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

THE CASE OF THE HUA HIN HUSBANDS

They say that all good things come in threes: the Three Degrees, the Three Stooges, the three very attractive young women that spent ninety minutes making my every sexual fantasy come true in one of the upstairs rooms at the Eden Club in Soi 7. I love things that come in threes, especially three cases in the same place because then I can swing three sets of expenses for a single trip. I figure it’s a perfectly reasonable arrangement. If I have to go and do an overnighter then it’s only fair that the client pays for the hotel, my meals and my transport. The client would be paying the same no matter how many cases I was working on. It’s not like I’m being dishonest by billing them all for the same expenses, it’s more that I’m taking advantage of an advantageous situation, and hand on heart I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I was on my way to Hua Hin with a song in my heart and three sets of retainers in the bank, all from women as it happens. When I first got into the private-eye game it was almost always girls I was checking up on, and bargirls at that. But as my fame spread, I started to get a fair number of female clients, usually farang women who wanted me to prove that their husbands or boyfriends were straying. Generally it was money for old rope. There are two golden rules about relationships in Thailand: bargirls always lie, and farang men sleep around. They just do. It’s instinct. The scorpion thing. And generally it’s easier to do a check on a farang man than it is to follow a Thai bargirl. The guy will almost certainly stick to one of the farang areas-Sukhumvit Road, Silom Road, Pattaya or Phuket. He’ll probably be staying in a hotel full of tourists or in a condominium building used by farangs so if I’m tailing him, I’m not going to stick out like the proverbial thumb. But bargirls tend to live in predominantly Thai areas where farangs are few and far between and a hell of a lot more visible.

I like Hua Hin. It’s a seaside resort, but it’s a lot less scummy than Pattaya. The sea’s cleaner, for a start, and there’s a better class of tourist. Families go there, mainly, and retired couples. It’s where the Thai Royal Family likes to holiday so the police in Hua Hin keep a tight grip on the nightlife side and there are no go-go bars or soapy massage parlours. There are plenty of beer bars, and more hookers than you can shake a stick at, but it’s nowhere as in your face as Pattaya or Phuket’s Patong beach.

I drove down in a rented Toyota and booked into a room with a sea view at the Hilton. Lovely.

My first case was Bob from Seattle, a frequent visitor to the Land of Smiles. Too frequent, according to his wife, who had decided to divorce him and felt that there would be a certain irony in having the divorce papers served on him while he was in Thailand. I had a quick shower, downed a couple of JDs from the minibar, then wandered down to the hotel where Bob was staying. The wife had emailed me a picture of her husband so I knew who I was looking for. I got myself a corner booth in the hotel coffee shop and settled down with a copy of the Bangkok Post.

I was lucky and I had only started on my second cup of coffee when in walked the man himself, with an obvious bargirl in tow. By obvious I mean that she was wearing tight blue jeans, a low-cut black T-shirt, and had a tattoo of a scorpion on her right shoulder. Elementary, my dear Watson!

Bob looked bored and the girl had the sultry pout that bargirls adopt when things aren’t going their way. They sat down in the booth next to mine and I flashed her one of my winning smiles. ‘ Falang kee-neo chai mai?’ I said.

‘ Nan-non loei,’ she sighed, confrming that old Bob was indeed a Cheap Charlie.

Bob was so impressed to hear a foreigner speak Thai that he introduced himself and asked if they could join me. He was keen to chat and I guessed he’d been stuck with the sour-faced hooker for a while. The girl started to play footsie with me under the table, which was nice. She slipped off her high heels and massaged the back of my legs with her toes, all the time keeping a butter-wouldn’t-melt look on her face. It seemed that they were both bored stiff with each other.

Bob told me his life story, pretty much, most of which I’d already got second-hand from the wife. He liked Thailand, he said, and was thinking about moving permanently to the Land of Smiles. The problem was, he didn’t know what sort of work he’d be able to do, as work permits are as rare as hen’s teeth in Thailand. Any job that can be done by a Thai, no matter how badly the Thai does it, can’t be given to a foreigner. So other than running a bar or teaching English, there aren’t too many career opportunities.

Bob asked me what I did for a living. ‘Well, Bob,’ I said, ‘I’m a private investigator.’

‘Must be an exciting line of work,’ he said.

I shrugged and took the envelope of legal papers from my jacket pocket. ‘Actually, Bob, it’s pretty boring most of the time,’ I said. ‘Just mundane tasks, like serving summons.’ I dropped the envelope on the table in front of him. ‘By the way, this is yours.’

He said thanks, not realising that I was serious.

As I stood up he shook my hand, and again I don’t think it had quite sunk in. I clapped him on the back. ‘The wife says the next time you’ll see her, it’ll be in court,’ I said. His jaw dropped and I could see that the message had got home. I heard the envelope being ripped open as I walked away and a low groan as he started to read the contents.

I headed back to the hotel, feeling pretty good with myself. I’d only been in town for an hour and I’d already earned a day’s money and covered the cost of my room, the car, two JDs and two coffees.

The second case was a missing person, sort of. A New Yorker called Ann phoned me to ask if I’d track down her husband, Joe, who’d gone missing in Thailand. He’d been at a body-building competition in Australia and had broken his flight in the Land of Smiles with a couple of buddies. The last phone call she’d had from Joe was two weeks earlier and he had said that he was in Hua Hin and that he was drinking in a bar owned by a guy called Kim, and wasn’t sure when he’d be back in the States. If I could find Kim, she said, she was sure I’d be able to find Joe. Now, there’s a pretty big farang population in Hua Hin. Not as many as in Pattaya, but still enough to make it a needle-in-a-haystack job without more definite information. She emailed me photographs of Joe. He was an amateur bodybuilder, a stocky, balding guy in his late twenties who couldn’t have been much more than five foot tall.

I did a quick trip around the bars that were open for the afternoon trade but no one knew of an owner called Kim. I figured I’d have more joy later at night but then I had a brainwave and phoned Ann. It was about one o’clock in the morning in New York and I’d obviously woken her up and the fact that it was a collect call did seem to annoy her somewhat, but she was able to answer my question-which flight did Joe travel to Thailand on? It was Japan Airlines. Flight JAL 006, two weeks ago on Tuesday.

I phoned the airline and told the girl who answered that I was the boss of a tour company based in Bangkok and that I’d lost track of a client that I’d taken to Hua Hin. Had my client by any chance phoned in to reconfirm his ticket? I gave her Joe’s full name and the details of his flight to Bangkok.

Indeed the ticked had been reconfirmed. By a travel agency in Hua Hin. And Joe had also changed his ticket to an open booking, with no flight home. The travel agency wasn’t far from the Hilton so I had a plate of fried noodles and an ice cold Heineken at a street stall and wandered over. The agency was a tiny shop wedged between two bars, both of which had a quartet of fairly attractive girls who all declared that I was a ‘handsum man’ and that I should spend some of my time-and money-with them. I resisted the calls of the sultry sirens and went inside the travel agency.

There was only one girl working in the office, so I played the stupid farang and said that I was a friend of Joe’s and that we were driving back to Bangkok together but that I’d forgotten what hotel he was staying at. She checked her computer and gave me the name and address of his hotel. It was called Kim’s Hotel, which I figured was a good sign.

Kim’s Hotel wasn’t as prestigious as the Hilton and it didn’t have a sea view but it did have a decent-sized pool and I guessed that was where a diminutive body builder might spend his afternoons. I was right. Standing by the diving board was the man himself, wearing nothing but a black thong, flexing his muscles in front of two teenage girls. I watched his show as he went through a full work out, his oiled muscles glistening under the afternoon sun. The two girls were giggling and kept offering him a two-for-one special, staring at 2,000 baht but dropping to half that pretty quickly. Joe just laughed and said that he wasn’t up for an afternooner but that he’d catch up with them later.

After about half an hour, Joe finished his workout and showered at the poolside shower. In view of the nature of the case, I didn’t think there would be any harm in being up front with the NewYorker. I waited until he had towelled himself dry before going over and introducing myself. I told him that I was a private eye and that his wife had paid me to track him down and to find out why he hadn’t gone home.

Joe grinned and nodded at the two sexy girls. ‘That’s why,’ he said.

We went over to a table and sat under a large umbrella and drank beers as Joe gave me his side of the story. I had a Heineken, Joe had a Charng Beer. Another sign of the newbie, that, drinking the local beer. He might as well have had a neon sign over his head flashing ‘I’ve just got off the plane’. Pretty much the only Thais who drank Charng were construction workers. Anyway, Joe told me that he didn’t love Ann. He wasn’t even sure why he’d married her. In New York, his lack of height and hair meant that he didn’t have much luck with women. Ann was pretty much the only woman who’d expressed any interest in him, and it had been her idea to get married. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t especially bright, but Joe had said yes because being married to her was better than being on his own. Then he’d come to Thailand and suddenly short, balding Joe was a ‘handsum man’. Within the space of his first week in Thailand he’d had more sex than he’d had in his whole life in the States. And he wasn’t sleeping with dogs either. Every girl he’d bedded had been drop-dead gorgeous, he boasted. And the supply of beautiful girls waiting to have sex with him seemed to be never-ending. Joe was like a kid in a sweetshop, a pig in shit, and all those other clichA©s. And the way he told it, he was NEVER going back to the United States. He’d already met a couple of body-builders who ran a gym in Bangkok and they had offered him a job. Joe had never really wanted to be an accountant, he’d never loved Ann, and had never enjoyed living in New York. He was taking control of his life, Joe told me. He was starting again in Thailand.

He was, in my humble opinion, making a huge mistake. Like a lot of newbies, he was starting to believe his own publicity. Joe wasn’t a ‘handsum man’, he was just a short, balding, thick-necked Yank with more money than sense. The girls weren’t flocking to him because of his muscles or his personality, it was because he had money and they wanted it. They were bargirls, their job was to make punters feel good so that they would hand over their money. The smiles, the kisses, the sex, were all part of the act. But newbies like Joe sometimes forgot that it was all about money and started to believe that they were somehow more attractive and desirable than they were back home. And providing that he continued to shell out the bucks, they’d continue to live out their fantasy. But as soon as they stopped paying, the girls would stop playing, and reality would hit home. If often hit hard, too, and there are probably hundreds of farang suicides every year in the Land of Smiles, as guys like Joe realised that their fantasy lives were just that-fantasies. And once a guy has got used to being surrounded by attentive, beautiful women who behave like submissive pornstars between the sheets, it was hard, maybe impossible, to go back to the real world.

I always say that when a newbie first starts to hang out with Thai bargirls, the newbie has the money and the bargirls have the experience. At the end of it, the bargirls have the money and the newbie has had the experience.

Anyway, Ann wasn’t paying me to burst Joe’s bubble. She just wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Now I could tell her, it was up to her what she did next. I got Joe to promise me that he’d phone or email his wife. It seemed the least he could do, under the circumstances.

Case number three was an American woman living in Japan, whose husband Gary was a marine who seemed to be spending more than his fair share of shore leave in Hua Hin. After a little do-it-yourself snooping Carol had discovered a couple of email addresses, one of them belonging to a girl called Mem, Thai phone numbers and a photograph of a pretty young thing working in an opticians store. Carol had also found a bank account number in Hua Hin with details of a 5,000-dollar transfer and had jumped to the obvious conclusion. She told me that she was a reasonable woman and wanted to make absolutely certain that her husband was fooling around. What she didn’t say, of course, was that any evidence I got that incriminated Gary would be useful when it came to thrashing out the divorce settlement. If I could show that Gary was supporting a Thai mistress, an American divorce court would skin him alive.

The name and the number of the bank account was a big help. It would have been a fairly simple matter to get a home address but it would require a large ‘donation’ to a friendly bank clerk so I thought I’d try a cheaper alternative first. The name of the opticians shop was in the photograph and there were only two branches in Hua Hin. I walked by both outlets several times during the day but didn’t see anyone who looked like the girl in the photograph.

Mem was in her mid-twenties and looked fit, not bargirl material but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. I decided to use the old ‘I’m from the embassy and I’m here about Mem’s visa application’ scam. I got my clipboard and a US Immigration application form from my rental car, put on my serious face and marched into the store nearest the Hilton. I gave them my standard speech about Miss Kongyou (Mem’s Thai name) applying for a US visa. The shop girls knew Mem but said that she had quit her job a few months earlier. I put on my worried face and said that there were a couple of things I had to clear up about her visa application and did they know where she was living.

I spoke in English. One of the girls asked the other ‘ Mem you kup Ning chai mai?’ which let me know that she was staying with someone called Ning.

I put on my helpful face and suggested that Mem had mentioned that she might be staying with her good friend Miss Ning but that I didn’t have her address. Two minutes later I had the name of the apartment block Mem was staying at, in Thai and English, with a hand-drawn map thrown in for good measure.

According to the shop girls, Mem was staying with her friend Ning, who’d just had a baby. The apartment building was a fifteen-minute walk from the opticians. It was a tidy, middle-class type of block and I figured a small apartment there would probably cost 4,000 baht or so a month, about what Miss Mem would earn as a salesgirl.

I found the office and asked the middle-aged Thai Chinese manageress if Ning or Mem were in. She wanted to know what room so I played the idiot tourist and said that my friend Gary had left Thailand suddenly with some money to give Mem. Mentioning money to landlords is a sure-fire way of getting their help. If their tenants have got money, the rent is going to be paid, and the one thing that keeps a landlord sweet is rent money paid on time. She picked up a phone, buzzed a room, then handed me the receiver. It was Ning, and I heard a baby crying in the background. The manageress was out of earshot so I switched back into embassy official mode and told Ning that I had some papers for Mem to sign. Ning said that Mem had gone back to her home in Khon Kaen for a week but that she would come down and see me.

She was a plain girl and looked worn out, and the baby she had cradled in her arm wouldn’t stop crying. I asked Ning if she knew whether or not Mem still wanted to go to the US and Ning shrugged and said that she didn’t think she did. I decided to change my story and said that I didn’t actually work for the embassy, but for a visa service that handled visa applications for various countries.

‘Like Switzerland?’ asked Ning. ‘I want to go to Switzerland.’

It turned out that the father of Ning’s baby was Swiss and he had told her it was next to impossible to get a visa for Switzerland. That’s not true, which made me think that perhaps Mr Swiss had a wife back in the land of cuckoo clocks and chocolate, but I put on my happy face and promised her that I’d send around the necessary Swiss forms. Ning said that Mem would probably want the Swiss forms too, as she was seeing a friend of Mr Swiss and that he was paying for her to go to school and was planning to marry her. ‘Mem finish Mr Gary,’ said Ning. ‘He butterfly too much.’

‘So she won’t want to see Mr Gary again?’

Ning shook her head. ‘She happy now,’ she said. ‘Her boyfriend good guy. Good heart.’ Good heart generally means generous with money. Over-generous.

I wondered if Gary knew that he’d been kicked into touch in favour of a more reliable sponsor. I guessed that he didn’t, but that his wife would take great pleasure in telling him, probably at the exact moment she served him with divorce papers.

So that was that. I went to an Internet cafA© and sent off three emails. Mission accomplished. Three cases, three fees, three sets of expenses, all in one day. A private eye can’t ask for much more. And I had the rest of the evening to enjoy myself at the expense of my clients. All three of them.