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

‘Cash,’ I said. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

I pocketed my retainer, wished him a safe trip home, and left him to his breakfast, picking up a sausage from the buffet on my way out.

Later that day I sent an email to Shanghai Charles. I said that Andrew did little more than eat in the hotel restaurants and visit the Huntsman Bar in the basement. He never even had a sniff of a bargirl. I had no misgivings about telling a little white lie. Andrew was a decent enough guy and I had double the bonus that had been promised, so I reckoned justice had been done. Justice A la Thai private eye.

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.