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

Pim’s apartment was number 305C, which I figured was Block C, third floor, apartment five. I waited around the entrance to the block until a group of students came out, and I hurried inside before the door closed. There were no elevators and the temperature was heading towards the predicted low-forties so I took off my jacket and headed for the stairs. There was a metal grille across the door to apartment five on the third floor. On the door itself were the numbers 305 so I figured I had the right place. The grille was padlocked on the outside, so there was obviously no one inside which meant that I’d missed her. Or that she hadn’t gone home that night.

I left it until four o’clock in the afternoon before returning to the roadside foodstall. The mid-forties forecast had been breached, and it was hellishly humid, and the boiled chicken had been sitting in the sun all day so I gave the kow man gai a miss and just ordered a Coke and a ten-baht bag of fresh pineapple. I ate my pineapple and sipped my Coke and scrutinised the faces of the passing students for any sign of Miss Pim. Five o’clock came and went and there was no sign of her, but as the majority were whizzing by on the back of motorcycles at five baht a time, I figured I could easily have missed her.

I got a motorcycle back to the Skytrain, then went home for a shower and a nap. I had a bargirl investigation that I’d been meaning to do for a while so after dark I caught a taxi to Soi Cowboy and parked myself in a dark corner of the After School Bar with a JD and Coke. The girl I was looking for was the fiancA© of a Swiss guy currently in receipt of a 30,000-baht-a-month retainer until her visa came through. Her name was Ann and there was no sign of her on the stage or sitting next to the half dozen or so customers scattered around the bar.

I started chatting in Khamen to one of the prettier girls. Yu-ee her name was, and she was determined to get me over to the Naughty Boys’ Corner but the only oral I was interested in was the sort that produced answers to my questions. I offered to buy her a cola but she said she’d prefer a Heineken beer and a tequila chaser. She told me she was eighteen but I figured she was a few years older than that. But even if she was in her early twenties that was still a pretty impressive drinks order for eight o’clock in the evening.

She slipped her hand on my knee and than ran it slowly along my thigh and asked me again to visit the Naughty Boys’ Corner with me. Five hundred baht and I was guaranteed a smile on my face. I told her that I was actually there to see a girl called Anne because a friend of mine had barfined her last month and he wanted her mobile phone number so that he could call her from Australia. I was pleasantly surprised when Yu-ee told me that Anne had stopped work, that she had a rich farang taking care of her, and that she was planning to start a new life in Zurich. She pronounced Zurich to rhyme with rich, which was cute.

I bought her another beer and chaser and spent another ten minutes having my thigh rubbed before I figured that the Naughty Boys’ Corner wasn’t that bad an idea after all. I left the bar at midnight with a smile on my face, and not just because I’d finally found a bargirl who was doing the right thing by her sponsor.

I went over to the motorcycle taxi boys and was about to tell them to take me home, when I remembered Lars. I decided to pay a night-time visit to Miss Pim’s apartment. I negotiated a round-trip fare with a guy with a 100cc Honda and got him to wait for me outside Block C. It was cooler than during the day, but it was still a hot evening and many rooms had their doors open, TVs on full blast, radios playing. The door to Miss Pim’s room was shut. The grille was unlocked, though, so someone was obviously inside. I bent down, pretending to tie my shoelace, but I couldn’t hear anything inside. But I did see two pairs of cheap flip-fops in the corridor outside the door, and one of the pairs was way too big for a girl. It’s the Thai way to leave their shoes outside the front door, and I’ve cracked more than a few cases by checking footwear outside an apartment at night. There were a number of reasons that could explain away the man-size pair of flip-flops outside her door. Her father might be visiting. She might have called a repairman out to fix her fridge. Or she might be on the other side of the door having torrid sex with her boyfriend or husband. If I was a betting man, which I am, I’d be betting the farm on the latter.

I got my motorcycle taxi guy to run me home. On the way I stopped off at a late-night internet cafA© and fired off an email to Lars laying out the shoe situation for him.

He phoned me three hours later, forgetting about the time difference in his haste to hear about the shoes from the horse’s mouth. I gave him a run down on what I’d seen, and suddenly he didn’t sound so sure of himself. Once when he’d phoned Pim on her landline a man had answered. Pim had hurriedly taken the phone and explained that it was her brother visiting. Lars said it was probably her brother again, but I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. I said I could easily check if she had a brother, though it would mean a trip to her home town.

Lars asked if I’d keep her under surveillance and promised to send me more money. I spent a couple of hours at the kow man gai stall the following morning, but I still couldn’t spot Miss Pim. There were just too many students on the move. I was starting to think about knocking on her door and giving her the old ‘I’m from the Danish Embassy’ speech and taking it from there. The temperature was heading towards the mid-forties again so I moved into a small shop where a dozen motorcycle taxi guys were watching a football match on a big screen TV. There was a small fan mounted on the wall and I positioned myself so that I could watch the game, keep an eye on the entrance to Block C, and enjoy a cool breeze. A couple of the guys were munching on fried grasshoppers and chatting away in a Laotian dialect so I nodded at the bag of insects and said ‘ sapp-e-lee?’, the Laos phrase for delicious. They roared with laughter and asked me if I’d like to try. I’ve eaten bugs before so in the interests of a bit of male bonding I took one. I’d like to say it tasted like chicken, but I’d be lying. It tasted like a fried insect. A bit like a slightly bitter cashew nut, with legs. I ordered a bottle of Sangsom whiskey and some soda for my new-found friends and they found me a plastic chair. I figured I’d missed Miss Pim for the day so I might as well enjoy the football.

It turned out that one of the guys came from my wife’s village, so we did plenty of glass-clinking and shouting ‘ chon-gel’ which sort of means ‘cheers’. A few hours later and I figured I’d better head home to freshen up and dig out a suit to catch Miss Pim in my embassy guise later that evening.

My new best friend said that he was knocking off for the day and that he’d give me a lift to the Skytrain station at On Nut. It was one hell of a ride due to the combination of the whisky I’d bought him and the amphetamines he’d been popping. We zig-zagged through the traffic, me with white knuckles and clenched teeth, him with a manic look in his eyes and a tendency to scratch his groin with his gear-changing hand whenever we overtook a smoke-belching bus. By the time he pulled up in front of the Skytrain station I was feeling fairly light-headed.

The guy wouldn’t take any money from me. I was just about to head up the stairs to the platform when I thought I’d try a long shot. I pulled out Miss Pim’s picture and showed it to him. It was probably all the whiskey I’d drunk but I didn’t bother with a cover story, I just told him the truth, that Miss Pim’s boyfriend was worried that she might be being unfaithful and that I hadn’t been able to find out whether or not she was fooling around. The motorcycle taxi guy grinned the moment he looked at the photograph, then he beamed, then he burst out laughing. ‘I know her,’ he said.