CHAPTER SIX
“You said it would be hot here in April,” Timmy said. “But this is ridiculous. It’s like India.”
“This is a good sign,” I said. “You’re already getting sentimental.”
“Anyway, I’m just happy to be off that plane.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and die here, and we won’t have to get back on the plane and sit immobilized for another seventeen hours.”
“Please don’t say that.”
We were waiting in the taxi queue outside Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. The night I got home from Key West, Timmy had left a note on my pillow. At first, I thought he had forgotten to gather up an official document of the New York State Assembly, an uncharacteristic untidiness on his part. Then I saw that it was a message for me, composed following our Atlanta airport-Albany phone conversation of a few hours earlier. The note read: “About you and me falling in love with Asia again — sign me up!”
I had told Ellen Griswold that my aide and I preferred flying business class, and she had replied, “Of course. Are you kidding?” But even with Thai Airways orchid-garnished entrees and comely cabin attendants of both sexes, we were glad to be on the ground after the nonstop slog and standing out-of-doors in the soaking heat.
“This doesn’t look like India at all,” Timmy said, once we were in the taxi speeding down an eight-lane expressway.
“Bangkok looks more like Fort Lauderdale or San Diego.”
“What does India look like?”
“Oh, Schenectady.”
“Anyway, this is not the Bangkok I remember — all these skyscrapers. This is the shiny all-new Asia. In the seventies, 54 Richard Stevenson
Bangkok was still mostly quaint, filthy canals and teak houses on stilts.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No,” I said, “I’m sure that just below the surface it’s still very much Thailand,” and noted the Buddha figures on the dashboard and the amulets and garlands of jasmine dangling from the rearview mirror. Getting into the taxi, I had had a back-and-forth with the driver, Korn Panpiemras, over whether he would lawfully employ the meter or we would instead pay an extortionate flat rate — we eventually settled on the meter — and this ritual also was reassuringly Thai.
As we approached the city center, the late-afternoon traffic was nearly as thick as the air, and we didn’t reach our hotel until almost seven o’clock. The Topmost-Lumpinee, described on a gay-travel Web site as “gay friendly” and convenient to gay bars and clubs — and not far from Gary Griswold’s last known address — was a pleasant tourist hotel with a spacious lobby adorned with gold-leafed Siamese dancers and smiling elephants. In the time it took to fly from JFK to Bangkok, the dollar had declined even further against the Thai baht — and most other currencies — but the Topmost still looked like a bargain at under fifty dollars a night.
When the bellhop checked our room key, he exclaimed happily, “Nine-oh-nine! A lucky number!”
When we got up to 909, however, the key didn’t fit. “Oh,” the kid lugging our bags said with a dark look. “It is six-oh-six.”
Inside the unlucky room, Timmy headed for the shower and I phoned Rufus Pugh. This was one of the Bangkok private investigators my New York PI friend had suggested I try. I had liked the look of Pugh’s Web site. It said he spoke fluent Thai and employed Thai investigators. Other Web sites I looked at made no such claims, even though they all seemed to be run by foreigners. Also, most of the others specialized in “cheating husbands” and “cheating girlfriends,” and Pugh Investigative Services also listed background checks, surveillance, due diligence and, significantly, missing persons. So I had e-mailed
Pugh, and he replied that I should phone him when I got to Bangkok.
I reached Pugh on his mobile, and wherever he was, the reception was poor. He said he was tied up on a stakeout with a team, and we made a plan to meet for breakfast at eight at the Topmost. Pugh had an accent of some kind that I couldn’t place. I figured with a name like his it had to be Arkansas or Louisiana.
Timmy and I had slept on the plane, thanks to Griswold family business-class largesse. So we picked up a Bangkok city map at the hotel front desk and set out to have a look at Griswold’s apartment building on the way to dinner. It looked like a twenty-minute walk. And I soon saw on the map that Geoff Pringle had lived less than half a mile away from Griswold before he died in the fall from his balcony a week earlier.
Moving through the premonsoon Bangkok night heat felt more like swimming in swamp water than walking through air, and our polo shirts were soon drenched. The part of Sathorn we passed through was a mix of city office towers and apartment buildings on the main streets, and smaller shops, restaurants, and food stalls on the sois that ran off them. The street food was as aromatic as I remembered it, and we paused for some noodles in a pork broth with herbs. We sat on tiny stools at a tiny table on a sliver of sidewalk and were served from a tiny cart with a full kitchen inside it that was operated by a small nuclear family. Timmy said it was the best food he ever ate. It cost a dollar, not that Ellen Griswold wouldn’t have sprung for two.
Among the vehicles zooming by in the soi a few feet from us as we ate were motorcycles, some with single male riders.
Timmy glanced up at these apprehensively from time to time, as well as at the motorcycles upon which entire families were lined up one behind the other, the small children in front as if they were air bags.
Lou Horn had obtained Geoff Pringle’s address from a mutual friend and passed it on to me, and Timmy and I paused 56 Richard Stevenson in front of the building. It stood along narrow but heavily traveled Sathorn Soi 1. Cars, taxis and motorcycle taxis cruised quietly up and down the street — with an occasional three-wheeled tuk-tuk as a reminder of old Bangkok — with pedestrians treading carefully along the narrow walkways on either side.
Bougainvillea and yellow and scarlet flamboyant tree branches spilled over white stucco walls along the route, including one in front of Pringle’s building. An enormous portrait in an elaborate gold frame of a gravely contemplative King Bhumibol stood among the decorative plantings, along with brushed stainless steel lettering identifying Pringle’s building as the Royal Palm Personal Deluxe Executive Suites.
Many of the building’s balconies had potted trees and flowering plants on them as well, talismanic reminders of the Thais’ origins as agricultural villagers, or in the case of most of the farangs, probably, pretty tropical ornaments.
A uniformed security guard in an orange vest stood under a streetlight at the entrance to the building’s small driveway. I said sa-wa-dee-cap. He sa-wa-deed me back, and I said I was sorry to hear about Mr. Geoff.
“Oh, very bad. Mr. Geoff. Oh, Mr. Geoff. Bad. He your friend?”
“He was my friend’s friend,” I said quickly. “Did he live up there?” I pointed.
“Yes, fall down,” the guard said, indicating an area of low foliage where some branches looked newly broken.
“Bad,” I said.
“Oh, bad.”
“Did you see?”
“No, no. No see. I hear.”
“You heard Mr. Geoff fall?”
“Yes, yes. Very bad for me. I hear him say.”
“He said something? After he fell?”
“No after. Before. I hear ‘oh-oh-no!’ He just say like that.
‘Oh-oh-no!’ I am in hut,” he said, indicating the small sentry box a few feet from us. “I hear big sound. He fall down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Very bad for me.”
“What time was it? Late?”
“Very late. People sleeping.”
“Did anyone else see or hear it happen?”
“El-suh?”
“Was it only you who heard him fall?”
“Only me. Bad luck for me.”
“Did you phone the police?”
“Later. Police come later.”