just to encourage the boys in brown to do their thing.
The next day at about noon the cops went in. They got Miss Boo and, as it turned out, her husband, who had recently given up his job as a labourer in Isaan and moved to Bangkok to help his wife spend Yves’s money. The police also found a dozen yah ba tablets in the room.
Miss Boo and her husband were hauled off to the station where Yves identified the girl and signed forms in triplicate confirming that he wanted to press charges. The cops were prepared to let Boo go with just a ‘fine’ but Yves insisted that she be charged. The theft charge and the drugs were good enough to put Miss Boo behind bars for a hundred days. And a hundred days in a Thai jail is the equivalent of a year or so in the civilised world. The husband came up with a decent bribe, which coupled with the fact that it was his first offence meant that he walked. He caught the next bus back to Isaan.
Yves was happy with the result. He got his revenge, but he didn’t get his million baht back. To be honest, I don’t think it was ever about the money. Yves had money enough to burn. It was about being lied to by a girl half his age and about him having to face the fact that the sexy, young, Miss Boo wanted just one thing from him: cold, hard cash. He wasn’t the handsome, debonair man-of-the-world that he liked to think he was; he was a punter, and she was a hooker. And they were facts that Yves didn’t want to face. C’est la vie, as the French say. Serves him right, is what I say.
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 amp;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 cafA© 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
