The 38 Million Dollar Smile

CHAPTER THREE

The photograph of her ex-husband that Ellen Griswold had given me was about a year old, she said. In it, a lithe, well-tanned, curly-haired man in his midforties stood in front of a frangipani tree in splendid full bloom. Griswold wore khaki shorts and a lime green polo shirt. While not striking in appearance, he seemed a leaner, looser version of his older brother Bill, a tense and weary business traveler with a five o’clock shadow whom I met briefly at the Albany airport when his flight from Washington unexpectedly arrived only twenty minutes late.

In the picture, Griswold’s dark eyes shone brightly as he peered confidently into the camera lens. His full-lipped smile, while not beatific, looked natural and relaxed. Buddhists say we inhabit our bodies only temporarily, but in this picture, at least, Griswold’s soul appeared comfortable in its then-abode.

I looked at the picture and the other material on Griswold on the first leg of my Key West flight, a two-hour ride down to Atlanta. Ellen Griswold had provided regular-mail notes from Gary and hard copies of e-mails sent from Thailand. Nearly all were addressed to Ellen, not to Ellen and Bill. In his messages, Griswold spoke glowingly of his new home — he wrote, “the Thais are a truly free people” — and of the contentment he had found in Buddhist ethical systems and through daily meditation.

He also mentioned being pleased with a condo he had purchased in Bangkok. This was about eighteen months earlier, and Ellen had included the street address in her packet.

There were several references to what Griswold termed “the romance department.” All the romances seemed to be with Thai men. Early in his life in Bangkok, there was Keng, “a sweetheart of a man,” and later “delightful” Sambul, and then

“quiet” Poom. No mention was made of any of these relationships ending. It seemed as if when one halted or dwindled out, Griswold just moved on to another. This left me 26 Richard Stevenson wondering what the exact nature of these liaisons might have been.

The last boyfriend mentioned, in an e-mail dated the previous July 17, was Mango. Griswold called him “a beautiful man and a fantastic human being.” He also said, “This one’s a keeper, I hope.” This was a month before Griswold sold all his holdings in the US for thirty-eight million dollars and two months before he disappeared.

The other material Ellen provided me, at Bob Chicarelli’s direction, was biographical and statistical data. I noted that Griswold had been a business major at Cornell with an art history minor. His resume consisted mainly of marketing positions with Algonquin Steel, the family company. He started low at Albany headquarters then climbed steadily, with his company career culminating in his becoming head of marketing in the US Southern region when he was in his early thirties.

Then Griswold left the company and ran his Key West art gallery before departing for Thailand.

On the smaller plane from Atlanta to Key West, I looked through the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand I had picked up that morning at Stuyvesant Books. In the “Dangers and Annoyances” section that Lonely Planet quaintly and helpfully includes in all its guidebooks, unscrupulous tuk-tuk drivers were listed, as well as fake-gem scams. No mention was made of drive-by shootings or police-run massacres. The emphasis in Lonely Planet’s Thailand was on the green landscape, the golden temples, and the smiles.

“I have to admit,” Lou Horn said, “that in retrospect we should have seen it coming — Gary mentally and physically sailing off into the blue. There were signs.”

Marcie Weems added, “Thailand, swell — nice people, nice place. And Buddhism, that’s fine, too — the ethics of tolerance and acceptance and nonviolence. And, of course, all those cute monks with their shaved heads and gorgeous orange robes. But astrology? Numerology? I don’t think so.”

“And before his transformation Gary was so even-keeled most of the time,” Janice Romeo said. “And smart and fun to be around. The four of us took trips together, and Gary was always a delight. He was focused, yes, even obsessive about some things, like his bike racing and his good causes. But he was never really muddleheaded. And after he got out of the Algonquin Steel power job sturm and drang and opened the gallery, he was pretty relaxed too. Of course, it was also around that time that he started getting into the weirdness.”

“He was weird, but still not weird,” Weems put in. “Gary was Mister Moderate-and-Conventional with most things — food, alcohol, dress. Key West is famous for its eccentrics, but Gary was hardly one of the seventeen thousand four hundred and twelve local characters.”

“And men,” Romeo said. “Don’t forget men — another area where Gary was Mister Middle-of-the-Road. No Mangos or Pomegranates or Pomolos for the Gary we knew. He went for Lou, to cite a nearby example. An excellent, levelheaded choice. Lou, are you hurt that we all think of you as a merely reasonable object of desire?”

They all laughed as Horn digested the ambiguous compliment. We were seated at a table at Salute, an open-air mainly Italian place along the Atlantic Avenue beach on the nocruise-ships quiet side of Key West. A half-moon hung in the evening sky behind palm fronds rustling in a warm breeze. I had my Sam Adams and the others their Ketel One vodka with a side of ice, apparently the national beverage of the Conch Republic.

Horn was a broad-faced man in his late forties with a salt-and-pepper beard, a few skin-cancer scars scattered about, a one-time middleweight wrestler’s build now starting to respond to the tug of gravity, and a twinkle in both his eyes and his step.

He had brought along Griswold’s two other closest friends in the keys. Both Weems and Romeo had moved to Key West twelve years earlier when the New York publishing house where Weems had been a senior editor was bought by Argentinean beef producers and most of the house’s functions were moved 28 Richard Stevenson to Buenos Aires. Now they ran a small B and B, Romeo said, and only served pork products for breakfast.

Easy to look at in their pale cottons and silks, the two women seated across from me, one olive-skinned and ample, one creamy and svelte, were also merrily festooned with skin cancer Band-Aids, apparently a small price to pay for life in what was still a pretty good place for getting away from it all.

Key West still had allure, despite cruise ships the size of the Pentagon lumbering in daily, and the influx of millionaires who had left the island unaffordable for lesser new arrivals. Gary Griswold had seemed more or less at home there, and his three friends said they were stunned when Griswold suddenly announced, after a vacation trip to Thailand, that he was abandoning them and his life there for a country on the other side of the world.

Horn said, “Gary and I were no longer partners in the personal sense by the time he left. So, emotionally it was more or less okay. That part of our relationship had petered out more than a year earlier, and we both had been seeing other people.”

“ Seeing, ” Weems said. “Such a darling way of putting it.”

“Anyway, I had always been the one to play around,” Horn said. “Gary, being more serious and focused about everything he undertook, was more of a serial monogamist.”

“This is true,” Romeo said. “Marcie and I once certified Gary as an honorary lesbian.”

“I sometimes wonder,” Horn said, “what would have happened if Geoffrey Pringle had never invited Gary over to Bangkok. Though, of course, Gary had begun to change almost a year before that. At the time, we thought maybe it had something to do with Gary falling off his bike, screwy as that might sound. Another biker ran into him in a race up near Ocala, and Gary wiped out and landed on his head. He was wearing a helmet, but he had a bad concussion, and the whole thing seemed to throw him for a loop like nothing else we’d ever seen. He went around in a daze for a week after he got out of the hospital. And it was not too long after that that he got the astrology bug, and he started seeing a woman on Stock THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 29

Island who claims to help people get in touch with their past lives. I’ve read that head injuries can sometimes cause personality changes, temporary or even permanent, and we all wondered at the time if Gary hitting his head had somehow jarred loose his bullshit detector.”

I asked, “Who is Geoffrey Pringle?”

“A longtime Key West full-timer who moved to Thailand four or five years ago,” Horn said. “It was Geoff who invited Gary over for a two-week visit.”

“What does Geoff do in Thailand?”

“He’s retired,” Romeo said. “His family in Chicago made a fortune in grain futures years ago. A while back, Geoff inherited forty or fifty mil, and bingo, off he flew.”

I asked if anybody had checked with Pringle about Griswold’s current situation. Wasn’t this guy likely to know something?

“We tried,” Horn said. “But Geoffrey won’t really talk to us.

Apparently he and Gary had some kind of falling-out. I got Geoff on the phone in Bangkok about a month ago. He said he didn’t know where Gary was, and he ‘couldn’t care less,’ his words. Geoff also told me in no uncertain terms that the day I phoned him was not an auspicious date for him to be taking a transoceanic telephone call, and he just hoped that I had not fucked up his entire month.”

Romeo laughed and said, “And Geoff didn’t even land on his head, as far as we know.”

Some food arrived, an aromatic bounteous antipasti for the table.

“Don’t be dainty,” Romeo said. “Shovel it down. There’s more where that came from. Plus, the pasta dishes.”

As we dug in, Horn said, “The numerology thing with Gary was especially uncomfortable for all of us whenever nine-eleven came up. Gary had bought into a theory bouncing around the Internet about the date, eleven, and the shape of the two New York towers, and some supposed prediction by Nostradamus made in the fourteenth century that historians say was fake.

30 Richard Stevenson

There was even more to it — something about the flight numbers of the crashed planes adding up to something significant — and Gary took it all very seriously.”

“After a while, of course, Gary didn’t really talk to us about any of that,” Romeo said. “When we were casually dismissive, or just unresponsive, he tended to drop the subject for a while.

We didn’t want to insult him or hurt him. But we weren’t about to indulge this looniness, either. What do you do? What do you say? We loved Gary, but we were just flabbergasted. Some people are susceptible to these notions and some aren’t, and we happen to fall into the latter category. It just got terribly awkward.”

“He obviously cared what you thought of him,” I said. “And after he moved to Thailand, he stayed in touch. But you said, Lou, that Gary gave indications that things were starting to go wrong. What were those indications?”

They looked at each other. Horn said, “You know about Mango, right? From Ellen Griswold.”

“I do. Apparently Gary was head over heels for the guy.”

“He was,” Janice said, “and then later he wasn’t. In one email he sent me late last summer — I’ve got a hard copy for you to take with you — Gary said Mango might not be who he said he was. This was extremely distressing for Gary. He had trusted this guy, he said. Gary had also been to a seer — that’s the word he used. And what the seer predicted was ‘bloodshed’ in Gary’s life, and ‘great sorrow for people close to him.’ Again, the seer’s words.”

That’s all? No specifics?”

“No.”

“Did Gary tell anybody the seer’s name?”

“No.”

“Not death, just bloodshed? That was the word? And sorrow?”

“It is tantalizingly and unhelpfully vague,” Horn said.

I asked Janice how she had replied to Griswold’s unnerving e-mail, and she looked sheepish. “I never really responded, really. What I thought was, this is supermarket tabloid stuff.

Gary didn’t have to go all the way to Thailand for this. He could have picked up forecasts like that for a couple of bucks at the Winn-Dixie checkout. He said the seer was some kind of renowned figure in Thailand, but it sounded like a racket to me.

I wasn’t about to say that, though, so I just let it go. About a week later, I sent him some chirpy message about nothing at all.

I stupidly just ignored this thing that obviously was terribly important to Gary.”

“Well, if it was a scam,” Weems said, “Gary could afford it.

He had more money than God and Buddha put together.

Anyway, what could you possibly have said? Sometimes when people are acting screwy, silence from friends is the only kind and useful response.”

I asked if Griswold had informed any of the three that he had transferred his entire fortune to a Bangkok bank and that he planned on a large investment with an early big payoff. No, they said, they had not known about this until I had told Horn on the phone. “You scared the bejesus out us of with that one,”

Weems said.

“We’re just hoping that something really horrible hasn’t happened,” Horn said. “Gary has all that money over there in a part of the world that I assume can be dangerous. And then there’s the Griswold family history of violent death. It almost makes you believe in fate or karma or people being doomed by forces beyond their control or understanding. Notice I said

‘almost.’”

I said, “What Griswold family history of violent death? I don’t know about that.”

“I suppose there’s no reason Ellen would have mentioned it,” Horn said. “But Gary’s parents died in a small-plane crash fifteen or so years ago. This was just a year or two before Bill’s ex-wife, Sheila, sailed off on a Caribbean cruise and disappeared at sea. Presumably, she fell overboard, though nobody knows for sure.”

32 Richard Stevenson

So the JAP was actually the late JAP. “This is news.”

“It does help show,” Horn said, “why Gary might take predictions of bloodshed by a fortune-teller more seriously than a lot of us would.”

“It seems,” I said, “as though Gary was closer to his former wife than to his brother Bill. Why might that be true? Or am I wrong?”

“There was never any love lost between Gary and Bill,”

Horn said. “They were just two different types of animal. It was partly the gay thing. The Griswolds only accepted that grudgingly, and it just wasn’t discussed. But there were other big differences. The steel and building supply businesses never really interested Gary. He was in it for fifteen years to prove something to his family and to himself, I guess. And then he walked away from the company without giving it a second thought.”

“Plus,” Romeo said, “Gary’s brother was some kind of big Bushophile. That was certainly an issue. It was another topic that could never be mentioned among the Griswolds.”

“Gary hated the militarism of the Bush people,” Horn said.

“He was constantly giving money to peace groups and to human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. A big part of Thailand’s draw for him was the Buddhism and the philosophy of nonviolence.”

I told them I wasn’t surprised that the reality of Thailand for Griswold may have turned out to be something other than a travel-poster Buddhist paradise. “I am also fond of the place,” I said. “But if you don’t like militarism, it’s hardly the place to go.

Thailand has had a dozen or more military coups since it started electing governments in the nineteen thirties. The generals, of course, always go to the country’s beloved King Bhumibol to ask his permission to overthrow the elected government. If he ever said, ‘No, sorry, you can’t do that,’ I’m not aware of it. The place also has a thoroughly corrupt police force that’s been known to simply execute suspected drug dealers, as I recall.

And drive-by shootings are sometimes used to resolve business disputes, I’ve heard.”

The three were now looking at me queasily. I guessed I should have told them, as with Timothy, only about the reclining Buddhas. I said, “But the Thai people generally are gentle and humor-filled. And deeply spiritual. And they have a highly developed sense of fun — sanuk, they call it. Sanuk infects just about everything the Thais do.”

“Like their drive-by shootings?” Romeo asked.

The waitress arrived to clear away the antipasti platter, which we had picked clean. Griswold’s three friends, subdued now and a bit shaken, decided this would be a good time to order another round of drinks.

“Look,” I said, “I think you’re right to worry about Griswold. It’s reasonable to think that anybody vanishing in Southeast Asia with thirty-eight million dollars at his disposal has either met foul play or is in hiding in order to avoid foul play. Or — and I know you’d much rather not think about this

— Griswold has himself done something illegal, and he is in hiding not from criminal bad guys but from Thai-cop bad guys.

Which are sometimes one and the same thing, I’m sorry to say.”

They all set down their glasses of Ketel One and looked at me soberly.

After a moment, Horn said, “I guess we were hoping you would tell us things about Thailand that were more reassuring.”

“I wish I could.”

“Well, then,” Weems said. “It’s good you’re going over.

When do you leave?”

“In a couple of days, I think. I’ve booked space on both Thursday and Friday.”

“Are you going alone? Or do you have a staff?”

“I may have help. That’s unclear.”

“Poor Gary,” Horn said. “I can’t believe, really, that he’s done anything wrong himself. The guy is just so decent. So, something really bad must have happened to him. Oh, God.”

Our pasta dishes arrived, and we talked quietly about what Horn, Weems and Romeo all saw as the good life in Key West.

34 Richard Stevenson

There were rising costs and overpopulation and the threat of catastrophic hurricanes. But low-pressure island life was still the best, they all agreed and wished that Gary Griswold had not lost his capacity to be happy in this place that his friends all loved.

We were well into our lasagna and fettuccine when an acquaintance the three hadn’t seen for a while stopped by the table to greet them. Nadine Bisbee, an angular, middle-aged woman in a sarong and fourteen pounds of turquoise and silver jewelry, was introduced to me as another friend of Griswold who was quite concerned about him. Horn told her I was a private investigator preparing to fly to Thailand to search for Griswold.

“Oh,” Bisbee said, “I don’t think we need to worry about Gary anymore. Elise Flanagan saw him two weeks ago in Cambodia.”

Horn and Romeo said it at the same time. “She did?”

“It was at a border crossing. Elise was on a tour bus on her way from Bangkok to Angkor Wat with her Antioch-alum architecture history group, and there was Gary at Thai passport control heading back into Thailand from Cambodia. She yelled at him, she said, but he either didn’t hear Elise or for some reason he didn’t want to run into anybody he knew. Elise said she thought maybe he had some underage youth in tow and was embarrassed by it.”

I said, “Does Gary have a history of underage youths as a sexual interest?”

Romeo said, “Just Lou.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“No,” Weems said. “It had to be something else. Was Elise sure it was Gary she saw?”

“Elise said it was definitely Gary. Elise has been getting forgetful in recent years, but she certainly knows Gary as well as any of us. I mean, she bought art from Gary and Lou for years and was in the gallery at least once a month, wasn’t she, Lou?”

“Elise would certainly know Gary,” Horn said somberly.

“Maybe this means he’s been in Cambodia for six months, and that’s why nobody has heard from him.”

Romeo said, “For chrissakes, Cambodia surely has telephones and post offices. Even the Internet, I’ll bet. Am I right, Don?”

“In the Khmer Rouge era, it didn’t. But now Cambodia is not so cut off, no.”

“So, what’s going on with Gary?” Weems said, and they all looked at me.