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

Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson
THE CASE OF THE DOUBLE-CROSSED DUTCHMAN

There are a whole host of things I love about living in Thailand: the gorgeous women, the climate, the food, the beaches. But right at the top of the list of things I hate is being pursued at high speed by two motorcyclists with gun-toting pillion passengers. The guys out to put a bullet in my head weren’t flashing the smiles that Thailand is famous for-they were glaring at me with murder in their eyes. I swerved over to the right, trying to clip the rear wheel of the bike nearest to me but he moved away easily. The pillion passenger was caught off balance and he grabbed the waist of the driver. I took a quick look over my left shoulder. The second pillion passenger had his gun aimed at my head. I slammed on the brakes and the bike roared by, the passenger’s hair whipping in the wind.

I cursed, spitting out pretty much all the swear words I knew. I was in deep, deep shit, and it had all been the fault of my brand new digital camera.

The case had started easily enough. I’d received a phone call from a Dutch detective agency in Amsterdam that I’d done business with a few times. They were good payers and good payers are like hens teeth in the private-eye business. They were acting for a well-known Dutch businessmen who’d married a girl from Bangkok five years earlier. The businessmen had started taking his wife to a local Thai restaurant and was worried that she might have started a relationship with a young waiter. The Dutch detectives had put the wife under surveillance but so far hadn’t caught her misbehaving, but now the wife was planning to fly to Thailand for Songkran, the Thai new year. It’s the traditional time for Thai families to get together, and the businessman was too busy adding to his millions to go with her. A red flag was raised when the Dutch detectives discovered that the Thai waiter had booked onto the same flight to Bangkok. It could have been a coincidence, of course, but the Dutch guys wanted me to mount a surveillance operation once they’d arrived in Bangkok.

The girl’s parents lived in Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, so the first thing I did was to check if she had booked an onward flight from Bangkok. She hadn’t, but she might be planning to buy the ticket once she’d arrived, or even travel up by train or bus. I asked for a description of the jewellery and watch she usually wore, because photographs were often surprisingly unhelpful for identifying people and there would be several dozen young and pretty girls, all with black hair and brown eyes, getting off the KLM 747 from Amsterdam. The information, along with her passport number and a copy of her Thai ID card, came over with her pictures, plus a photograph of the waiter, and a sizeable retainer was transferred into my account with Bangkok Bank.

She was due to arrive at Don Muang at eleven o’clock in the morning in two days’ time. The problem was, I had no idea what she was going to do once she’d arrived. I bought Business Class tickets on the three flights that were due to leave for Chiang Mai after her flight had arrived, just in case she decided to head up north straight away. But if she took a car into Bangkok, I had a problem. I’d have to be in the terminal to check that she arrived, but that would mean parking my car in the multistorey. If she hopped into a cab I’d lose her before I got back to my vehicle. If she was picked up by a friend then the friend would have parked in the multistorey and by the time I’d identified their car it would be too late to get to my own vehicle. I couldn’t use motorcycles to follow her because motorcycles aren’t allowed on the country’s expressways, and the route from the airport to the city was all expressway. I didn’t have the money to start paying half a dozen guys to stake out the airport to cover every eventuality so I decided to nab a taxi driver at the airport and offered him 2,000 baht for a four-hour hire. He practically bit my hand off and I gave him 500 baht up front and told him to wait outside the terminal for me. He had a mobile phone so that if the girl headed to the car park I could follow her and then call the taxi to pick me up. If she hired a cab then I was ahead of the game, I just had to get into my taxi and follow her. And if she walked over to the domestic terminal and bought a ticket to Chiang Mai, all I’d have to do would be to get on the flight with her. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I sipped a cup of coffee in the arrivals area.

The terminal was packed, as hundreds of thousands of Thais rushed home in time for the New Year celebrations. There were lots of tourists too, who think it’s fun to douse each other with water as a way of celebrating Thai New Year. Frankly, after ten years of having water thrown in my face every April, I celebrate the festival by staying at home and ordering pizza and beer over the phone. But that’s just me.

The flight landed bang on time and it took them just over an hour to pass through Customs and Immigration. I spotted the girl among a group of Thais. She was pushing a trolley piled high with suitcases and bulging nylon bags, presumably gifts for her family. The waiter was a few paces behind her, pushing his own trolley. Nothing suspicious about that, they would have been sure to have met on the plane even if they hadn’t been planning to travel together. The photographs that the Dutch agency sent didn’t do the girl justice. She had waist-length hair, high cheekbones, and was model-pretty with curves in all the right places. She was tall for a Thai, five-seven or thereabouts, and she was wearing a short denim skirt that showed off a gorgeous pair of legs.

There were four people waiting to greet the girl, two were a few years younger than her and they quickly waied her, pressing their hands together and placing the tips of the fingers against their chins. Showing respect. That tends to be how Thais greet each other, even after long absences. No great show of emotion, no hugs or kisses. A nice, respectful wai. The girl first waied the two older members of the group, then returned the wai to the girl and boy who had waied her. Then she introduced them to the waiter. He waied them all, then they pushed their trolleys towards the car park. That answered two questions right there. She wasn’t flying to Chiang Mai and she was definitely travelling with the waiter.

I kept my distance but the terminal was so crowded that I doubted they would have spotted me even if they’d looked my way. They walked to the car park and started putting the bags into the back of a Toyota van. I made a note of the registration number and hurried back to the waiting taxi.

I was feeling even more pleased with myself as the van pulled out of the multistorey car park. I told the taxi driver to follow the van and settled back in my seat. All we had to do was keep the van in sight on the expressway and make sure that we took the same exit. The fact that I was tailing the van in a Bangkok taxi meant that there was virtually no way they’d spot me. Taxis account for about ten per cent of the cars on the roads at any time.

The van started to pull away from us and I told the driver to step on it. He nodded enthusiastically but we didn’t go any faster. I told him again, this time in Khmer, but that didn’t seem to sink in so I repeated myself in the Isaan dialect that many taxi drivers speak. He nodded again but the van continued to disappear into the distance. I peered into the footwell. The accelerator was flat against the floor. I groaned. The engine was juddering like a heart-attack victim and we hadn’t even broken sixty kilometres an hour. The driver grinned and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles started to turn white.

We lost the van before we reached the first turn off so I told the driver to take me back to my office. I gave him half the fee we had agreed on but he threw a temper tantrum and started waving his mobile phone at me and threatened to call his friends. Most taxi drivers have at least a crowbar or baseball bat in their vehicles, and guns aren’t unknown, and one of their favourite pastimes is roughing up troublesome farangs, as they call us foreigners, so I gave him the full 2,000 baht. The Dutchman would be covering my expenses anyway so it was no big deal.

I phoned the Dutch agency and spun them a story about knowing the general area where the subject was, but that I wanted a recent phone bill from the client to see if there were any Bangkok numbers that the girl had called before arriving in Thailand. An hour later and a phone bill was faxed through to me. I was in luck-there were four numbers with Bangkok’s 02 prefix. I fed the numbers into a reverse directory I use and the computer gave me the addresses. Three were offices and one was an apartment in the Bangna area of the city. I drove out to Bangna in a rental car and sat outside the apartment block for the rest of the day.

The apartment was in a small side road and it was difficult to get a view of the main entrance without sticking out like a sore thumb so I parked the car and went and sat in a small chicken restaurant opposite the block. I ordered some kow man gai, steamed chicken and rice with a tangy sauce and a bowl of watery soup. There was a British soccer game on the television set in the corner and after muttering ‘Man U channa nanon (Manchester United are sure to win) I was pretty much ignored by the half dozen male customers sitting at a Formica table drinking Singha beer. After about an hour I saw the waiter walking towards the apartment block. Bingo. He went inside.

I phoned my contact in the Dutch agency and explained that the waiter was definitely staying with the girl and there was no indication that they were heading up to Chiang Mai. My contact was pleased, but said that his client wanted a photograph of the girl and the waiter together.

I had a brand new digital camera in the boot of the car, so I parked as close to the apartment block as I could and sat with the camera on my lap. It had a telephoto lens and the salesman had assured me that it was state-of-the-art. Being digital, I could use my computer to email the pictures without having to wait for film to be processed. I as starting to feel pretty pleased with myself again. I had found where they were staying, there was only one way in and out, all I needed was a photograph and the fee was in the bag.

Time passed. It got dark. I had a couple of bottles of water in the car and I drank them both. Midnight passed. I was thinking about abandoning the surveillance for the night, figuring that perhaps the girl and the waiter were having too much fun to go out, when I saw movement in the lobby. I wound the window down and got the camera ready. It was the waiter. He held the door open and the girl walked out. ‘Yes,’ I hissed triumphantly. I brought up the camera lens and took a couple of quick shots. Just then there was a double flash of lightning. It looked as if my luck was changing for the worse-the weather had been fine all day and now that I had them in my sights a tropical storm was starting. I fired off another two quick shots and lightning flashed again.

Click. Flash. Click. Flash.

Then it hit me. My state-of-the-art digital camera with its onboard smarter-than-a-human-being computer had decided that as it was dark I should be using the flash. What the bloody thing hadn’t realised was that the last thing a private detective on a stakeout needs is a flash going off, computer-controlled or otherwise. The girl and the waiter looked in my direction and hurried along the road away from the car.

I cursed and fumbled with the camera, trying to find the control that turned off the flash.

Something smacked against the bonnet of the car and I looked up to see a muscle-bound Thai man glaring at me. He had a thick gold chain around his neck and a wicked scar across his left cheek that cut through a crop of old acne scars. He thumped on the bonnet again.

‘ Tham arai?” he screamed, which means ‘I’m sorry old chap but what exactly are you doing?’ or words to that effect.

I put the camera on the passenger seat and hit the central locking switch. The thuds of the locks clicking into place antagonised the man even more and he slapped the windscreen. A second man, just as heavily built, ran over and began pulling at the passenger door handle.

I looked around. Two more men were walking purposefully out of the restaurant and one of them was swinging a large machete. I didn’t know what I’d done to upset them but they didn’t look like the sort of guys who were going to respond to reason. I had the engine running to keep the aircon cold so I put the car into gear and moved forward, slowly enough to give the guy with the scar a chance to get out of the way. A foreigner running over a Thai would end only one way and sleeping on the floor of a Thai prison wasn’t how I was planning to spend my retirement.

I pushed harder on the accelerator. The guy kept hold of the passenger side door handle and jogged to keep up. I cursed. I didn’t want to drag him down the road, but I was equally unhappy at the prospect of the guy with the machete doing a remodelling job on the rental car.

Machete Guy shouted something and started to run. I stopped worrying about the man on the passenger side and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The wheels screeched on the tarmac and the car leapt forward. I roared down the road, snatching a quick look in the rear-view mirror. The four men were standing on the pavement, screaming at me. I grinned and took the first right turn, onto a major road. I was just starting to relax when I saw the motorbikes.

As they got closer I recognised one of the drivers-it was Machete Guy. I had no idea what I’d done to upset the guys, but figured they had obviously been up to something iffy and thought that I’d been taking photographs of them. Drugs maybe, or gambling. There might have been an underage brothel above the restaurant for all I knew. In an ideal world I’d have just explained that I had been taking pictures of an unfaithful wife, but Bangkok wasn’t an ideal world and it was probably too late for any explanation.

There was a fair bit of traffic around and I had to slow down. The motorcycles quickly gained on me. Machete Guy’s pillion passenger brandished a pistol and motioned for me to pull over to the side of the road. Yeah, right. I shook my head, braked hard, and pulled a left, cutting across a bus and feeling the rear end fishtail as I floored the accelerator again. I knew there was no way I was going to be able to outrun the bikes in the city. It would only be a matter of time before I hit traffic or a red light.

I could feel sweat trickling down my neck. Life is cheap in Bangkok. That’s not a clichA©, it’s an economic truth. The going rate for a professional hit is 20,000 baht for a Thai, 50,000 if it’s a farang. But amateurs were also happy to use bullets to solve a quarrel because most murderers end up serving seven years at most, and that was in the unlikely event of them being caught. All of this was running through my mind as I drove through the streets at high speed. Along with wondering why I hadn’t chosen another profession, why I’d moved to the Land of Smiles in the first place, and why I hadn’t read the manual for the camera before taking it on the job.

The best I could hope for was to run across a police patrol car but even that was no guarantee that I’d be safe. For all I knew, the four guys in hot pursuit could well be off-duty cops.

The second bike drew up on my passenger side and the pillion passenger waved a large automatic at me. I swung the car to the right. I had a really, really bad feeling about the way this was going to play out. They were getting madder and madder and all it would take would be one shot to a tyre and it would all be over.

Suddenly I saw a sign for the Pattaya Expressway and realised that it was my best hope: bikes aren’t allowed on the expressway and even if they ignored the law and followed me I’d be able to get the car up to full speed and with them being two up on small bikes they wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.

I kept on going straight, accelerated, then as the ramp approached I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car hard to the left, just missing the concrete dividing wall that separated the ramp from the road. The bikes continued to roar down the road then I saw the brake lights go red as they realised what had happened. I sped towards the line of toll booths, pulling my wallet out of my pocket and flicking through the notes. The toll was forty baht but I flung a red 100-baht note at the toll booth attendant and yelled at her to keep the change as I sped on through.

As I accelerated down the expressway I kept looking in the rear view mirror but there was no sign of my pursuers, and after twenty minutes barrelling along at more than 140 kilometres an hour I started to relax. I left the expressway at the third exit, then parked up and had a bowl of noodles and pork and a bottle of Chang beer at a roadside vendor to calm my nerves. My hands stopped shaking by the time I’d put the third bottle away.

I waited a couple of hours before driving back to the city, and I caught a few hours sleep after emailing a full report to the Dutch agency along with the photographs I’d taken.

I was woken by the phone ringing. It was one of the Dutch operatives- the client had booked himself on the next flight to Bangkok and he wanted to confront his wife, ideally while she was in bed with her lover. I’ve never understood that, but it’s happened time and time again. It’s not enough for the wronged guy to know that his wife has been unfaithful, he wants to rub her face in the fact that he knows. If it was me, I’d just up and leave. Okay, I’d clear out the bank accounts first and maybe take a razor blade to all her clothes, but I wouldn’t bother with a confrontation. That’s just me, though, and in this business the client is always right. Even when he’s wrong.

I got up and showered, then returned the rental car. The guy who ran the rental company was an old friend and he agreed to swap my paperwork with that of an American tourist who’d just fown back to Seattle so I was covered just in case the bike guys had taken my registration number.

The Dutch agency had told me to take good care of the client so I booked a Mercedes and driver and got to Don Muang Airport an hour before the flight was due, holding a piece of card with his name on it as I sipped my black coffee. The man who walked over to me and introduced himself was just about the fattest guy I had ever set eyes on. He wasn’t big. He wasn’t even huge. He was obese and must have weighed at least 400 pounds straight out of the shower. He was in his early forties, with slicked back hair and half a dozen chins. He was wearing a light blue suit that was stretched like a sail in a high wind; I figured he must be at least five times the weight of the his wife and I couldn’t imagine how they went about having sex. We shook hands. His was the size of a small shovel but the fingers were soft, like underdone pork sausages. He had no luggage and hadn’t shaved on the plane, but he said he wanted to head straight out to the apartment. I sat upfront as we drove out to Bangna. The client didn’t say anything and only grunted at my attempts to start a conversation so after a while I just let him sit there in silence.

It isn’t unusual for a pretty young Thai girl to marry an older guy. Like girls all over the Third World they want someone to take care of them and their families and there’s no doubt that a few thousand dollars in the bank can help add to a man’s attractiveness to the opposite sex. But there was no way on earth that the match between the lovely girl we were going to see and the blimp I had in the back of the Mercedes was a marriage made in heaven. He must have known that. Every time he caught a glimpse of the two of them in a mirror it must have hit home that he was simply too big for her. If it had been me, I’d have just been grateful for the fact that I was allowed to sleep with a woman as beautiful as her, and if the downside meant that she had the occasional fling with a man nearer her own age, well then I’d just put that down to the price I had to pay. The Dutch guys hadn’t managed to catch her being unfaithful in Amsterdam, which meant that she was probably only fooling around in Thailand. I wanted to tell the client that he’d be better off turning a blind eye to the occasional indiscretion and that the best thing he could do would be to go straight back to Holland, but I kept quiet.

I had the driver park around the corner from the apartment block, and pulled on a pair of shades and a Singha beer baseball cap before I got out of the car. The client was obviously used to sitting in the back of expensive vehicles because he didn’t make a move to open his door himself, he just sat staring straight ahead until I opened it for him. He wheezed as he hauled himself out of the car, and I swear the suspension sighed with relief. ‘I burn easily,’ I said, explaining away the cap and sunglasses, but the real reason was that I didn’t want to risk being recognised if Machete Man and his gun-wielding buddies were back in the restaurant. They weren’t, and I relaxed a little when I saw that the restaurant was closed.

A receptionist buzzed us into the apartment block and a purple 500-baht note got us the room number. We rode up in the lift in silence to the fourth floor. I looked around to see if there was a weight limit for the lift, and I kept having visions of the cables snapping and us both plummeting to our deaths.

There were a couple of dozen rooms on either side of a long corridor. We walked slowly along to the room. I waited at the side of the door as the client knocked, twice.

The door opened. The girl was there wearing a white T-shirt and blue denim shorts. She stared at him sleepily, then her jaw dropped as she realised who it was.

‘Darling…’ she said, but then the words dried up and her mouth open and closed silently.

‘Don’t “darling” me, you whore!’ hissed the client, and he pushed the door open. It was a studio apartment and the waiter was lying on the double bed, wrapped in a towel. The waiter leapt to his feet as the big guy strode into the room and rushed out, his bare feet slapping on the tiled floor as he bolted down the corridor.

I stayed where I was. The client had left the door open so I could hear everything that was being said. The girl began pleading that there’d been a mistake, that the waiter was just a friend, that she was only staying in the room until she could get a flight to Chiang Mai. The client let her beg and plead, then silenced her with an outburst of expletives that suggested he’d had an army career in his younger, and probably thinner, days.

‘You were a whore when I met you, and you’re a whore now!’ he shouted once he’d finished swearing. ‘I gave you everything. I gave you the clothes on your back, the watch on your wrist. I gave you money for your parents, I paid for your brothers to go to school. Anything you needed, anything you wanted, I gave to you. And you do this to me? You fuck around behind my back.’

She started to cry.

‘You’re dead to me, you bitch!’ he shouted. ‘When I get back home I’m destroying everything of yours. Every dress, every handbag, every shoe; everything I ever gave you, I’m burning. Every photograph of you, I’m destroying. You’re dead to me. I’m divorcing you and you won’t get a penny. The best lawyers in the country work for me, and if I get my way you’ll lose your Dutch citizenship.’

There was a dull thud and I took a quick look into he room just in case she’s beaten him over the head with a blunt object but she was the one on the floor, slumped down next to the bed, her hands over her face, sobbing her heart out.

He waddled over to a dressing table and grabbed her handbag. He pulled out a Dutch passport and ripped it into several places, went over to the toilet and flushed away the pieces. Then he threw the handbag into the toilet for good measure.

‘Please, darling…’ sobbed the girl.

The client sneered at her and walked out of the room, his ham-sized hands clenched into fists. I followed him back to the lift. I saw the waiter in the stairwell, anxiously looking in our direction, his hands clutching the towel around his waist. I waved for him to keep out of the way.

The lift doors opened and we rode down. ‘Bitch,’ said the client, venomously. His face was bathed in sweat and there were damp patches under the arms of his jacket.

I said nothing. I could see his point, but I figured that of the two of them, he’d lost the most. She’d lost a sugar daddy, but then she wouldn’t have to satisfy the sexual urges of a man big enough to crush her if he rolled over in his sleep. And a girl as pretty as her wouldn’t have to look too hard to find another husband. He’d lost a beautiful young gold-digger but now he’d have to sleep with nothing more than his right hand for company. Swings and roundabouts? I didn’t think so. If ever there was a Pyrhic victory, this was it.

We walked out of the block and over to the Mercedes. ‘I don’t need you any more,’ he wheezed. ‘I can take care of myself at the airport. Thank you. For everything.’ He handed me a fistful of euros which I guessed was my cab fare home.

I opened the rear door of the Mercedes and he hauled himself slowly into the back. The suspension groaned in protest. I closed the door behind him and the car moved away from the kerb. I got one last look at the client as the car drove off. There were tears streaming down his fleshy cheeks.