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 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.”
