Elle had indeed quit her job, which was one up for Hank. Elle had told him that she wanted to enrol at a beauty school in Soi 55 and Hank had wired the 20,000 baht for the year’s tuition. The next day I headed out there and spoke to a group of motorcycle taxi boys. They knew nothing about a beauty school and that was strange because the motorcycle boys spend all day ferrying people up and down the road and usually know everything that happens in their area. One of them said there was a small place down the road where young girls practised cutting hair, but it wasn’t really a school. I gave the guy fifty baht to take me to the place. It was an open air set-up with two chairs for cutting hair and a reclining chair next to a tap, all under a tattered awning tied to trees with lengths of rope. Below the awning was a hand-painted banner offering lessons in hairdressing and sewing with a ‘special promotional rate’ of 2,000 baht for a six month course. I asked to speak the boss and an old woman stepped forward, her face the texture of old saddle leather.
I gave her my biggest smile and threw in a respectful wai, then told her that my girlfriend wanted to learn hairdressing. No problem, she said, they were open five days a week from nine until five. Girls paid a flat 2,000-baht fee and turned up whenever they wanted. I mentioned that I knew a girl called Elle who had enrolled at the school and the old woman nodded enthusiastically and said that yes, Elle had enrolled but that she didn’t turn up very often. I asked her if the girls who completed the course received a diploma and she grinned, showing me a mouthful of bad teeth, and said sure. I doubted that the diploma would be recognised by any decent beauty salon but at least Elle hadn’t lied about signing up for a course in Soi 55. But she had lied about the cost, and had obviously pocketed the difference. I asked the old women if it was okay to take a photograph of the ‘school’ to show my girlfriend and she readily agreed. On the way home I popped into an internet cafA© and emailed a quick report to Hank, along with the digital photograph.
I figured that would be the end of the romance. She’d lied to him about not going with customers, and she’d fleeced him for 18,000 baht. Hank was enough of a realist to know that a girl who lies twice will keep on lying. And that without trust, no relationship has a hope in hell of surviving. I was wrong. Six months later he phoned me again. He was in New Zealand, and he was still very much in touch with Elle. After my second investigation, he’d had several long heart-to-heart chats with her and she had agreed to leave the temptations of Bangkok and to live with her mother and daughter in Udon Thani. Apparently the fact that he seemed to be aware of her every move had convinced her that there was no point in lying to him anymore. He had agreed to give her one more chance, but only on condition that she stayed with her family in her home town once she had graduated from the hairdressing school. I had already told him that the school’s diploma wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but she had attended classes every day and he had phoned her constantly, checking that she was sticking to her word. She was always either at school, or at home, and after six months she’d proudly sent him a photocopy of her diploma and headed back to Udon Thani with her mother and daughter. Hank had paid to set her up with her own beauty parlour and wanted me to drop by next time I was in Udon Thani to check on her progress. He wired me a two-day retainer and we agreed that I wouldn’t charge him for travel expenses. I figured he’d already paid me enough, plus I had several bargirl investigations arranged for Udon Thani. The Isaan town is a major source of prostitutes for Bangkok’s red-light districts. Probably a third of all farangs who ask for my help have gotten involved with girls from Udon Thani. The girls are pretty, generally, and darker than the Thais think is attractive. Their looks, coupled with the poor farmland and lack of decent jobs, mean that there is a constant stream of young girls on the busses into the capital, eager to work in the bars and massage parlours. Many meet a farang who wants to take care of them and every week dozens head back to Udon Thani with the promise of a monthly ‘salary’ from an overseas sponsor. A good percentage of them go straight back into the arms of their Thai boyfriend and husband, and once the sponsor starts to get suspicious that his sweetheart isn’t being as faithful as he’d hoped, that’s when they call me in. I had four Udon Thani investigations ready to go so I added Hank to the list, hired a nondescript Toyota and drove over to Isaan with my wife. She’s from near Udon herself and speaks Thai, the Isaan dialect and Laotian so she pretty much covers all bases, language-wise.
Elle’s beauty parlour was next to her house, some forty kilometres from Udon Thani. I wore sunglasses and a Singha beer baseball cap just in case Elle were to recognise me from my visit to the bar in Soi Cowboy, and I dropped my wife off outside the beauty parlour. I drove off and parked a mile or so away while I read the Bangkok Post from cover to cover and then drove back to collect the little lady. She’d had her hair cut and washed and her nails done and Elle had obviously studied well because she looked great. My missus and Elle had chatted away, as the girls do when they’re getting their hair done, and Elle had pretty much recited her life story. She had a boyfriend in New Zealand who loved her and who was coming to live with her one day. His framed photograph was hanging above her framed diploma, and there were snapshots of the two of them together all around the mirrors in the salon. The man took care of Elle and her daughter and her mother, and he was a good man with a good heart, Elle had said. She even offered to ask Hank if he had any friends who might be interested in my missus, but my missus, bless her, said that she was happy with the farang that she already had. That’s what she told me anyway, but I deleted Elle’s number from her mobile when we finally got back to Bangkok, just in case.
Elle said that her parlour made her about two hundred baht a day, which was pretty good money for Isaan, and a lot more on days when there was a function or party in the village. She enjoyed the work and loved her boyfriend, she said, and she was finally content with her life.
‘She’s a lucky woman,’ my wife said to me as we drove away from Elle’s house. She was right. Elle had been lucky to escape from the bar scene, and she was lucky to have a man like Hank supporting her. Most men would have given up on her long ago, cut their losses and found themselves another girl. But Hank had persisted and by the look of it his persistence had paid off. So maybe Hank was lucky, too. Only time would tell. Time, and maybe another visit from the Bangkok private eye.
‘What about you, love of my life?’ I asked the wife. ‘Do you feel lucky?’ She just gave me one of the smiles that the Thais are famous for, and said nothing.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING MOTOR
Dave was one of my best friends in Thailand. I wouldn’t exactly stop a bullet for him, but I’d trust him with my wallet and maybe even my girlfriend. He’s from the UK, one of those northern towns where it always seems to be raining, and he made a living as a freelance journalist. He was in his early thirties when I first met him. I was managing a big hotel in Surin and he wandered in with a young bargirl. I kept in touch with him over the years and when I moved to Bangkok he became a regular drinking partner whenever he passed through the city. He was younger and better looking than me so he was a good guy to use on my bargirl investigations. A bargirl who was supposedly not working might turn me down but might well a take a couple of thousand baht to be bedded by the young Adonis.
During one of his frequent stopovers he met Nong, a twenty-two-year-old student at one of the local universities. She quickly became his regular girlfriend, and we’d often go out to Thai nightclubs as a threesome. Nong had an older sister, Sen, who had landed herself a wealthy Japanese guy a few years earlier. She had prised a four-million baht dowry from him which enabled her to buy a nice house in the suburbs, a new car to drive around in, and enough spare cash to be able to send money to make life a little easier for her parents back in Sara Buri. Sen didn’t approve of Dave. I got the feeling she thought that her little sister could do better. The Japanese businessman had gone back to his wife in Tokyo, and Sen had been trying to encourage Nong to land herself a wealthy benefactor. Dave earned enough to get by, but he was never going to get rich working as a freelance journalist. Sen would have been much happier if Nong had landed a rich Japanese, or a rich American, or a rich German. In fact, so far as Sen was concerned, nationality wasn’t important but money most definitely was. Their parents were good, middle-class Thais, who owned a small banana plantation in Sara Buri, a town in the centre of Thailand. Once she reached eighteen, the parents had sent Nong down to live with Sen and get a decent education.
After Nong and Dave had been going out for a couple of months, Sen put her foot down and sent her younger sister back to Sara Buri. Dave wasn’t too bothered. He was travelling all around the region, and with his good looks he had more than his fair share of female admirers. But before long Nong was back in Bangkok and she soon met up with Dave again. Sen started to realise that she wasn’t getting anywhere by trying to keep Nong and Dave apart. She even began to drive her younger sister out to the airport to meet Dave whenever he flew into the country.
Dave used to join me at my favourite stamping ground on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 13 for a few cold
