye, not a psychiatrist. I have my opinions though, not that they’re much use to Lars and the thousands of other farangs who get ripped off by Thai girls every year.