before vanishing altogether.
Mrs. Griswold, who had no children and had not remarried, apparently fell overboard from the Norwegian cruise liner Oslo Comfort on the night of May 21, somewhere off St. Kitts.
Shipmates had seen Mrs. Griswold in the dining room earlier.
She was reported missing the next morning when she failed to meet dining room companions for a book signing with mystery author Deidre McCubbertson and crew members discovered that her bed had not been slept in. Family members speculated, the paper said, that “alcohol could have been a factor in the tragedy,” though the speculating family members were not identified.
There were three daily English-language newspapers in Bangkok, the Post, the Nation, and the Daily Express, and I scanned their archives for mention of a Gary Griswold. None turned up.
Ellen Griswold had given me the name of the Bangkok bank Griswold had had his thirty-eight million wired to. It was just after noon Thursday in Thailand, and I got the Commercial Bank of Siam on the phone. I said I was Gary Griswold and needed an account balance. Mrs. Griswold had told me the account number, and I recited it. After some minutes, a man came on the line and told me in English that was a little hard for me to follow that the account had been closed. I said, oh, that’s right, I had the money moved to an interest-bearing account but I had forgotten the number, and may I please have it along with the balance? No, the man said, sounding a bit wary now, there was no other account in the name of Griswold at the Commercial Bank of Siam.
It didn’t seem as if it would help if I screamed, “Then, where the bloody hell is my thirty-eight million?” So I said,
“Oh, God, where did I transfer that cash to? Was it Bangkok Bank?”
This was taking a chance — was there such a thing? — but the man said, yes, I had done exactly that.
“When?”
“You no remember?”
“Please pardon me. I’m so disorganized.”
A long silence. It wasn’t even staticky. Modern telecommunications are such a marvel.
“I can no help you, sir. You must phone Bangkok Bank.
Okay?”
“Oh, jeez, what’s my account number there? You must have had it for the transfer.”
What he gave me instead, and then quickly rang off, was a telephone number for Bangkok Bank. I called them, but they required an account number in order for our conversation to proceed. All this would have to wait until Saturday, when I would arrive in the Thai capital to work my magic in the flesh.
Lunch on Thursday with Ellen Griswold at her house in Loudonville got off to a bad start when I suggested why her former husband might be susceptible to dire forecasts by fortune-tellers. I said it could have something to do with the Griswold family history of people dying violently.
“Where did you get that information?” she demanded to know. “What exactly are you referring to, and what’s that got to do with anything?”
I told her Gary’s friends in Key West had brought it up — the plane crash and the Caribbean cruise disappearance — only in the context of Gary’s heightened sense of foreboding and karmic doom, nothing more than that.
“Oh God. Well, you know, there were people at the time who thought Bill had something to do with Sheila’s death — had her shoved overboard or God knows what. She had been squeezing him really hard financially. This was when Max and Bertha’s estate was tied up in probate. When Sheila died — or presumably died — it did take a lot of the pressure off Bill.
There were people, I know, who saw that as a little too convenient. In a way it’s funny, and yet it’s kind of pathetic.”
“So Sheila was eventually declared legally dead?”
“It took four or five years. For-bleeping-ever. Bill got nothing back. Sheila’s maid and her cats got some, and the state got the rest. But at least she wasn’t constantly dragging him into court anymore. Sheila was so aggressive for so many years, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if she strolled up through the herb garden right now and rapped on the window and waved a summons in our faces.”
We were seated at a nicely designed table with a sculpted aluminum base and a white polypropylene top in the Griswold’s sunporch. The bright room overlooked an herb garden and a broad expanse of trees and lawn stretching for some distance beyond. Most of the herbs were still covered, but some daffodils had sprung up and looked about to bloom in their cheerful, ephemeral way.
I had dug right into the crab salad and crusty baguette Ellen had brought out, and so had she. She had her worries, but they hadn’t hurt her appetite. She was drinking tap water with lemon, as was I, another healthful choice for midday. I rather liked Mrs.
Griswold — her confidence, her direct approach, her draping only mild refinement over peasant appetites — and I wasn’t sure why I didn’t quite trust her.
I said, “You know, the Thais believe in ghosts. It’s good that your husband isn’t the Griswold who’s over there now, or he might run into his first wife’s restless spirit. Has he ever been to Southeast Asia? Have you?”
“No, never had the pleasure.”
“You mentioned you had lived and worked abroad. Where was that?”
“I spent a month on a kibbutz when I was in college and lived in Geneva for a year doing marketing for Pepsico’s new Buzz Saw line of power drinks. I enjoyed both experiences in their entirely different ways. Though I have to admit my French became somewhat more fluent than my Hebrew.”
“It’s hard to imagine the Swiss on all that caffeine,” I said.
“Oh, they were scarfing it up by the time I was done with them.”
I didn’t doubt it. I summarized my Key West findings for Mrs. Griswold and told her they basically squared with what she had told me about her ex-husband-slash-current-brother-in-law: his unsettling passionate interest in past lives, numerology, and astrological forecasts; his involvement with the wonderful and then less-than-wonderful Mango; his large-scale financial transfers followed by his apparent disappearance.
“In fact,” I said, “Gary did not tell his Key West friends about converting his assets and wiring cash to Thailand, nor about the so-called surefire investment. When I mentioned it, that was news to them.”
“If they’re sane — which it sounds to me like they could be
— I’m sure they would have thought Gary was nuts, and possibly said so. Which Gary no doubt would not wish to hear.
Bill and I only know about it because Alan Rainey was involved in selling the company shares, and he asked Gary what was going on. Gary apparently thought he had to tell us all something.”
“Perhaps,” I said, having a thought, “Gary told Rainey he wanted the money for an investment because he thought Rainey would find that reassuring. And he really wanted the thirty-eight million for some other purpose.”
She mulled this over. “Possibly.”
“And if the actual reason for the transfer was known to your family, you might have waged an all-out campaign to keep Gary from doing whatever it was he was actually going to do.”
50 Richard Stevenson
“Oh God. Maybe that’s it. This could be even worse than we thought.”
“Well, worse or not worse. What had Gary spent large sums of money on in the past?”
She screwed up her face to the extent she was able to. “Not much. Art. Art books. Fancy European bicycles. His condo.
Gary lived comfortably and liked having money. But he was no serious spender.”
“Did he give money away?”
“I’d say he was like his parents. Generous, but responsible. I know he gave to arts groups and to human rights organizations.
But I would be very surprised if he ever went into capital for charitable giving. Of course,” she said, “I’m talking about before Gary started losing his marbles and babbling about past and future lives and all that garbage. God knows what was going on inside his brain six months ago when all this looniness apparently came to a
