Stephen Leather - Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye - True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson

She put the money into the back pocket of her jeans and tottered back to Yves’s place. True to form she reappeared again at just after seven and hailed a taxi. I was already on the back of the motorcycle taxi and we followed her across town. It was well before rush hour so we had no problem keeping her in sight. The guy I was using was Panu, one of my regulars. He had a disconcerting habit of picking his nose while driving at speed, but he was reliable and knew the city like the back of his hand.

Miss Boo’s taxi drove along Rama VII road and eventually stopped outside a six-storey apartment block in a busy side street. I told Panu to follow her inside. No one looked twice at a motorcycle taxi guy whereas farangs attract attention wherever they go.

Panu returned a few minutes later. Miss Boo was holed up in Room 702.

A few days later Yves and I went back to the police station with the photographs and a bank statement showing Miss Boo’s latest unofficial withdrawal. And this time I’d primed Yves to offer a 10,000 baht sweetener, just to encourage the boys in brown to do their thing.

The next day at about noon the cops went in. They got Miss Boo and, as it turned out, her husband, who had recently given up his job as a labourer in Isaan and moved to Bangkok to help his wife spend Yves’s money. The police also found a dozen yah ba tablets in the room.

Miss Boo and her husband were hauled off to the station where Yves identified the girl and signed forms in triplicate confirming that he wanted to press charges. The cops were prepared to let Boo go with just a ‘fine’ but Yves insisted that she be charged. The theft charge and the drugs were good enough to put Miss Boo behind bars for a hundred days. And a hundred days in a Thai jail is the equivalent of a year or so in the civilised world. The husband came up with a decent bribe, which coupled with the fact that it was his first offence meant that he walked. He caught the next bus back to Isaan.

Yves was happy with the result. He got his revenge, but he didn’t get his million baht back. To be honest, I don’t think it was ever about the money. Yves had money enough to burn. It was about being lied to by a girl half his age and about him having to face the fact that the sexy, young, Miss Boo wanted just one thing from him: cold, hard cash. He wasn’t the handsome, debonair man-of-the-world that he liked to think he was; he was a punter, and she was a hooker. And they were facts that Yves didn’t want to face. C’est la vie, as the French say. Serves him right, is what I say.

By and large, I avoid Pattaya like the proverbial plague. It’s a scummy place unless you’re a sex tourist and it brings together the worst sort of farangs and the worst sort of Thais. It’s a Wild West town with go-go bars where tattooed guys with shaved heads and beer bellies drive around on Harleys with hookers half their age clinging to their backs, where drugs, booze and hookers are on tap twenty-four hours a day, and where there’s a murder/suicide pretty much every week. A murder/suicide? Yeah, that’s where a guy is found in his room, a plastic bag tied around his neck and his hands tied behind his back. The cops always write it off as a suicide but I’ve never heard of anyone killing themselves like that outside of the Land of Smiles. The other preferred way of ending it all is for a tourist to throw himself out of his hotel room window. That usually gets classified as a suicide too, even if the tourist’s wallet is empty and his watch and mobile phone are missing. You see, murder is bad for business. And Pattaya is all about business. The local press play ball, too, and most of the murder/suicides are never reported.

At any one time there are probably as many as 20,000 hookers in Pattaya, and frankly most of them are well past their sell-by date. That’s just my humble opinion. Most of the overage, overweight, overdrinking sex tourists who prowl the beach road at night would probably disagree. A big chunk of the bargirl investigations I get are from guys who’ve fallen for the charms of a Pattaya hooker. They meet her on a two-week vacation, fall in love, and before they go back to farangland they beg the girl to stop working and promise to send her a monthly salary. After a few weeks they start to wonder if the girl is sticking to her end of the deal and that’s when they get in touch with me. Frankly, it’s money for old rope. Rule Number One when it comes to bargirls: if their lips are moving, they’re lying. Rule Number Two: if their lips aren’t moving, they’re planning their next lie.

Time after time I hear the same refrain. ‘My girl is different.’ And ‘I know she loves me.’ And ‘She never really wanted to work in the bar in the first place.’ Whatever. I tell them my daily rate and when I’ve got a few cases lined up I take a run down the coast in a rental car. Over the years I’ve probably investigated 300 bargirls who’ve sworn love and devotion to farang boyfriends. And how many have turned out to be loyal, faithful girlfriends, patiently sitting in their rooms waiting for their boyfriend to return? Err, let me think about that for a while. Err, none. Not one. Like I said, money for old rope.

To be honest, I don’t enjoy bargirl investigations. They are generally pointless and I’m forever telling clients what they don’t want to hear. There’s also the risk of violence. Bargirls take no prisoners and they fight mean. I’ve seen a girl weighing forty kilograms soaking wet take out a guy three times her size by walloping him on the temple with the heel of her shoe. I always try to get in and out without the girl finding out who grassed her up because to a Thai bargirl revenge is a dish best served up cold, hot, spiced with chilli or wrapped up in a pancake with a bowl of sweet sauce on the side.

Anyway, for this trip to Sleaze-By-The-Sea I had two cases and I was feeling good because neither of them involved checking up on bargirls. Case number one involved a Brit by the name of Ronnie who was working for an oil company in Malaysia. Ronnie had married a girl from Pattaya-Gradai, her name was, she used to work in a beauty parlour, he said-and she’d gone back home to supervise the building of a new family home. Building work had slowed and Ronnie got the feeling that his wife was starting to give him the runaround. Case number two was a Singaporean girl called Cindee (she stressed the spelling three times so it obviously meant a lot to her) who was wondering why her husband was spending so much time in Pattaya. As soon as she told me the name of the hotel he was staying at I had a pretty good idea what he was up to. The Penthouse in Pattaya Soi 8 was a well known sex-tourist hangout. If she’d just checked out their website she’d have realised that it wasn’t a Hilton or Hyatt. Taking bargirls to rooms wasn’t just allowed, it was practically compulsory. Still, if she wanted to pay me to confirm the blindingly obvious, I was happy to take her money.

So with two retainers in the bank, I rented a nondescript Toyota and drove south and booked into the Penthouse. It took me all of five minutes to locate Mr Singapore. The Penthouse has a convenient CCTV system hooked into the hotel’s TVs so that punters can check out the girls in the bar downstairs. Mr Singapore and his best buddy-as described to me by Cindee-were sitting there watching the girls dancing. I showered, changed into fresh Chinos and a polo shirt, and headed downstairs. By the time I walked into the bar, Mr Singapore was playing pool with four or five reasonably cute bargirls, all of them drinking heavily, apparently on his bar tab.

I perched myself on a bar stool smiled at a lanky bargirl and before I could say ‘I’m fresh off the plane from Auckland’ she was by my side with her hand on my thigh, tossing her hair and pointing her surgically-enhanced but nonetheless tempting breasts at me. Her name was Du and she had only been working in the bar for two weeks, she said. The tattoo of a scorpion on her shoulder and the three-baht gold chain on her wrist suggested she’d been at the game a bit longer than that, but I just nodded and smiled, patted her on her very impressive backside and told her to get me a Jack Daniels and herself whatever she wanted. A few rounds later and I had the full story on Mr Singapore. He was a regular who came for a week every few months, she said, which pretty much put paid to her story of only being there for two weeks. That’s typical of a Thai bargirl-cunning as a fox, with the mind of a goldfsh.