Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson Read Free Page A

opposite sex. But there was no way on earth that the match between the lovely girl we were going to see and the blimp I had in the back of the Mercedes was a marriage made in heaven. He must have known that. Every time he caught a glimpse of the two of them in a mirror it must have hit home that he was simply too big for her. If it had been me, I’d have just been grateful for the fact that I was allowed to sleep with a woman as beautiful as her, and if the downside meant that she had the occasional fling with a man nearer her own age, well then I’d just put that down to the price I had to pay. The Dutch guys hadn’t managed to catch her being unfaithful in Amsterdam, which meant that she was probably only fooling around in Thailand. I wanted to tell the client that he’d be better off turning a blind eye to the occasional indiscretion and that the best thing he could do would be to go straight back to Holland, but I kept quiet.
    I had the driver park around the corner from the apartment block, and pulled on a pair of shades and a Singha beer baseball cap before I got out of the car. The client was obviously used to sitting in the back of expensive vehicles because he didn’t make a move to open his door himself, he just sat staring straight ahead until I opened it for him. He wheezed as he hauled himself out of the car, and I swear the suspension sighed with relief. ‘I burn easily,’ I said, explaining away the cap and sunglasses, but the real reason was that I didn’t want to risk being recognised if Machete Man and his gun-wielding buddies were back in the restaurant. They weren’t, and I relaxed a little when I saw that the restaurant was closed.
    A receptionist buzzed us into the apartment block and a purple 500-baht note got us the room number. We rode up in the lift in silence to the fourth floor. I looked around to see if there was a weight limit for the lift, and I kept having visions of the cables snapping and us both plummeting to our deaths.
    There were a couple of dozen rooms on either side of a long corridor. We walked slowly along to the room. I waited at the side of the door as the client knocked, twice.
    The door opened. The girl was there wearing a white T-shirt and blue denim shorts. She stared at him sleepily, then her jaw dropped as she realised who it was.
    ‘Darling …’ she said, but then the words dried up and her mouth open and closed silently.
    ‘Don’t “darling” me, you whore!’ hissed the client, and he pushed the door open. It was a studio apartment and the waiter was lying on the double bed, wrapped in a towel. The waiter leapt to his feet as the big guy strode into the room and rushed out, his bare feet slapping on the tiled floor as he bolted down the corridor.
    I stayed where I was. The client had left the door open so I could hear everything that was being said. The girl began pleading that there’d been a mistake, that the waiter was just a friend, that she was only staying in the room until she could get a flight to Chiang Mai. The client let her beg and plead, then silenced her with an outburst of expletives that suggested he’d had an army career in his younger, and probably thinner, days.
    ‘You were a whore when I met you, and you’re a whore now!’ he shouted once he’d finished swearing. ‘I gave you everything. I gave you the clothes on your back, the watch on your wrist. I gave you money for your parents, I paid for your brothers to go to school. Anything you needed, anything you wanted, I gave to you. And you do this to me? You fuck around behind my back.’
    She started to cry.
    ‘You’re dead to me, you bitch!’ he shouted. ‘When I get back home I’m destroying everything of yours. Every dress, every handbag, every shoe; everything I ever gave you, I’m burning. Every photograph of you, I’m destroying. You’re dead to me. I’m divorcing you and you won’t get a penny. The best lawyers in the country work for me, and if I get my way