Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson (9 page)

THE CASE OF THE MILLION-BAHT BARGIRL

I’ve never understood why so many tourists end up sending money back to their temporary girlfriends when they go home. It makes no sense to me. Paying and playing while you’re in Thailand is all well and good, but why pay when you’re thousands of miles away? My bread and butter work is checking up on bargirls. And nine times out of ten, the client is a love-struck farang wanting me to check that his beloved isn’t doing what she was doing when he met her. There is a theory that sex tourists check in their brains on arrival at the airport, but there’s no excuse for long-term residents of the Land of Smiles to be shelling out money to bargirls. Anyone who lives here really should know better. You’ve only got to sit down at one of the beer bars at the entrance to Nana Plaza to see what goes on. Motorcycles buzz up with a pretty young thing on the back. The girl totters into the plaza to start work, the boyfriend drives off to play pool with his friends. After the bars have closed, the guy drives back and picks up the girl and off they go to spend her hard-earned cash. The girls are hookers hooking and they’re not going to stop doing that just because some guy thousands of miles away starts sending her a few thousand baht each month.

Guys who live here know how it works, which is why I was so surprised when I met Yves. And even more surprised when I heard what the daft sod had done. He phoned me on my mobile and said that he’d heard good things about me from a couple of guys I’d worked for. It’s always nice to get a word-of-mouth recommendation rather than a client who has just seen one of the stickers I put on every ATM machine I use. Yves was French, very well spoken and clearly upper class so I put on my best shirt and tie and went around to his office for a chat. Well, not his office, actually. He was a bit wary about being seen with a private eye, so we met in a nearby Starbucks.

I got there twenty minutes early which gave me time for a look around, but he turned up on his own and looked every bit as French as he’d sounded on the phone. He was a small man in his early forties, his hair starting to grey at the temples, fairly good looking and looking dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, grey slacks and dark brown shoes with tassels on them. He bought a couple of coffees and then told me his story.

He’d been in Thailand for most of his life. His father had been involved in the shipping business at the time of the legendary Jim Thompson, and on occasions they’d done business together. Thompson is just about the most famous farang in Thailand; he pretty much single-handedly set up the country’s silk exporting business before disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

Yves had met several members of the Thai Royal Family and had married a Thai woman from a high-class background. She was now on the family estate in Pyrenees raising their three children. Yves travelled back and forth between France and Thailand, though he admitted that the Bangkok office pretty much ran itself. It soon became clear why Yves was spending so much time in the Land of Smiles. He was a frequent visitor to Patpong, one the city’s main red-light districts. Being married hadn’t stopped him fooling around and, with his wife in France, his sex drive had gone into full throttle.

He usually drank in one of the biggest bars in Soi Cowboy, and was a close friend of the Thai owner. He paid and played and from the ‘cat that got the cream’ grin on his face, I could see that he enjoyed himself. Yves’s life had changed a month earlier when a twenty-year-old girl by the name of Boo walked onto the stage and started dancing around a silver pole.

Boo means crab. It’s a common enough name for a Thai girl. Prawn. Chicken. Apple. Orange. For some reasons Thais seem to love to name their daughters after food.

Anyway, according to Yves, Boo was drop-dead gorgeous. Waist-length hair, full breasts, long legs, tight stomach, great arse, hell I was getting turned on by the description alone. And when he took a photograph from his wallet and showed it to me I practically started salivating. She was hot. Hot, hot, hot.

Yves got the owner to send young Boo over to his table and within seconds he was infatuated with her. He offered to let her stay in his penthouse apartment in Silom, and wanted to pay her to stop working. She’d only been dancing for three weeks and the bar owner was none-too-pleased at Yves taking his best-looking dancer away, but a 10,000-baht backhander got everything sorted.

Boo didn’t fully move into Yves’s apartment, but she did spend a lot of time there. They went out most nights, usually to the bar where she used to work. They’d barfine a few of her friends and visit the city’s top nightclubs. Usually at some point he’d slip her some money and she’d return with a few tablets of Ecstasy and then they’d go home where, before too long, he’d crash out. He was twice her age and I figured she was wearing him out. It was funny, Yves didn’t look the type to be doing E. Just shows that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Anyway, usually when Yves woke up, she was gone.

Then he hit me with the big one, the fact that took my breath away. In order to formalise his relationship with her, he had given her a million baht. One million baht! When I heard that my eyebrows shot skyward and my jaw dropped. A million baht!

Let me put that into perspective. A million baht isn’t a million pounds. Or a million dollars. But it is one hell of a lot of cash in Thailand. It would take a Thai schoolteacher the best part of five years to earn a million baht. The sweet little salesgirls in Robinson’s Department Store would have to work for a decade, maybe more, to earn a million baht. Even a star pole-dancer in a top Nana Plaza bar who spent every evening on her back with her legs open would be lucky to take home 50,000 baht a month. So a million baht would be almost two years’ salary. And Yves had given it to Boo. Given it to her. I shook my head in disbelief but Yves took out a bank statement and showed it to me. Sure enough, there was the bank transfer. One million baht, straight from his account to hers.

I made a mental note to charge him double my usual rate because Yves clearly had money to burn. I tried to work out how many times I could have sex with a million baht, assuming that I was paying the going rate. Six hundred baht for a bar fine, fifteen hundred baht for the girl. Four hundred baht for a short-time hotel. Total outlay, two thousand five hundred baht. Divided into one million was one hell of a lot of sex.

Yves made it clear that he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He never actually said that he loved her, but she was the mother of his children plus I figured he knew that a divorce would be bloody expensive in France. He wanted Boo to be his mia noi, his minor wife. A full-time mistress who would be a wife in all but name.

He went to her village in Isaan to meet her mother and Boo had given her 800,000 baht to build a house on some land they owned. That immediately set alarm bells ringing for me because that was three or four times the going rate for building a house there. Labour is dirt cheap in Isaan, and materials are well below Bangkok prices, so I was sure that Yves was being ripped off.

He’d come to the same conclusion shortly after returning to the city from Isaan. But it wasn’t the house that made him think twice about his dream girl. A ‘sister’ appeared, a girl who was a few years older than Boo but with a hundred times more experience by the look of her. Thais are pretty flexible about who they refer to as their ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and the term doesn’t necessarily mean that they have the same mother and father. In the case of Boo’s ‘sister’, Yves got the impression that she was just a friend from her village, probably the girl who had enticed Boo into the bar business. The ‘sister’ started going out with Yves, Boo and her friends on their nightly rounds. She was draped in gold— thick necklaces, rings on most of her fingers and heavy bracelets. The ‘sister’ suggested that Yves buy Boo some gold and that got Boo all excited so Yves agreed to go along to a gold shop with them.

Now, Yves was no stranger to gold shops, and he knew how they worked. The gold jewellery is pretty much pure metal and is sold by weight, with a few hundred baht thrown in to cover design and workmanship. The daily gold price is usually on a sign in the window, one price for selling and a slightly lower price for buying. In Thailand, gold is as good as money and it’s a standard con for a bargirl to take her beloved into a gold shop to buy a token of his love, only to have the girl return alone the next day and exchange it for cash.

Yves went into a gold shop near Soi Cowboy with Boo and the ‘sister’ and a middle-aged Thai-Chinese woman started the hard-sell. Yves asked the price of a few items, and soon realised that he was being taken for a ride. He figured that the ‘sister’ had done a deal with the shop and arranged a hefty commission for anything that Yves bought. He refused to buy anything from the shop, and walked out with a tearful Boo.

Now that his suspicions were raised, Yves started taking a closer look at the lovely Miss Boo. He went through his bank statements and discovered that somebody had regularly been withdrawing 20,000 baht from one of his accounts. Yves got most of his spending money from the petty cash float in his office, so it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to fgure out who was hitting the ATM. Yves went to his local police station but the cops told him that they wouldn’t act without proof and that they didn’t have the enthusiasm to mount an investigation. I smiled when he told me that. The police were hoping he would offer them a reward, in which case they would have immediately swung into action, but instead he had taken them at their word and contacted me. Still, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good and I was as happy as Boo to take Yves’s money.

Yves wanted revenge. If it was me I’d have just walked away. Hell, if it had been me I wouldn’t have given her a million baht in the first place. Yves wanted her in jail, behind bars, he wanted her punished. It seemed petty to me, she was just a bargirl doing what bargirls do. I don’t see why he’d expected anything else. Money to bargirls is like water, it’s easy to get and easy to spend. Give a bargirl a hundred baht and she’ll spend it. Give her a hundred thousand and she’ll spend that. When Yves offered her a million, what else was she supposed to have done other than said ‘thank you’ and taken it?

Anyway, rule number one of the private-eye game is that the customer is always right, even when he’s wrong, so I quoted him a daily rate and he passed me a thick wad of notes in a company envelope.

I got him to fax me a signed authority and a copy of the bank account that had been accessed with the ATM card and I took them along to the branch with a couple of boxes of chocolate almonds. I chose the plainest female cashier, gave her a winning smile and the sweets and five minutes later I had the information I needed and a phone number that I most definitely didn’t. All the withdrawals had been from the same ATM, close to Yves’s penthouse apartment, and they had all been made between five and seven o’clock in the morning, while Yves was sleeping off the effects of the alcohol, Ecstasy and sex.

I phoned Yves and told him what I’d discovered. We agreed that he’d carry on as usual, and I’d stake out the ATM. He’d text me when he got home and I’d wait with my trusty digital camera. Three days later and I got what I wanted. Yves and Boo got home at just after three after a night on the town. I was sitting outside a 7-Eleven opposite the ATM by four with a motorcycle taxi close by, and at six-thirty a decidedly sexy Miss Boo tottered down the road in skin-tight jeans and high heels and slotted in an ATM card. I fired off half a dozen shots. The last one was a beauty, Boo grinning from ear to ear as she counted a fistful of notes.

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.