The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER TWO

“Thirty-eight mil?” Timothy Callahan was impressed.

“That’s getting close to being real money these days. Not for some major CEO, who might find thirty-eight million stuffed into his Dick Cheney’s-birthday-bonus envelope. But for the family screwup, it sounds like a perfectly respectable sum to fritter away in the tropics.”

We were dining late at a Thai place on Wolf Road after my meeting with Ellen Griswold and were enjoying some decent tom yam kung and steamed rice. I was eating around the flavorsome but inedible debris in my soup bowl — the lemongrass, galangal root and kaffir lime leaves — and Timmy was picking his out of the bowl, bit by bit, and arranging them on a separate small plate he had requested.

I said, “Gary Griswold wasn’t always a screwup, and that’s partly why his family is concerned. He did the marketing for their Econo-Build stores in Florida for six years and turned them into serious competitors with Home Depot. Then he ran an art gallery in Key West that wasn’t a big moneymaker, Ellen Griswold said, but apparently succeeded well enough. It wasn’t until he discovered the quirky charms of Bangkok that he apparently flipped out money-managementwise. If, in fact, he did. Griswold claimed he was investing the thirty-eight million in a sure bet with a quick payoff.”

Timmy transferred another reed of tough lemongrass out of his soup bowl and said, “My Aunt Moira once lost five thousand dollars in a Ponzi scheme.”

“I’ll bet a priest told her it was okay.”

“He was probably running it.”

“Another reason to worry,” I said, “is this business of the astrologer Griswold once accepted investment advice from.”

“Griswold bought Enron?”

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“No, Ellen said it actually worked out. Some land deal in Bangkok. But all the Griswolds were fit to be tied at the time.”

“There you go. You’re always so skeptical about the relative positions of the planets and stars on erroneous charts drawn up centuries ago affecting people’s personalities and events in their present-day lives. Let this be a lesson.”

“Anyway, in the go-go Southeast Asian economy, most land deals probably work out these days. Also, that investment was about three hundred K, and now we’re talking thirty-eight million, Griswold’s entire net worth. And the fact that he seems to have broken off all contact with his family sounds bad. He never said a word to them about moving or dropping out of sight or that anything had gone wrong. All he said in his last email was that something had come up that would keep him busy for a while and he might be out of touch, but not to worry.

Then, for six months, nothing. He just seemed to…you know.”

“Fall off the face of the earth?”

“Exactly.”

Timmy said, “And then there’s Mango, the refreshing tropical fruit drink.”

“The Griswolds know nothing about him, just that apparently Gary Griswold was seriously smitten. Mango may have nothing to do with either the investment, so-called, or the seeming disappearance. It is true, of course, that Thailand harbors more than its share of sexually alluring flimflam artists.

Somebody once rudely called the country a brothel with temples.”

“So,” Timmy said, “are you flying over? You’ve talked for years about going back to the region for a visit.”

“Ellen Griswold’s retainer is ample and her expense limit high. So, sure, it makes sense. Once I’m there, it shouldn’t take long. Griswold probably cut a swath.”

“A guy with thirty-eight mil is bound to stand out among the rice paddies.”

“Why don’t you come along?” I said. “You’ve got some leave time built up. You could do legwork for me. Brain work, too, as is your habit. It would be a legitimate expense. And it’s a fascinating part of the world, as I have gone on and on and on about on countless occasions.”

“What on earth could you possibly be referring to?” he said and transferred another kaffir lime leaf onto his mulch pile.

“Also, the war’s over. I’d like to see Bangkok without it being overrun by drunken, drug-addled, horny American GIs such as myself. I’m sure the place is very different now, and we could check it out together.”

“But what if,” Timmy wondered, “we got over there and Griswold’s situation turned out to be something really complicated and dangerous and ugly? That certainly seems possible with somebody vanishing with that amount of money.”

“It’s true,” I said, “that the Bangkok I knew in the seventies had a harsh underside. You could, for instance, have somebody bumped off for a few hundred dollars. That would be for killing a Thai. A farang might be double that. It’s also a fact — I suppose I should mention — that the Land of Smiles, home to some of the sweetest people in the world, has one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia — which is saying a lot — and some of the most nightmarish prisons anywhere. Few people emerge from Thai prisons sane, or even alive. It’s also a sad reality that in legal disputes between Thais and foreigners, the foreigner is always wrong and may have to lay out big bucks — backhanders, they call them — just to save his own neck. There is a lot about the Thai paradise that’s not so heavenly, I know.

And it’s entirely possible that Gary Griswold has fallen victim to some aspect of that not-so-delectable Thailand.”

Now Timmy had set down his soupspoon and was giving me one of his looks. “You’re not making any of that up, are you?”

“No. But otherwise it’s a lovely country. The Thais have their rice, their Buddha, their beloved king, and their well-developed sense of fun. That’s the Thailand I’ll bet Griswold fell in love with — until something somehow went awry.”

“Oh, awry,” Timmy said.

20 Richard Stevenson

“Look, if it turns out that Griswold has fallen into something grisly and there’s real danger, then you’ll get back on the plane and fly home. That would be simple enough.”

“I understand. And you?”

“Well, we’d have to see. It would depend on if I could be helpful or not, or what I might have to do to earn my fee.”

Timmy looked down at his tom yam kung and said to it,

“Here we go again,” and my heart went out.

Back at the house on Crow Street, it took me under ten minutes to come up with the name of Gary Griswold’s most recent boyfriend in Key West. Ellen Griswold thought the man’s name might be Horn, and she was right. When I called an old friend of Timmy’s living in Key West — one of the former Peace Corps mafia whose humanistic tentacles are everywhere

— she confirmed that Griswold had been a well-known presence in Key West over a period of about a decade and had had a boyfriend named Lou Horn. Horn now owned and managed the art gallery the two had founded together, which now was named Toot Toot.

I got Horn on the phone with no trouble. He not only didn’t mind being called at ten forty at night, but said he was very worried about Griswold and fearful about what might have happened to him. Horn was relieved, he said, that I would be searching for Griswold. He said he and two other Key West friends had been in occasional contact with Griswold until about six months earlier, when all communication from Griswold’s end had inexplicably ceased.

I asked Horn if, before his disappearance, Griswold had said anything to anybody in Key West that seemed out of character or otherwise odd or set off alarm bells. Horn said, “Well, maybe.” When he assured me that he and other of Griswold’s Key West friends would willingly tell me what little they knew, I thanked him, called Delta, and booked a flight for the next day.

I also phoned a PI friend in New York City who I’d done work for and obtained a list of reputable investigative firms and individuals operating in Bangkok. I had just begun checking these agencies out online when I became aware of an eerie silence above me. Normally, at this time of night, Timmy was upstairs in the bedroom guffawing at The Daily Show, and frequently so was I. Instead, when I went up, I found the television off and Timmy with his wireless laptop open on the bed.

“Working late for the people of New York State?” I said. “If so, we thank you.”

His look was grave. “I Googled Bangkok crime statistics.

Holy Mother!”

“Timothy, this is not going to help.”

“Oh yes, it is. I’m not going, and I’m not sure you should, either.”

This was my fault. I should only have told him about the golden reclining Buddhas. I said, “You’re getting a distorted picture. New York City looks sinister and forbidding on a police blotter, too. I sometimes do work there. So do you. We like New York.”

“It’s true,” he said, “that there’s very little street crime in Bangkok. It’s peaceful in that respect. But if you’re doing business there — as Griswold may have been doing — look out. A favorite way of settling money disputes is for one party to hire a guy on a motorcycle to drive by and shoot the other party in the head. Extrajudicial killings by the police are routine.

Get this: in July two thousand one, a Bangkok newspaper ran a front-page story with the headline, ‘Police Death Squads Run Riot.’ In one region, the police general dealt with drug dealers by sending cops out to shoot them. ‘Our target,’ this police official said, ‘is to send one thousand traffickers to hell this year, to join some three hundred fifty before them.’ Could Griswold have gotten enmeshed in some gigantic drug deal? That could explain the so-called quick return on investment. If so, he could be six feet under in the backyard of a police station. Land of Smiles, my ass, Donald. The Thailand I am seeing in front of me here is bloody treacherous.”

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I leaned over his shoulder. “Timothy, this is great stuff.

Really helpful. Would you mind printing this for me? I’ll read it on the plane to Key West tomorrow. I’m going down to talk to Griswold’s friends there. It turns out they’re quite worried about him, too.”

“And then” — Timmy went right on — “I came across a book I think you should read. I’m ordering it tomorrow from Stuyvesant Books. It’s My Eight Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison.

It’s by some American bozo who got on the wrong side of somebody over there, and he landed in some nightmare Midnight Express situation he didn’t have enough ready cash to buy his way out of, the way the rich Thais do.”

“Well,” I said. “All this stuff is frightening, sure. It makes me apprehensive too. But it’s also all the more reason to worry about Gary Griswold. He sounds like a basically good guy — adventurous in a harmless way, a spiritual searcher. Maybe too naive and susceptible, but that’s hardly a moral crime. And he may have been victimized by the Thai subculture displayed so garishly on your screen there. Griswold may be in trouble, and he needs help. I’ve been hired to help him, but of course, you don’t need to be involved.”

“I intend not to be.”

“That’s up to you.”

He said, “It’s not that I don’t get it. I agree that Griswold could well be up to his ears in some hideous mire — a swamp of his own making or not — and he needs somebody to come along and drag him out. All I’m saying is, Bangkok sounds as if it can be a very dangerous place, and I’m frightened for myself and for you.”

“I know.”

“And the other thing is, how objective are you being about this? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Griswolds to hire somebody on the scene there instead of somebody who hasn’t set foot in Bangkok for years? Maybe,” he said, “your judgment is a bit off because you mainly want to get back to this part of the world you once found so compelling and do it at somebody THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 23 else’s expense. And maybe reconnect with Bank or Book or Mango or Dragonfruit or like that. Is what I have just described a distinct possibility, or isn’t it?”

A relentlessly keen-minded piece of work was my beloved. I said, “Yes, all that is a distinct possibility. And I want you to know that I am resolving at this moment — thanks to you — to turn into a perfectly rational human being and to behave accordingly.”

“Uh-huh.”

I added, “In my next life.”

He seemed unamused by me, gave up and tried Jon Stewart.