“We tried it June, remember? It is all happy and wonderful until one day you can’t have a two hundred thousand baht handbag or a first class ticket to Europe. Then the trouble starts.”
“I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care how rich they are,” she said, meaning it, or meaning it at the time she said it to be more precise.
“June, this is me and this is my life. I’m not making a career change at my age and I’m not apologizing for not being born with a silver fork in my tongue. You always love me when another man is paying your bills. Last time we moved in together it was a catastrophe. You may be happy to be with me but we both know you will never stop flirting with other men’s bank accounts,” Carl told her sternly.
“You make me sound like a whore.” Her face was becoming red with anger and she was sitting rigidly straight.
“I am just saying this is the way it is.”
“Fuck you! Stop the car!”
A fuck was already out of the question so he gave her half of what she had asked for and stopped the car. She grabbed her shoes and designer handbag and leapt out of the car in bare feet slamming the door behind her. Carl lit a cigarette as he watched her beautiful rear disappearing angrily into the distance. He hated to see her go and there had been a time when it took him a while to get over her. Carl felt regret that she was gone again. What bothered him most was that under all of the conflicting emotions he mostly felt relieved. He had once been accused of having an overly protective sub-conscious that looked after him without him being aware of it. Maybe they were right and, who knows, maybe he had pissed her off on purpose. “Carl,” he muttered to himself as he drove home, “Can you really afford to be throwing beautiful women out of your car in the middle of the night?”
Chapter 9
Carl located his client late Thursday morning. The fat man was beside the hotel pool and he was not alone. His companion was obviously a bar girl but he appeared convinced that nobody else in the hotel was aware of that. Carl didn’t recognize her so he assumed she came from Nana Plaza on Sukhumvit Soi 4. He hardly ever went there. He had never liked it much and found the bars there more aggressive than the ones in Soi Cowboy. There was only one way in and out of Nana Plaza’s bar complex and Carl didn’t approve of that either. Carl liked lots of options when it came to making a fast exit.
The client had the demeanour of a man who was happily living a celebrity lifestyle with a young model attached. What the rest of the world saw was an elderly, grossly overweight sweating foreigner, holding hands with a micro-bikini clad teenage girl with plastic tits, fuck me tattoos, bright green fingernails and a permanent scowl. The client had an expression on his face like he had won the lottery of life. ‘It must be so much more fun to be oblivious to public opinion,’ Carl thought.
Carl had a quick look around the pool area. It was laid out like a tropical garden with palm trees and dark wood salas, providing some shade. The sala is the Thai version of the gazebo. The largest sala was used as the hotel’s poolside restaurant with cushions on the floor for sitting cross-legged at low oblong teak tables. This was where the pool staff congregated.
Carl spotted a sweating muscle-bound security officer in a dark suit hiding behind the cashier’s booth at the back of the poolside restaurant with his two-way radio in his right hand. He was staring at their table and talking excitedly into the radio. Carl was friendly with the security team and hoped they wouldn’t hold today against him.
Five-star hotels preferred Bangkok’s working girls to stay away from their swimming pools. Most of them had a policy of allowing the girls into the hotel as long as they let security take a photocopy of their ID card. This was in case a guest later claimed he had been robbed. This semi-open policy was necessary to keep their guests happy. This was Bangkok and not everybody came for the temple tours and the fake handbags.
The hotels believed this policy worked in a discreet enough fashion that the other guests would never know what was going on. Unfortunately for the hotel, they had a guest staying with them who was not familiar with the rules and was advertising their secret compromise to the other guests.
There was not a lot the hotel could do about her. They would have had her registered as staying in his room for their legal protection. So for all intents and purposes she was their guest. They wouldn’t have minded so much if she had been even half presentable. Unfortunately for the hotel she had almost everything they disapproved of. If the word ‘Prostitute’ had been tattooed on her forehead she would have been holding a full house. Carl’s client was oblivious to the drama being played out in front of him.
They sat down at a poolside table. Carl sat in the chair opposite the client, which put the girl with the green fingernails on his left. She was devouring plates of spicy food as if she hadn’t eaten for a week. The next few minutes involved the usual circus of having to say something to her in Thai because the client insisted that she would be impressed. She wasn’t, but Carl humoured him anyway.
“So, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so soon. What have you got for me?” he demanded in a tone that assumed failure and wanted Carl to know that he was expecting nothing but excuses. He was sweating profusely and his pasty white skin was quickly turning bright red in the sun. This was good news for hotel security. Carl wondered if they realized it.
Carl heard a beep from his phone telling him that a message had been received. He took his phone out and held it under the table away from the glare of the sun. He took his reading glasses from his pocket and perched them on the end of his nose. The message was from the hotel’s head of security. It said, ‘please call me when you get a chance.’
“Please excuse me for a moment. I need to answer this,” Carl told his client.
He typed in a reply that said, ‘I know what you want. Don’t know him well enough to criticize his taste in women. My guess is sunburn will get you the result you are hoping for.’
Carl put the phone away and carefully placed a blown-up picture sourced from Somchai Poochokdee’s Thai ID record on the table. Then beside it he put documents regarding structure and ownership of Las Vegas Real Estate. He turned the documents around so they faced the client. Then he added some digital printouts of pictures of the target’s office, home and car.
“The name he is using is Somchai Poochokdee. He took on this name when he became a Thai citizen in 1997. He got his Thai citizenship much faster than I have ever seen done by anybody before. He owns and operates a company called Las Vegas Real Estate. The office was on Phetchburi Road but was moved to Silom Road several years ago. I have a surveillance team mobilized and on him since yesterday. He lives in a large house in the suburbs of North Bangkok and is married with a teenage daughter. His wife is still a bit of a mystery but the team say she looks well educated and from a good family. They put her age at early forties. I am waiting on her family history. His travel records show frequent visits to Macau where he plays poker and my information is that he has been doing this for over a decade. He travels on a Thai passport.”
The client lifted the picture to within a few inches of his face and creased up the skin around his fat eyes to squint the picture into focus. He placed the sweat-drenched paper back on the table and became temporarily speechless. When he did attempt to speak it was mumbled and incoherent. He took a deep breath and said, “It’s him. That’s my brother. How did you do it?”
“I have my methods,” Carl answered trying to sound humble. Well, maybe he didn’t try that hard.
“What now?” the client asked.
Carl appeared to think for a while. In reality his pitch had been planned in the car on the drive over. For reasons he didn’t understand at the time, he had chosen not to mention that he was doing a background check in the USA.
“Surveillance to understand how he functions, telephone records to see who he talks to, general information sourcing to try to link him to the victims. I’m networking into the police investigation of the student murders. I cannot begin to tell you how dangerous it is to be seen to be interested in such an active high profile murder case. I’m trusting you will maintain secrecy until I have completed the investigation,” Carl told him in his professional voice.
“Good. Of course, I understand. To be totally honest I am too excited to think and will happily follow your advice. I’ll wait to hear from you again.”
