weeks earlier and he had said that he was in Hua Hin and that he was drinking in a bar owned by a guy called Kim, and wasn’t sure when he’d be back in the States. If I could find Kim, she said, she was sure I’d be able to find Joe. Now, there’s a pretty big farang population in Hua Hin. Not as many as in Pattaya, but still enough to make it a needle-in-a-haystack job without more definite information. She emailed me photographs of Joe. He was an amateur bodybuilder, a stocky, balding guy in his late twenties who couldn’t have been much more than five foot tall.
I did a quick trip around the bars that were open for the afternoon trade but no one knew of an owner called Kim. I figured I’d have more joy later at night but then I had a brainwave and phoned Ann. It was about one o’clock in the morning in New York and I’d obviously woken her up and the fact that it was a collect call did seem to annoy her somewhat, but she was able to answer my question-which flight did Joe travel to Thailand on? It was Japan Airlines. Flight JAL 006, two weeks ago on Tuesday.
I phoned the airline and told the girl who answered that I was the boss of a tour company based in Bangkok and that I’d lost track of a client that I’d taken to Hua Hin. Had my client by any chance phoned in to reconfirm his ticket? I gave her Joe’s full name and the details of his flight to Bangkok.
Indeed the ticked had been reconfirmed. By a travel agency in Hua Hin. And Joe had also changed his ticket to an open booking, with no flight home. The travel agency wasn’t far from the Hilton so I had a plate of fried noodles and an ice cold Heineken at a street stall and wandered over. The agency was a tiny shop wedged between two bars, both of which had a quartet of fairly attractive girls who all declared that I was a ‘handsum man’ and that I should spend some of my time-and money-with them. I resisted the calls of the sultry sirens and went inside the travel agency.
There was only one girl working in the office, so I played the stupid farang and said that I was a friend of Joe’s and that we were driving back to Bangkok together but that I’d forgotten what hotel he was staying at. She checked her computer and gave me the name and address of his hotel. It was called Kim’s Hotel, which I figured was a good sign.
Kim’s Hotel wasn’t as prestigious as the Hilton and it didn’t have a sea view but it did have a decent-sized pool and I guessed that was where a diminutive body builder might spend his afternoons. I was right. Standing by the diving board was the man himself, wearing nothing but a black thong, flexing his muscles in front of two teenage girls. I watched his show as he went through a full work out, his oiled muscles glistening under the afternoon sun. The two girls were giggling and kept offering him a two-for-one special, staring at 2,000 baht but dropping to half that pretty quickly. Joe just laughed and said that he wasn’t up for an afternooner but that he’d catch up with them later.
After about half an hour, Joe finished his workout and showered at the poolside shower. In view of the nature of the case, I didn’t think there would be any harm in being up front with the NewYorker. I waited until he had towelled himself dry before going over and introducing myself. I told him that I was a private eye and that his wife had paid me to track him down and to find out why he hadn’t gone home.
Joe grinned and nodded at the two sexy girls. ‘That’s why,’ he said.
We went over to a table and sat under a large umbrella and drank beers as Joe gave me his side of the story. I had a Heineken, Joe had a Charng Beer. Another sign of the newbie, that, drinking the local beer. He might as well have had a neon sign over his head flashing ‘I’ve just got off the plane’. Pretty much the only Thais who drank Charng were construction workers. Anyway, Joe told me that he didn’t love Ann. He wasn’t even sure why he’d married her. In New York, his lack of height and hair meant that he didn’t have much luck with women. Ann was pretty much the only woman who’d expressed any interest in him, and it had been her idea to get married. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t especially bright, but Joe had said yes because being married to her was better than being on his own. Then he’d come to Thailand and suddenly short, balding Joe was a ‘handsum man’. Within the space of his first week in Thailand he’d had more sex than he’d had in his whole life in the States. And he wasn’t sleeping with dogs either. Every girl he’d bedded had been drop-dead gorgeous, he boasted. And the supply of beautiful girls waiting to have sex with him seemed to be never-ending. Joe was like a kid in a sweetshop, a pig in shit, and all those other clichA©s. And the way he told it, he was NEVER going back to the United States. He’d already met a couple of body-builders who ran a gym in Bangkok and they had offered him a job. Joe had never really wanted to be an accountant, he’d never loved Ann, and had never enjoyed living in New York. He was taking control of his life, Joe told me. He was starting again in Thailand.
He was, in my humble opinion, making a huge mistake. Like a lot of newbies, he was starting to believe his own publicity. Joe wasn’t a ‘handsum man’, he was just a short, balding, thick-necked Yank with more money than sense. The girls weren’t flocking to him because of his muscles or his personality, it was because he had money and they wanted it. They were bargirls, their job was to make punters feel good so that they would hand over their money. The smiles, the kisses, the sex, were all part of the act. But newbies like Joe sometimes forgot that it was all about money and started to believe that they were somehow more attractive and desirable than they were back home. And providing that he continued to shell out the bucks, they’d continue to live out their fantasy. But as soon as they stopped paying, the girls would stop playing, and reality would hit home. If often hit hard, too, and there are probably hundreds of farang suicides every year in the Land of Smiles, as guys like Joe realised that their fantasy lives were just that-fantasies. And once a guy has got used to being surrounded by attentive, beautiful women who behave like submissive pornstars between the sheets, it was hard, maybe impossible, to go back to the real world.
I always say that when a newbie first starts to hang out with Thai bargirls, the newbie has the money and the bargirls have the experience. At the end of it, the bargirls have the money and the newbie has had the experience.
Anyway, Ann wasn’t paying me to burst Joe’s bubble. She just wanted to know where he was and what he was doing. Now I could tell her, it was up to her what she did next. I got Joe to promise me that he’d phone or email his wife. It seemed the least he could do, under the circumstances.
Case number three was an American woman living in Japan, whose husband Gary was a marine who seemed to be spending more than his fair share of shore leave in Hua Hin. After a little do-it-yourself snooping Carol had discovered a couple of email addresses, one of them belonging to a girl called Mem, Thai phone numbers and a photograph of a pretty young thing working in an opticians store. Carol had also found a bank account number in Hua Hin with details of a 5,000-dollar transfer and had jumped to the obvious conclusion. She told me that she was a reasonable woman and wanted to make absolutely certain that her husband was fooling around. What she didn’t say, of course, was that any evidence I got that incriminated Gary would be useful when it came to thrashing out the divorce settlement. If I could show that Gary was supporting a Thai mistress, an American divorce court would skin him alive.
The name and the number of the bank account was a big help. It would have been a fairly simple matter to get a home address but it would require a large ‘donation’ to a friendly bank clerk so I thought I’d try a cheaper alternative first. The name of the opticians shop was in the photograph and there were only two branches in Hua Hin. I walked by both outlets several times during the day but didn’t see anyone who looked like the girl in the photograph.
Mem was in her mid-twenties and looked fit, not bargirl material but I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. I decided to use the old ‘I’m from the embassy and I’m here about Mem’s visa application’ scam. I got my clipboard and a US Immigration application form from my rental car, put on my serious face and marched into the store nearest the Hilton. I gave them my standard speech about Miss Kongyou (Mem’s Thai name) applying for a US visa. The shop girls knew Mem but said that she had quit her job a few months earlier. I put on my worried face and said that there were a couple of things I had to clear up about her visa application and did they know where she was living.
I spoke in English. One of the girls asked the other ‘ Mem you kup Ning chai mai?’ which let me know that she was staying with someone called Ning.
I put on my helpful face and suggested that Mem had mentioned that she might be staying with her good friend Miss Ning but that I didn’t have her address. Two minutes later I had the name of the apartment block Mem was staying at, in Thai and English, with a hand-drawn map thrown in for good measure.
According to the shop girls, Mem was staying with her friend Ning, who’d just had a baby. The apartment building was a fifteen-minute walk from the opticians. It was a tidy, middle-class type of block and I figured a small apartment there would probably cost 4,000 baht or so a month, about what Miss Mem would earn as a salesgirl.
