Текст книги "The 38 Million Dollar Smile "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Both of them?” I said. “They took both Timmy and
Kawee?”
“I’m afraid so, yes, Mr. Don.”
“But why Timmy? They may think Kawee can lead them to
Griswold. But what’s the point of dragging Timothy along? To
me, that doesn’t add up.”
We were in Pugh’s Toyota banging along Sathorn Soi 1
toward Griswold’s condo. The call had come to Pugh from one
of his innumerable police department snitches – the Johnny
Walker brigades, he had called them – alerting him that four
armed men had arrived at Griswold’s building half an hour
earlier. They had pistol-whipped the security guard and ordered
Mr. Thomsatai to take them up to Griswold’s apartment and let
them in. They then forced the condo’s two occupants, a Thai
lady-boy and an older farang, to leave with them in the black
SUV they had arrived in.
I said, “Thomsatai. That degenerate. They bought him.”
“Possibly.”
We lurched around the corner onto Soi Nantha. The sun
was down now, and the sky was infused with a gold even richer
than that of the spires on the temples over near the king’s
palace along the Chao Phraya River, a mile or two north of us.
Pugh slowed a bit for the speed bump behind the Austrian
Embassy, then hurtled past Paradisio, its entryway thick with
Sunday day-off comings and goings.
“But it was Thomsatai who phoned the police?” I asked.
“He had to. The security guard would have notified his
superiors, who would have acted. They have a reputation to
protect, for business reasons.”
“And the guard is okay?”
“Apparently.”
98 Richard Stevenson
“That’s good. It means they are not simply gunning people
down. They want to get what they want to get. In some cases,
anyway.”
Neither of us spoke out loud of the balcony-plunge deaths
of Geoff Pringle and then the famous fortune-teller.
I asked if anybody got a description of the car.
“Generally, but no tag number. The traffic police have been
alerted to watch for a black four-by-four with tinted windows
containing four men and their two abductees.”
“Is anything likely to come of that?”
As Griswold’s building came into view, Pugh said, “It’s a
pricey car. Some enterprising officer might view it as a mark for a quick two-hundred-baht hit and then discover it has captives
inside it. We would need good luck for that,” Pugh added, and
tooted his car horn three times, one for the Buddha, one for the Dharma, his teachings, and one for the monks who preserve the
Buddha’s wisdom.
We pulled in behind a cop car that was parked in front of
the apartment building, pink bougainvillea petals from a nearby
bush already gathering on its blue hood. A second car from
GUTS security services was parked nearby, and a new younger
and bigger guard stood watch at the sentry hut. A few of the
building’s occupants and some neighbors had gathered, but they
seemed to be keeping their distance.
“There must have been witnesses,” I said, as we headed into
the building. “There was still some daylight when they did it.”
Pugh said, “Do you really think any of these people would
describe what they saw, and by so doing establish their existence inside what most of my fellow countrymen regard as
the diseased and capricious minds of the police? Dream on,
Khun Don, dream on.”
A plainclothes detective and his uniformed associate had Mr.
Thomsatai in a cubicle off a polished marble lobby of the type
that once must have housed royalty but was common now in
luxury apartment buildings. Was there a finite supply of marble
in the world, as with fossil fuels? This was surely the case, but THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 99
which would run out first? If Timmy had been there, he would
have had an informed opinion on this question. But he wasn’t,
and I wanted to strangle to death until he lay in a heap on the
shiny marble floor whoever had taken him from me.
Mr. Thomsatai glanced at Pugh and me when we came in,
then away. This guy was guilty of something, probably
practically everything. Why had the condo association hired this conscienceless crook? Thomsatai had violated two of the five
explicit moral precepts of Buddhism – no lying, no stealing —
and yet here he was, playing the aggrieved victim. I did not,
however, walk over and kick him hard, as I was impelled to do.
Pugh politely wai- ed the plainclothes officer – raised palms together, a small bow – and the cop wai - ed him back. A
round-faced man in his forties with an expertly shaped pile of
gleaming black hair on his head, the detective was the senior
Thai in the room, but he plainly knew and respected Pugh, for
his abilities perhaps, or his Johnny Walker.
Pugh introduced me to the two cops as the “boyfriend” of
Timothy Callahan. It was given as a neutral description and
received that way. Pugh also told Detective Panu
Pansittivorakul that I was a private investigator searching for a missing American, Gary Griswold.
“I am aware of that,” Panu said with no particular
expression. “How are you making out with your search, Mr.
Don?”
“Nothing yet,” I said. “But we have some ideas. I think we
can assume that this abduction is in some way tied to Gary
Griswold’s having gone into hiding. Has anybody IDed any of
the four goons?”
“Unfortunately, no. We have descriptions, but no one
recognized any of them. Not the security guard, not Mr.
Thomsatai.”
I said to Thomsatai, “Could one of them possibly have been
the unfriendly man on the motorcycle who paid you to phone
him when Mr. Gary came around? He sounds like a good bet to
me – the sort of man who, if there was a good kidnapping in
100 Richard Stevenson
the works, wouldn’t dream of being left out. Wasn’t Mr.
Unfriendly Motorbike perhaps one of the four?”
Thomsatai looked up and lied so unconvincingly that beads
of sweat popped out on his forehead. He was his own human
polygraph. “No, no. I would recognize that bad man. These
men were others. No motorbike man, no, no.”
Pugh motioned for Panu to step aside and spoke to him
quietly. I couldn’t hear what was said, but the detective nodded at the uniformed officer. The cop then walked over and picked
up a fat Bangkok telephone book from a desk and smashed it
against the side of Mr. Thomsatai’s head.
Timmy wasn’t there to object, so I had to do it. “Rufus,
don’t, please. What happened to the elephant and the
grasshopper?”
“Who were they?” Panu demanded of Mr. Thomsatai, who
sat looking stunned and close to tears. Panu then switched to
Thai and barked a string of orders I could not understand. The
cop picked up the phone book again, and when I stepped in his
direction, Panu snapped something to Pugh in Thai that from
his body language plainly meant, “Get this farang dickhead out
of here.”
Pugh, not looking as embarrassed as I wanted him to,
indicated that I should follow him out of the cubicle.
That’s when Mr. Thomsatai said, “Yes, now I remember!
Yes, yes, one of them was the man on the motorbike who was
looking for Mr. Gary.”
I looked at Pugh in a funny way whose meaning he correctly
understood to be, “Can we trust any of this?”
Then my cell phone rang. I checked the number but the
caller’s ID was blocked. They all watched me – they knew it
wasn’t going to be a lovely invitation for Sunday brunch, and I
knew it too. As Panu pointed and the uniformed cop quickly
led Mr. Thomsatai out of the cubicle, I flipped open the phone.
“Hello.”
“Don?”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 101
“Yes, yes.”
“It’s Timothy.”
“Timmy, can you talk?”
“Well, yes. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Of course. So what’s the deal?”
“The deal is, they want Griswold. They will trade Kawee and
me for Griswold.”
“I see.”
“That’s about it. I’m not supposed to say any more. Oh,
except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“They said I should tell you that we are on the fourteenth
floor.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.”
“So that’s about it, I guess. God, it’s good to hear your
voice.”
“It’s so good to hear yours.”
“Just…please get Kawee and me out of this, if you can.
Okay?”
“We will, we will. Can you tell me anything more about
where you are?”
“No.”
“Is Kawee okay? Are they treating you well enough?”
“Yes. We’re both all right. So far. But one of the gentlemen
hosting us just handed me a note asking me to tell you this. You have forty-eight hours to hand over Griswold.”
“I understand.”
“The note also has a big ‘fourteen’ on it. As in fourteenth
floor. Get it?”
“I sure do.”
“I’m supposed to hang up now. Bye.”
“Good-bye, Timothy.”
102 Richard Stevenson
And then he was gone.
I repeated the conversation to Pugh and Detective Panu.
“They’re on the fourteenth floor somewhere. We’re supposed
to believe, apparently, that if we don’t hand over Griswold
within forty-eight hours, Timothy and Kawee will be shoved off
a high balcony.”
Pugh and Panu looked grim. “So sorry,” Panu said.
“How many buildings are there in Bangkok fourteen or
more stories high? Any idea?”
Pugh and Panu looked at each other. “Many hundreds,”
Pugh said. “Twenty-five years ago this would have been easy.
Today Bangkok is Houston or Miami in that regard.”
“Yes, but all you have to do is check all the fourteenth floors
in Bangkok. That limits it, right? Even if there are, say, thirty-five hundred buildings with fourteenth floors, you’d need only
thirty-five hundred or, even better, sixty-five hundred officers to do a sweep. That doesn’t seem insurmountable, does it? How
many cops are there in Bangkok?”
Again, both Pugh and Detective Panu looked at each other
gravely, and then at me. Panu said, “It’s a matter of priorities.”
He gave a wan apologetic shrug.
“What we’re talking about here,” Pugh said, “is a déclassé
Thai lady-boy, a nobody. And Mr. Timothy is a mere tourist,
less than a nobody in Thailand. While it is true that tourists are gods in Thailand collectively speaking, individually they do not merit a tremendous amount of interest, particularly by the
police. Am I putting that too harshly, Khun Panu?”
“A little, perhaps.”
I said, “What if we paid for the services of the police?
Would that help? Perhaps some senior officer, a captain or even
general.”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Pugh said and glanced at Detective Panu,
who shrugged mildly.
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 103
“Okay, you locate that official and I’ll come up with the
payoff. How much are we talking here? Twenty cases of Johnny
Walker? Sixty? Or is it cash – US dollars? Euros?”
Panu said, “Bahts make a nice gift.”
“How many bahts?”
“I’ve heard that fifty thousand can be helpful. That’s about
sixteen thousand dollars, I believe. Unless the US dollar has
grown even weaker in the past hour.”
“It’s not just a question of national pride,” Pugh said. “The
baht is currently a sounder currency than the dollar. So your
client, Mrs. Griswold, will provide the funding for this
additional expense?”
I told them about the e-mail from Ellen Griswold calling me
off the case because, she claimed, she had heard from her ex-
husband, and he insisted he was in no danger and was merely
embarrassed over some personal matter.
“Therefore,” I said, “any further expenses will have to be
met by Gary Griswold himself, who plainly is in big trouble.
What this means is, we have to find Griswold fast. Then, (a)
extract cash from him to pay off your for-profit police
department to prod it to do its job, (b) find out from him what
the hell is going on here so that we can help get him out of the rotten situation he’s in, and (c) – if those two approaches fail
– have Griswold in hand so that we can trade him for Timmy
and Kawee and hope that he can hand over to these people,
whoever they are, whatever it is they want from him, thus keeping Griswold from being shoved off a balcony.”
Pugh said, “I like your tour d’horizon, Mr. Don. It’s dead-on.
And your willingness to sacrifice poor Mr. Gary, if necessary, in order to save your boyfriend and the katoey is admirable. There
are degrees of innocence in this complex situation. And Mr.
Gary, should he perish, would be fulfilling a karma plainly
nudged into existence by his own klutziness. Not that we
shouldn’t do everything we can to save this wayward farang’s
sorry ass from whatever mishigas he has waded into of his own volition.”
104 Richard Stevenson
“Timmy, of course, would have a few choice words for me
if he were here,” I said. “He’s a bit of a moral absolutist. He
would allow for no cold-blooded choices of the type I have
described. But let’s just get him back, and then he can lecture all of us to his heart’s content.”
Pugh said, “And what if Mr. Gary is unwilling or, God
forbid, unable to underwrite our efforts and those of the
hardworking Royal Thai Police? What if we track him down and
he laughs in our faces and tells us all to go do what is
anatomically impossible for most people – not that there aren’t
exceptions to that rule at certain clubs I could mention in
Surawong? Or what if we locate Mr. Gary and he is penniless?
This could get complicated, I think.”
“If Griswold can’t produce whatever cash that’s needed,
then I’ll go down to the ATM on Rama IV Road near the
Topmost and stand there for half an hour with my MasterCard
pumping bahts into a bag. That won’t be a problem. Please go
ahead right now and make whatever sleazy arrangements are
appropriate with your sleazy police department’s sleazy higher-
ups.”
Pugh and Panu both squinted at me and nodded.
I remembered Timmy’s warnings to me about getting mixed
up in this case. Timothy, the grounded one. Timothy, the
sensible one. Timothy, the seer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“So, Bob. What’s the deal with the Griswolds? What I’m
dealing with here seems to be not exactly what it seemed to be
when you sent Ellen Griswold to me to track down her
wayward ex-husband and wayward current brother in-law in
Thailand.” I explained what had transpired in the previous
twenty-four hours and asked the lawyer, “So, what I want to
know from you is, can the Griswolds be trusted, or what?”
I had reached Chicarelli on the golf course Sunday morning
in Clifton Park, near Albany. When I called his house, his wife
was reluctant to violate the sanctity of Chicarelli’s Sabbath golf game by blabbing his cell phone number for a business matter.
But when I said the urgent situation I was calling about had to
do with the Griswolds, a name of consequence in Albany, she
recited the number pronto.
“They’ve got Timmy? Christ, Strachey, have you notified the
US embassy? They’ve gotta bring in the FBI, would be my
thinking. Going at this on your own sounds very risky to me.”
“It may come to that, but my Thai sources say the cops here
are more effectively inspired by cash than by hectoring from
farangs in suits. There’s a big DEA station here, but I’d probably have to convince those guys that there’s a major heroin
shipment involved in order to get their attention.”
“You might want to consider saying just that.”
“I might, in the end. For all I know at this point, it could
even be true. But what about the Griswolds? What’s the story
with them? Ellen sends me flying over here and gives me pretty
much carte blanche to do anything I can to save her ex and his
thirty-eight mil. Then she e-mails me some lame crap about he’s
A-okay, it’s all a misunderstanding, and come on home. Plainly
the guy really is up to his ears in some stinking mess involving influential fortune-tellers and who knows what kind of criminal
weirdos. It seems like half the goons in Bangkok want to get
hold of Griswold and…I hate to think. Give him a shove. My
106 Richard Stevenson
question to you is, why would Ellen call me off? What’s her
game here? It’s possible that Gary lied to her about being safe, but why would she be so ready to believe the lie? Bob, I’m
confused.”
There was a long pause – was Chicarelli taking time out
from my call to pick some grass off his four iron? – and then
he said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this.” More silence.
“Yeah?”
“It could be financial.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bill Griswold has serious money troubles, I’ve heard from
people who would know. It’s possible all of a sudden that
maybe the Griswolds think they cannot afford you.”
“That sounds unlikely. I’m a monetary tiny speck in their
scheme of things.”
“No, this is big and it’s significant. There’s a hostile takeover underway at Algonquin Steel. A holding company operating out
of the Caymans is busy rolling up shares in the Griswold’s
zillion-dollar family store. Bill Griswold is fighting it, and there’s a high probability that the family’s assets will be tied up in
litigation for years to come. Bill and Ellen may land on their feet eventually, but the family well is going to be shallow-borderingon-dry for the foreseeable future. All this just developed on Friday, so that could help account for Ellen’s change of plans.”
“I was somewhere over the Pacific on Friday. At least she
didn’t call the airline and demand that they turn the plane
around.”
Chicarelli laughed once. “She might have. That’s Ellen.”
“Anyway, what you’re suggesting doesn’t sound right. It’s
not like the Griswolds are suddenly penniless. And surely Ellen
would not cut her ex-husband off if she believed he was in real
danger. And again, if he contacted her and told her he was not
in any danger, why would she believe that? She thinks he’s
borderline bonkers these days. It’s possible, I suppose, that he’s got some scheme in mind to save himself, and my poking
around is screwing that up somehow. But if that’s the case, why
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 107
wouldn’t Griswold just explain that to me, and I’d have another
helping of fried crickets and then head home. No, there’s
something screwy about the way all the Griswolds are behaving.
Anyway, now I have no choice but to get to the bottom of the
entire bizarre mess and get Timmy out of Thailand. You know,
he didn’t really want to come here. He thought it would be dangerous. I talked him into it.”
“People by the thousands go there and have a wonderful
time,” Chicarelli said. “Isn’t Thailand called the Land of
Smiles?”
“That’s what I told Timmy. It’s true, too. But nobody, Thai
or otherwise, who has anything to do with the Griswolds is
smiling these days. What’s that about? That’s what I want to
know.”
“Jeez, Strachey. Now I’m sorry I ever sent Ellen to you. I
figured: Thailand. Gay. Free ride. Big bucks. I thought I was
doing you a favor. And I was helping out Ellen, too. She’s
somebody you don’t want to make unhappy if you can avoid
it.”
“She’s formidable. Though I kind of like her, even if I don’t
quite trust her.”
“This didn’t come from me, but did you ever hear the stuff
about Ellen and the demise of Bill’s first wife?”
“What stuff is that?”
“Sheila Griswold, Bill’s ex, was a vindictive lady who made a
career of making his life miserable after the divorce. Hounding
him endlessly for more, more, more. I knew Sheila’s attorney,
Hal Woolrich, a total scumbag who’s now in Waterbury for tax
evasion. Anyway, Sheila disappears on a Caribbean cruise and a
lot of people thought she went overboard with a little help from others on the boat. Among the merrymakers on the ship that
night were Ellen’s personal trainer, Duane Hubbard, and
Hubbard’s boyfriend, Matthew Mertz. They were pretty scuzzy
characters. Mertz had a history of coke dealing and at least one assault conviction. Word got back to Albany – probably by
way of Woolrich – that these two were on the ship when
108 Richard Stevenson
Sheila disappeared, and a number of people who knew the
situation wondered if maybe Bill and Ellen put those two up to
turning poor Sheila into shark bait. Anyway, there was never
any evidence and, because of jurisdictional confusion, no
investigation to speak of.”
“Ellen told me,” I said, “that her husband was a suspect in
people’s minds in his ex’s disappearance, but not that she was.
This is quite a fascinating family you’ve gotten me involved
with, Bob.”
“Yeah, well, Strachey, you send them a billable-hours
statement the first of the month and payment arrives by the end
of the month. Or has so far. Just how fucked-up the Griswolds
may be, I don’t really know. But Christ, if I’d ever thought
Timmy was going to get hurt on account of the Griswolds, I
would never have sent Ellen to you. This just stinks to high
heaven, and I am so, so sorry.”
“Timmy hasn’t gotten hurt on account of the Griswolds.
He’s gotten hurt because of me. So, what became of these two
characters, the personal trainer and his beau, Hubbard and
Mertz?”
“I have no idea. Would you like me to find out?”
“Nah. There’s no real need to know. This all happened —
what? Fourteen or fifteen years ago?”
“Something like that.”
“If you can easily track these guys down, do. Otherwise, I’ve
got plenty of other unsavory characters to keep my mind
occupied. What you might do, though, is try to get an
explanation from Ellen as to what’s going on here. What did
Gary actually tell her yesterday that made her fire me from the
case? I’ve tried phoning her and will try again, and I’ll e-mail her too. Maybe she’ll open up to you.”
“Possibly. Though in my dealings with Ellen over the years
I’ve sometimes wondered if she wasn’t holding back on a few
important details of whatever it was.”
“Now you tell me.”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 109
“Yeah, well. Have you ever had the perfect client? What
you’re always dealing with are human beings. It’s a hazard of the workplace OSHA can’t seem to do anything about.”
I gave Chicarelli my Thailand cell phone number and asked
him to call me anytime he developed any clue at all as to what
the Griswolds were up to. He wished me luck springing Timmy
and Kawee. I said, “Do you believe in lucky numbers?”
“No. Can’t say that I do.”
“Me neither. I’ve always believed that when good things
happen in circumstances that are beyond our control, that’s
what we call luck. Likewise with bad things. The Thais believe
that events can be manipulated through managing the symbols
of luck – rituals, amulets, wielding the right numbers, prayer. I would try any of that if I thought it would help keep Timothy
safe. But now I look around me here – at the shrines, the
temples, the stupas, the spirit houses – and none of it seems
like anything that will help bring Timmy back. In fact, it all feels like it’s part of what took Timmy away from me and put his life
in danger. And I feel as if I’m not only in danger of losing
Timmy, but that I’m losing Thailand, a place I love. It’s awful.”
“Get Timmy back,” Chicarelli said, “and I’m guessing your
love of Thailand will follow.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “First things first.”
