Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson (10 page)

THE CASE OF THE PATTAYA PLAY-AWAYS

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.

Miss Du kept pestering me to take her for a short-time romp upstairs but I put her off by telling her that my herpes had just flared up and I was probably infectious for a few days. She flounced off which gave me the chance to challenge Mr Singapore to a game of pool. He turned out to be a really nice guy. His name was Alan and he ran a successful business in Singapore, organizing golf trips around the region, and just wanted to have a few days R&R in Thailand at a tenth of the cost of similar shenanigans in the Lion City. After a couple of hours of drinks and pool I had his namecard and an invite for a night out on the town next time I was in Singapore. He made no move to take any of the girls for short-time rumpy-pumpy, so as darkness fell I made my excuses and headed out of the hotel. I found a nearby internet café and sent a carefully worded email to Cindee. The thing was, I liked the guy. And he was just doing what a million guys do, and millions more would do if they could: to blow off a bit of steam with a few good-looking girls in tow. It was natural, it wasn’t as if I’d caught him with a mistress or a toy-boy. He was just a guy, having fun. So I told Cindee that I’d seen her husband and his friend playing pool with a few girls, but that I didn’t think there was anything serious going on. I still felt like a rat when I hit the ‘send’ button.

So, off to the other job. Ronnie had been married for almost ten years. He’d moved to Kuala Lumpur as a regional manager with a big oil company with his Thai wife and child. He was on a full expat package—big salary, flights home, nice house, maids, international school for the kid, the works. After a couple of years the wife had said that she was homesick and he’d agreed that she should return to Thailand, which is were he planned to retire to anyway. They bought a large plot of land on the outskirts of Pattaya and he paid an architect to design a ten-room mansion with a pool and a three-car garage. Ronnie spent most of his time in Kuala Lumpur where his son went to one of the top international schools. He had a nanny and a couple of maids and a driver so it wasn’t exactly a hardship posting, and every few months he flew back to Pattaya to spend time with his wife. The arrangement worked well for the first year, but then progress on the house slowed to a crawl. And Ronnie’s suspicions were raised when his wife started talking about starting up a band and owning a restaurant, two long-term dreams of hers. He go in touch via my website and after a few emails I agreed to go and check her out. He faxed me a map to get me to his dream house and I drove out for a look-see. It was easy enough to find, and easy enough to see that building had stopped some time ago. The house had been half-completed but much of what had been done was now overgrown by weeds. There was bamboo scaffolding around the basic framework of the house, but there was no sign of a roof and there were no windows or doors. There was a large rectangular hole where the pool was going to be, and another hole which I guessed was where the garage foundations would go, but there was no building equipment around, no cement mixers or shovels or pickaxes. According to the schedule that the architect had given Ronnie, the house was due to be finished within eight weeks but there was clearly no chance of the builders meeting the deadline. I took a few snapshots with the trusty digital camera so that Ronnie could see for himself.

I spotted an old man feeding some chickens on the nearby plot and I went over and spun him a line about liking the look of the building and wanting to build one just like it myself. Did he by any chance know who the builders were as they were clearly a most professional firm? The old guy fell for my patter and gave me all the information I needed. According to the old man, the wealthy Thai woman who was paying for the house had told the builders to stop work and to start constructing a restaurant on South Pattaya Road, Soi 2 he thought. He gave me the name of the head builder and his mobile phone number. Apparently the guy gave the old man a few baht every now and then to keep an eye on his scaffolding.

I drove back to the Penthouse Hotel figuring that I’d made a pretty good start on both cases and that I deserved a few tumblers of Jack Daniels as a reward. I showered and headed down to the bar. It went by the name of The Kitten Club and Mr Singapore was in residence and feeling no pain. We started playing pool again and buying rounds of drinks for ourselves and his fan club. We stayed until closing and then we wandered over to the hotel’s restaurant which was open twenty-four hours. Alan said that the girls would join us later and that we didn’t have to pay barfines. Considering that we’d spent the best part of 10,000 baht on drinks and snacks already, I figured it wasn’t much of a saving. Anyway, within an hour we had his fan club sitting with us again and there was lots of leg-stroking and breast-fumbling and tongue-swapping. I popped over to the toilet a couple of times and managed to get a few digital snaps of Alan and his mate and the girls. Eventually the two guys chose a girl each, said good night to me, and staggered over to the elevators leaving me with the remains of the fan club. Alan gave me a leer and a thumbs-up as the doors closed. I waved back feeling like a shit because I was going to have to tell his wife what he was up to.

The four girls left were pulling out all the stops persuading me to take them upstairs and I was starting to think that perhaps I deserved more of a reward than just a few JDs, then Miss Du wandered over and started whispering in their ears. She obviously told them about my herpes flare-up because five minutes later I was sitting on my own and my hard on had faded into a memory.

Before I hit the sack I emailed the pictures to Singapore. I felt bad about dropping Alan in it and did my best to explain to Cindee that her husband appeared to be just blowing off a bit of steam. It wasn’t as if he had a mia noy or even a long-term girlfriend, he was just hanging out with bargirls and I figure that ninety-nine per cent of the men in Thailand, single or married, do that at some time. It’s only natural, right? As I hit the ‘send’ button I had a feeling that Cindee wasn’t going to see it that way, though.

The next morning I launched into the hotel’s breakfast buffet then took a stroll down to South Pattaya Road, Soi 2. It was a rough area, even by Pattaya standards, and most of the residents seemed to be Thai labourers and their families. I sat down at a foodstall area and even though I wasn’t hungry I ordered a plate of kow man gai, one of my favourite dishes. It’s steamed rice and chicken and a bowl of watery soup. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. I got chatting to the middle-aged couple running the stall. They were from Kalasin but they had moved to Pattaya decades earlier to seek fame and fortune. They had six kids and the foodstall, which wasn’t much by Western standards but by Thai standards they were doing okay. I always figure that anyone who isn’t up to his knees in water planting rice by hand in the burning sun has got to be ahead of the game. The couple knew about the new Thai cabaret that had just opened further down the soi. They were too old to go out much at night, and they had to be up at first light to go to the market, but they often heard the cabaret’s band late at night. ‘They’re not very good,’ chuckled the old man. ‘I’ve heard drowning dogs that were more tuneful.’

I paid for my snack and wandered along the soi to take a look at the cabaret. A pack of mangy soi dogs watched me walk by, wondering what the hell a farang was doing in their neck of the woods. Soi dogs are strange animals. Like Thai people they’re good-natured unless riled, and they have a totally laid back approach to life. You’ll see them sleeping under cars, in the middle of the road, in gutters, totally oblivious to traffic and pedestrians. The dogs, that is. And the people, too, come to think of it. You never see soi dogs scrounging for food, either, the way you do in the West. They don’t go around begging, they just wait to be fed. There’s always a dog-loving foodstall owner who’ll put out a bowl of rice and meat for them or an old lady throwing out her kitchen scraps. The Lord will provide, seems to be their philosophy. Or Buddha will provide, I guess. I figure the dogs, given the choice, would opt for Buddhism rather than Catholicism or Judaism. The circle of life, and all that. I might only be a humble soi dog but next life I’ll be a general or a politician or a massage-parlour owner. Call me a naïve and sentimental old fool, but I always felt that I’d been a soi dog in a previous life. The one question I couldn’t answer was whether my karma was improving or not.