Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson (17 page)

As soon as I got home I sent Rick an email telling him that not only was Vee working, she was also more than happy to have sex with clients. He must have been straight on the phone to her because the next day I got a reply from him. Rick wanted to know if I was sure that she was having sex because she’s told him that she was just helping out with the hotel visits because the parlour was short-staffed. She’d assured him that she only did straight massages.

I’ve never understood why clients will always take the word of their girlfriend over the evidence that I’ve given them. Time and time again I’d present my report only to have the client phone or email asking me if I was sure. Was I sure? Of course I was sure! What did they think they were paying me for? And of course the girlfriend is going to lie. She’s hardly likely to admit that she was screwing around, not when there’s money at stake, is she? I didn’t argue with Rick, I just phoned Andy and asked if there were any details he could give me that would convince Rick that he’d had sex with his nearest and dearest. Andy told me about the tattoo of a butterfly that she had on the small of her back, the three moles on the inside of her right thigh, and the fact that she whimpered like an injured kitten when she came. I passed on the information to Rick and I never heard from him again. It was probably more detail than he wanted. I felt a bit bad about bursting Rick’s balloon, but I figure I was saving him money and heartache down the line.

THE CASE OF THE SUSPICIOUS SPOUSES

A big chunk of my work in the early days came from sex tourists who’d fallen in love with bargirls and wanted me to check up on whether or not they were being faithful. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the answer was no, she was still sleeping with paying customers. It was money for the proverbial old rope. Initially I got work through word of mouth, but after a year or so I figured I should go out looking for business, and the best way to do that was through the internet. I set up a website advertising my services,
www.thaiprivateeye.com
, and before long I was getting assignments from around the world.

One of the first emails I got through the website was from a woman named Barbara who lived in Glasgow in bonnie Scotland. Any country that makes Johnnie Walker Black Label has got my vote of thanks, so I was more than happy to help Barbara. Plus she sent my retainer by bank transfer within forty-eight hours of me taking the case, which in my mind at least put paid to the theory that the Scots are tight with money. Barbara’s husband had been in Thailand for a couple of months, and while she had no evidence that her husband was fooling around, she had a feeling that something was wrong. Women’s intuition. And she wanted me to find out if he was having an affair with a Thai girl.

Her husband, William, was an artist and he’d been travelling around the Chiang Mai area, painting. For a lot of the time he’d been staying with a friend, but she didn’t have an address for him. All she knew was that it was a penthouse apartment with a stunning view. Not much help, really. He was going to stay in Bangkok for a week or so before returning to Scotland, but she didn’t know which hotel he’d be staying at. I explained that Bangkok was a city of more than ten million people, so without an address I had no hope of finding him. She did know the date of his return flight, and that he was flying British Airways. He’d bought a cheap economy ticket and he was locked into his return date so he’d have to be on that flight. I asked her to email me a photograph of him and I’d put him under surveillance at the airport. In my experience, if a guy has a Thai girlfriend she will see him off at the airport, for no other reason than he’d probably give her all his unwanted baht before heading for the plane.

The money, and the photograph, arrived within forty-eight hours. William was a good-looking guy with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, in his early thirties. If he’d wanted to fool around in Thailand, I didn’t think he’d have had any problems.

I got to the airport a good three hours before the flight was due to leave and wandered around with a paper cup of coffee. He appeared ninety minutes before the flight was due to close, pushing a trolley loaded with two suitcases and a dozen or two cardboard tubes that I assumed contained his artwork. And hanging on his arm was an absolute stunner. The girl was in her early twenties, waist-length glossy black hair, smooth white skin, great figure and a mouth that just begged to be kissed. I took a few pictures with my digital camera. She kept planting kisses on his cheek, and I got a belting photograph of him with both hands on her bum, kissing her full on the mouth. A lot of times on surveillance operations I’m always amazed at how plain the girls are. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in Thailand so long but I’ve become very selective whereas a lot of tourists seem to jump on the first girl they see. I get paid to check up on some of the ugliest girls in the country, and the guys get really upset when I tell them that the love of their life is still sleeping with customers. But William’s girl was faultless, and I had half a mind to ‘accidentally’ bump into her and get her phone number after he’d flown off. But I’m nothing if not professional so I carried on taking a few long-range photographs.

They went and sat in a pub on the first floor while they waited for his flight, and I managed to get a couple more shots of them getting close and personal, then followed them to the departure gate where true to form he took out his wallet and gave her all his Thai money. She put up quite a performance, shaking her head and wiping tears from her eyes, but she took the money. After he’d kissed her and waved and gone through to immigration, I followed the girl to the taxi rank. Lots of heads turned to watch her as she walked. She got into a taxi and it headed down the expressway.

I caught a cab home and emailed the pictures to the wife, along with a report of what I’d seen. Easy money. I could imagine the scene in Glasgow when William arrived home. Thai girls tend to cut off the dicks of unfaithful husbands. Upcountry they toss the bloody remains to the ducks, and in the cities they put it in a food blender. I doubted that Barbara would be as cruel as that, but I reckoned William was still in for a shock when he got home.

A couple of days later, I got an email from the husband. I opened it, expecting a torrent of abuse, but to my surprise it was quite a chatty epistle, complimenting me on my professional approach to the job. And he thanked me for bringing an unhappy situation to an end. According to William, the love had gone from his marriage years ago and he had been trying to find a way of ending it. My investigation had been the spark for him and his wife to start talking about divorce, and now they had decided to consult lawyers and end the marriage. There were no kids and his wife had a well-paid job, so all they had to do was to decide on a fair split of the marital assets. Once that was out of the way, William planned to fly back to Thailand and start a new life with Som, the girl who’d been at the airport. And the main reason for the email was that William wanted to pay me to run a check on the lovely Som! I couldn’t believe it at first and thought it was a wind-up, but William was serious. Som had been a go-go dancer in the Long Gun Bar in Soi Cowboy, and while he’d paid her to stop work he was worried that she might go back to her old ways while he was in Scotland. I gave him my bank details and told him to send over a retainer. I told him I didn’t need a photograph of the lovely Som, but I’d need her date of birth, full Thai name and any other details he had.

A couple of days later he emailed me all the information. Som was twenty-two and lived in a cheap hotel in Soi 15, not far from Soi Cowboy. I knew the place. It was a well-known bargirl haunt. She went to school in Siam Square most mornings. Her mother lived in Pattaya with an elderly German.

William said that he’d agreed to transfer 15,000 baht a month into Som’s bank account. That set alarm bells ringing right away. A halfway decent bargirl can easily earn four times that dancing around a silver pole and sleeping with customers. A real pro with high-spending Japanese customers can earn six figures. Som was a stunner and I found it difficult to believe that she was staying at home for just 15,000 baht. Her hotel bill would be almost 10,000 baht a month, even on a long-term lease, then there would be her mobile phone bills, clothes, cosmetics, food. And as a bargirl, even a former one, there would be a good chance of a drugs problem and a very good chance that there was a family to support.

William said that she emailed him pretty much every day, and that she always answered her mobile.

I started to follow her. It wasn’t difficult. She didn’t own a car or a motorcycle and used taxis, motorcycle taxis and the Skytrain. Over a few days I kept a close eye on her. She went to school during the week, spent most of her time in her room, probably watching TV, and went out to eat at night with girlfriends. More often than not, Som would pick up the bill. I saw her using several different mobile phones, but I couldn’t get close enough to hear what she was saying. Multiple phones is always a bad sign. It suggests multiple boyfriends or sponsors. She never went to a nightclub or to the city’s red-light districts. She went to Pattaya one weekend but stayed with her mother and didn’t go near the bars.

I didn’t see her with another guy, Thai or farang, but it was clear that her lifestyle was costing well over 15,000 baht a month and as she wasn’t working the money had to be coming from somewhere.

I reported back to William. Som wasn’t seeing anyone, but she was living well beyond her means. I said that if he wanted to be sure that she didn’t have any other sponsors I’d have to check her bank account. At best that would mean a visit to a branch to sneak a look at a computer terminal, at worst it would mean a bribe of tens of thousands of baht. William said he’d pay me for another day to visit the bank and sent through the extra money to my account along with the details of her account.

I went along to a branch of Som’s bank in a tourist area, found a sweet young cashier, flashed her my most charming smile and told her that I’d sent money to my girlfriend but that she’d told me that it hadn’t arrived yet. I asked the cashier if she could check that the money had actually gone through. The girl told me what I already knew, that I’d have to go to Som’s branch to confirm the transfer, all she could do on her terminal was to check the balance. She called it up on screen and as she did I leaned over and took a quick look. There was close to two million baht in the account. I flashed the cashier a thumbs up. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘The money must have gone through,’ I said. ‘We’re building a house.’ I thanked her and hurried out.

I phoned William and told him that Som had a stack of money in her account, far more than she could have saved, even as a go-go dancer. The only way she could have amassed that amount of cash was from a generous sponsor, and probably more than one. She certainly didn’t need William’s 15,000 baht a month.

‘But you’ve never seen her with another guy?’ he said. I could hear the hope in his voice. I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the years. It was the sound of a man who wanted to believe that he wasn’t being lied to, even when all the evidence suggested the contrary. I don’t know what it is with these guys. They really do check their brains in at the airport. I don’t understand it. I understand bargirls. They work for money. Period. They don’t dance in go-go bars and sleep with men twice their age for fun. They do it for money. But the guys who fall in love with them, just what goes through their minds? The guys who cling to the hope that their bargirls are special, that their bargirls don’t lie and cheat, they’re the ones that I really don’t understand.

‘No, I’ve never seen her with a guy,’ I said. But just because I hadn’t seen her walking arm in arm with another farang didn’t mean that she didn’t have a string of overseas sponsors, men who would send her a monthly ‘salary’ in the hope that Som would be faithful to them. It was laughable. The best they could hope for was a form of timeshare: regular payments would entitle them to her company on their occasional visits to the Land of Smiles. She was providing a fantasy, and getting well paid for it, too.

‘There you go, then,’ said William. ‘That’s all I need to know. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt.’

I wished him well and cut the connection. I’d done my job. I’d told him what I thought, but he preferred to cling to the fantasy.

I opened a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’m sure Som would make William welcome when he came back to Thailand. She’d probably move in with him for a while, but as soon as a wealthier sponsor came to town she’d be off, spinning William a line about a relative being sick or her mother needing company. The only way to keep a girl like Som would be to keep upping the ante, to keep paying, until he had nothing left to give. And once she’d bled him dry she’d be off for ever. I raised the bottle in salute to the man on the other side of the world, a man who didn’t know what was about to hit him. Another lamb to the slaughter.

THE CASE OF THE WORRIED HEIR

Robyn was a well-spoken guy and sounded like he had his head screwed on right when he phoned me from the UK. He lived in Oxford and the way he told it he was one of the few guys who’d married a Thai girl and made a success of it. Sorry if I sound cynical, but in the Western world marriages have about a fifty-fifty chance of actually ending up as till death do we part. In the States most marriages fail, and the UK has the worst marriage failure rate in Europe. Throw in the fact that the wife was a hooker prior to tying the knot and that she is from a totally different culture and I’m always amazed to hear that a Thai–farang marriage has lasted longer than five minutes.

Anyway, when Robyn was in his forties he’d been in Thailand working for an NGO when he’d met the love of his life. He didn’t say that he’d met her in a bar and I didn’t ask. They’d married and he’d taken her back to Oxford where so far they’d lived happily ever after and raised a couple of kids. They were getting on fine, he said. He wasn’t a rich man, far from it. He worked in a bookshop in the city centre and didn’t seem to be particularly ambitious. But he wasn’t worried about his long-term prospects because his elderly father was very wealthy. Robyn’s dad, Jack, owned a huge farm on the outskirts of the city which he leased out while he lived in a bungalow. Robyn’s mother had passed away a few years earlier, and as Jack was now in his late seventies it wouldn’t be too long before the estate passed to Robyn. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get the feeling that Robyn was waiting vulture-like for his old man to pass on, but death comes to all of us and when the Grim Reaper called for Jack, Robyn would get his inheritance.

Anyway, Robyn kept telling his dad what a great place Thailand was and suggested that he head out to the Land of Smiles for an extended holiday. The warm climate and the hospitable people would be a tonic for the old man, and a welcome change for the grey clouds and gloomy faces of a typical English winter. Eventually Jack agreed. Robyn was all too well aware of the dangers of Thai bargirls so he made sure that Jack steered clear of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket and suggested that he rent a serviced apartment in Cha-am. Robyn’s wife had friends and relatives in the beach resort, which is a couple of hours drive from Bangkok, so Robyn knew that Jack would be well looked after if he ran into any problems.

Robyn figured that his dad would have three months in the sun before returning to Oxford revitalised. What he didn’t plan on was the Thai gossip network, which went into overdrive almost as soon as Jack walked into his serviced apartment. A rich, elderly farang, staying alone. It was like a wounded tuna thrashing around in a shark-infested sea. Within days a beautiful young girl by the name of Ying was offering to show him around. Ying lived in the block and worked part-time as a real-estate agent. The way Robyn told it, she’d started cooking and cleaning for Jack, telling him that she had a Thai boyfriend in the past but that now she was footloose and fancy free and much preferred farang men to Thais

Jack and Robyn spoke every few days on the phone and at first Robyn was happy enough that his father had someone to cook and clean for him and to show him around. But Robyn’s happiness was short-lived when Jack dropped the bombshell that he and Ying had become more than just good friends. They were in love, Jack was going to marry her and as soon as the winter was over, he planned to bring her back to the UK. Jack was especially pleased that Ying was only a few years younger than Robyn’s wife so she wouldn’t be lonely.

That’s when Robyn got in touch with me. He realised that if the marriage went ahead, the family estate would quite probably end up in the hands of a twenty-something Thai girl.

Like Robyn, I was hearing alarm bells ringing. A ten-year age gap is perfectly acceptable in a relationship. I’ve known marriages work where the husband is twenty years older than the wife. But Jack was half a century older than Ying, and I doubted that it was his wrinkles or shrunken gums that she fancied. You didn’t have to be a private eye to realise that Jack had been hooked by a gold-digger, but the old man was clearly thinking with his dick rather than his brain, so the son wanted me on the case. He’d found my firm on the internet and called me straight away. Robyn had already done a bit of detective work himself. His wife had recommended the apartment block to Robyn’s father and she’d telephoned the staff there to get the low down on Ying. The staff didn’t think much of Ying, apparently, and were fairly sure that she had a Thai boyfriend. I assured Robyn that I’d be able to help and gave him my bank details.

As soon as the retainer had been transferred I phoned my contact at the British Embassy. Generally the embassy officials are not too helpful to guys like me but over the years my contact Clive had been less obstructive than most. I ran Jack’s situation by Clive and asked him what the chances would be of Miss Ying getting a visa to the UK. ‘About the same as a snowball in hell,’ said Clive. In cases like that—which were not unusual in Thailand—the embassy would keep on stalling, hoping that the husband-to-be would come to his senses. I passed that information on to Robyn so that at least he could stop worrying about anything happening in the short term.

The next step was to have chat with Jack. I caught a VIP bus to Cha Am, then paid ten baht for a motorcycle taxi to take me to the apartment block. I asked the girls at the reception desk to phone Jack’s room and five minutes later we were sitting at a beachside bar enjoying a couple of beers. I told him that I was from the British Embassy and that I had a few questions about his application for a visa for Ying. He didn’t question the fact that I had a New Zealand accent, and he was eager to chat. I figured that during the weeks he’d been in Thailand he’d been starved of intelligent conversation. We chatted about his life in Cha Am, his family back in Oxford, rugby, football, and then eventually we got around to the subject at hand. Miss Ying.

It was Jack’s first trip to Thailand, so I explained the basics to him. There are no pensions, unemployment benefits or sickness payments, so Thai girls would do whatever they had to do to survive and to support their families. And attaching herself to a wealthy older man was a much better option than planting rice by hand.

Jack shook his head, refusing to accept that I might be telling the truth. At his age he deserved a little pampering, he said. And he was sure that while Ying might not yet be in love with him, she would make a perfect wife.

According to Jack, she phoned him every morning, then came around in the early afternoon. Most days she went downstairs to the local hair salon to make herself look good for him. They would eat together most evenings, and then at ten o’clock she’d head off to her own room. They had become lovers he admitted coyly, but she didn’t want to move in with him until after they were married. That set more alarm bells ringing in my cynical head. Ten o’clock was the perfect time for a young lady to head off to a nightclub with her Thai beau.

I had a couple of more beers with Jack and I told him a few horror stories of farang men who’d lost everything to their Thai wives or girlfriends, but he just laughed and said that Ying was different. If I’d had a dollar for every guy who’s told me that his girl was different, I’d be a hell of a lot richer than I am. I didn’t tell Jack that, though. I wished him well, told him that his application was working its way through the system, and I went off to phone Robyn.

I told Robyn that his father was still determined to marry Ying and that the next stage would be to start checking her background. He was keen for me to proceed and agreed to wire over further funds. I already had a game plan. In my experience, girls having their hair done tended to chat away merrily. In the past I’d tried using my wife to glean information from various hairdressers but she tended to march in and tell all and sundry that her husband was a private eye and ask her questions point blank. Her elder sister Boo was a bit more devious, though, and in recent years she’d had many a free cut and blow dry courtesy of my investigations. I left it until Friday afternoon, figuring that was a dead cert for a day that Miss Ying would get her hair done. I took the VIP bus down to Cha Am with Boo. I showed her a photograph of Ying and made sure that she was in the salon by three o’clock.

Half an hour after Boo had sat down, Ying walked in. She was obviously well known and as luck would have it she sat down next to my sister-in-law. I love it when a plan comes together!

As it happened, Boo didn’t have to do any fishing. It turned out that Ying loved the sound of her own voice and she wanted to tell all and sundry about her good fortune. She had a hooked a rich old farang, there was a huge dowry on the horizon and she was going to be moving to the UK before long.

I’d briefed Boo to see what the hairdressing girls knew, so she used delaying tactics and asked for a dye job. They were still working on her hair when Ying dropped a big tip and headed into the apartment block for her rendezvous with Jack.

It was easy enough then for Boo to get the full scoop on Miss Ying. Later, as we sank a couple of congratulatory Jack Daniels, Boo told me what she’d learned. According to the girls, who were getting a bit fed up with Ying’s boasting, she was the long time mia noi, minor wife, of a local car dealer and that he was also planning to move to the UK to set up a business exporting cars back to Thailand. The farang was old and according to Ying wouldn’t be alive much longer and that she and her boyfriend would have the lot. I gave Boo a 1,000-baht bonus and complemented her on her red hair.

I put Boo on the bus back to Bangkok and staked out the apartment block in a rental car. If I had Miss Ying right, she’d be hanging out with Jack until ten o’clock and then she’d be out on the town with Mr Car Dealer. I couldn’t stop myself grinning when at ten thirty an older model BMW arrived in front of the block, and a few minutes later Ying hurried out and climbed in to give the driver a peck on the cheek. Bingo.

I followed them to a trendy bar-restaurant where a local band belted out pretty good cover versions of Eighties songs to a packed house of middle-class Thais. I got a seat by the bar and munched on my favourite snacks—gung shar nam pla, or raw prawns marinated in fish sauce and chilli, with lashings of raw garlic. Lovely.

Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer sat at a table and sipped champagne as they listened to the band. There was a large group at the neighbouring table that were celebrating a birthday and at midnight a big cake was taken to their table and everyone began singing ‘happy birthday’. I took the opportunity to pop over with my digital camera and join the other revellers who were taking photographs. I managed to fire off a few shots that clearly showed Miss Ying and Mr Car Dealer together.

I booked into a hotel at Robyn’s expense and the following day headed back to Bangkok. I emailed Robyn a full report and copies of the photographs I’d taken. I figured that would be the end of the case. As it happened, I was wrong. I hadn’t taken into account how attached Jack was to young Miss Ying. When Robyn had told his father about Ying’s boyfriend, Jack point blank refused to believe him. Ying had told him that the man was her brother, and that Jack was the only man she loved. Jack believed her, which just goes to show that there’s no fool like an old fool. It’s a standard lie for Thai girls to pass off their boyfriends, or even husbands, as their brothers. ‘Oh, I share my room with my brother’ they’ll tell their farang sponsor. Bullshit. I’ve been at airports on surveillance jobs when I’ve seen a bargirl tearfully wave off her farang lover, accompanied by her ‘brother’. As soon as the farang has passed through Immigration, the ‘brother’ and the bargirl are at it like dogs in heat.

Anyway, Robyn was starting to panic as he realised that he was faced with the loss of his inheritance. He wanted to know what I thought he should do. I said that if he sent me another 10,000 baht I’d head back to Cha Am and speak to the girl. I might have given Robyn the impression that I was going to get heavy with Miss Ying, but in fact I was just going to play a mind game on her. It was clear from what Boo had told me that Ying wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer so I figured she’d be gullible to fall for any line I gave her.

I waited until the money had come through before catching the VIP bus back to Cha Am. I’d put on a suit and carried a briefcase and added a pair of spectacles to give me added authority. I knocked on Miss Ying’s door, gave her the ‘I’m from the British Embassy and I’m here to talk about your visa application’ speech. I had a fistful of leaflets that I’d picked up last time I’d been at the embassy, and I gave them to her.

Part of me felt sorry for the girl. She was only doing what she had to do to survive. If she’d been born in the West I doubt that she’d have thrown herself at an old fart like Jack or a married man like Mr Car Salesman. But Thailand wasn’t the West and she would soon be thirty and in Thailand a thirty-year-old woman is well over the hill. But Miss Ying wasn’t paying my wages and Robyn was so I hardened my heart and lied to her. I told her that she wasn’t going to get a visa to the UK because the embassy was unhappy at the huge age gap between Jack and herself. I also told her that Jack had very little money, and that he lived off a small allowance. If he’d told her that he was wealthy, he was lying, I said. And I told her that any assets he had in England would, under English law, go to his children on his death. Even if they did go ahead with the marriage, all she would be entitled to would be half of any money that Jack had in Thailand. And there wouldn’t be much of that.

She took it quite well, under the circumstances. She nodded and smiled, fluttered her eyelashes and asked me if I was married. A real trooper.

Jack returned to the UK a few weeks later. I got an email from Robyn saying that I’d killed the romance stone-dead and that his father was busy sending off angry letters to the British Embassy complaining about no-good interfering busybodies and threatening to sue them. It would be water off a duck’s back and I doubted that he’d ever get a reply. I figured Jack had had a lucky escape. He seemed healthy for his age and I got the feeling that Ying might well have been tempted to hurry things along, death-wise. It wouldn’t be the first time that an old farang had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs by a tearful Thai wife. Divorce Thai-style, they call it.