The 38 Million Dollar Smile ds-10 Read online

  Then, for six months, nothing. He just seemed to…you know.”

  “Fall off the face of the earth?”

  “Exactly.”

  Timmy said, “And then there’s Mango, the refreshing tropical fruit drink.”

  “The Griswolds know nothing about him, just that apparently Gary Griswold was seriously smitten. Mango may have nothing to do with either the investment, so-called, or the seeming disappearance. It is true, of course, that Thailand harbors more than its share of sexually alluring flimflam artists.

  Somebody once rudely called the country a brothel with temples.”

  “So,” Timmy said, “are you flying over? You’ve talked for years about going back to the region for a visit.”

  “Ellen Griswold’s retainer is ample and her expense limit high. So, sure, it makes sense. Once I’m there, it shouldn’t take long. Griswold probably cut a swath.”

  “A guy with thirty-eight mil is bound to stand out among the rice paddies.”

  “Why don’t you come along?” I said. “You’ve got some leave time built up. You could do legwork for me. Brain work, too, as is your habit. It would be a legitimate expense. And it’s a fascinating part of the world, as I have gone on and on and on about on countless occasions.”

  “What on earth could you possibly be referring to?” he said and transferred another kaffir lime leaf onto his mulch pile.

  “Also, the war’s over. I’d like to see Bangkok without it being overrun by drunken, drug-addled, horny American GIs such as myself. I’m sure the place is very different now, and we could check it out together.”

  “But what if,” Timmy wondered, “we got over there and Griswold’s situation turned out to be something really complicated and dangerous and ugly? That certainly seems possible with somebody vanishing with that amount of money.”

  “It’s true,” I said, “that the Bangkok I knew in the seventies had a harsh underside. You could, for instance, have somebody bumped off for a few hundred dollars. That would be for killing a Thai. A farang might be double that. It’s also a fact — I suppose I should mention — that the Land of Smiles, home to some of the sweetest people in the world, has one of the most corrupt police forces in Asia — which is saying a lot — and some of the most nightmarish prisons anywhere. Few people emerge from Thai prisons sane, or even alive. It’s also a sad reality that in legal disputes between Thais and foreigners, the foreigner is always wrong and may have to lay out big bucks — backhanders, they call them — just to save his own neck. There is a lot about the Thai paradise that’s not so heavenly, I know.

  And it’s entirely possible that Gary Griswold has fallen victim to some aspect of that not-so-delectable Thailand.”

  Now Timmy had set down his soupspoon and was giving me one of his looks. “You’re not making any of that up, are you?”

  “No. But otherwise it’s a lovely country. The Thais have their rice, their Buddha, their beloved king, and their well-developed sense of fun. That’s the Thailand I’ll bet Griswold fell in love with — until something somehow went awry.”

  “Oh, awry,” Timmy said.

  20 Richard Stevenson

  “Look, if it turns out that Griswold has fallen into something grisly and there’s real danger, then you’ll get back on the plane and fly home. That would be simple enough.”

  “I understand. And you?”

  “Well, we’d have to see. It would depend on if I could be helpful or not, or what I might have to do to earn my fee.”

  Timmy looked down at his tom yam kung and said to it,

  “Here we go again,” and my heart went out.

  Back at the house on Crow Street, it took me under ten minutes to come up with the name of Gary Griswold’s most recent boyfriend in Key West. Ellen Griswold thought the man’s name might be Horn, and she was right. When I called an old friend of Timmy’s living in Key West — one of the former Peace Corps mafia whose humanistic tentacles are everywhere

  — she confirmed that Griswold had been a well-known presence in Key West over a period of about a decade and had had a boyfriend named Lou Horn. Horn now owned and managed the art gallery the two had founded together, which now was named Toot Toot.

  I got Horn on the phone with no trouble. He not only didn’t mind being called at ten forty at night, but said he was very worried about Griswold and fearful about what might have happened to him. Horn was relieved, he said, that I would be searching for Griswold. He said he and two other Key West friends had been in occasional contact with Griswold until about six months earlier, when all communication from Griswold’s end had inexplicably ceased.

  I asked Horn if, before his disappearance, Griswold had said anything to anybody in Key West that seemed out of character or otherwise odd or set off alarm bells. Horn said, “Well, maybe.” When he assured me that he and other of Griswold’s Key West friends would willingly tell me what little they knew, I thanked him, called Delta, and booked a flight for the next day.

  I also phoned a PI friend in New York City who I’d done work for and obtained a list of reputable investigative firms and individuals operating in Bangkok. I had just begun checking these agencies out online when I became aware of an eerie silence above me. Normally, at this time of night, Timmy was upstairs in the bedroom guffawing at The Daily Show, and frequently so was I. Instead, when I went up, I found the television off and Timmy with his wireless laptop open on the bed.

  “Working late for the people of New York State?” I said. “If so, we thank you.”

  His look was grave. “I Googled Bangkok crime statistics.

  Holy Mother!”

  “Timothy, this is not going to help.”

  “Oh yes, it is. I’m not going, and I’m not sure you should, either.”

  This was my fault. I should only have told him about the golden reclining Buddhas. I said, “You’re getting a distorted picture. New York City looks sinister and forbidding on a police blotter, too. I sometimes do work there. So do you. We like New York.”

  “It’s true,” he said, “that there’s very little street crime in Bangkok. It’s peaceful in that respect. But if you’re doing business there — as Griswold may have been doing — look out. A favorite way of settling money disputes is for one party to hire a guy on a motorcycle to drive by and shoot the other party in the head. Extrajudicial killings by the police are routine.

  Get this: in July two thousand one, a Bangkok newspaper ran a front-page story with the headline, ‘Police Death Squads Run Riot.’ In one region, the police general dealt with drug dealers by sending cops out to shoot them. ‘Our target,’ this police official said, ‘is to send one thousand traffickers to hell this year, to join some three hundred fifty before them.’ Could Griswold have gotten enmeshed in some gigantic drug deal? That could explain the so-called quick return on investment. If so, he could be six feet under in the backyard of a police station. Land of Smiles, my ass, Donald. The Thailand I am seeing in front of me here is bloody treacherous.”

  22 Richard Stevenson

  I leaned over his shoulder. “Timothy, this is great stuff.

  Really helpful. Would you mind printing this for me? I’ll read it on the plane to Key West tomorrow. I’m going down to talk to Griswold’s friends there. It turns out they’re quite worried about him, too.”

  “And then” — Timmy went right on — “I came across a book I think you should read. I’m ordering it tomorrow from Stuyvesant Books. It’s My Eight Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison.

  It’s by some American bozo who got on the wrong side of somebody over there, and he landed in some nightmare Midnight Express situation he didn’t have enough ready cash to buy his way out of, the way the rich Thais do.”

  “Well,” I said. “All this stuff is frightening, sure. It makes me apprehensive too. But it’s also all the more reason to worry about Gary Griswold. He sounds like a basically good guy — adventurous in a harmless way, a spiritual searcher. Maybe too naive and susceptible, but that’s hardly a
moral crime. And he may have been victimized by the Thai subculture displayed so garishly on your screen there. Griswold may be in trouble, and he needs help. I’ve been hired to help him, but of course, you don’t need to be involved.”

  “I intend not to be.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  He said, “It’s not that I don’t get it. I agree that Griswold could well be up to his ears in some hideous mire — a swamp of his own making or not — and he needs somebody to come along and drag him out. All I’m saying is, Bangkok sounds as if it can be a very dangerous place, and I’m frightened for myself and for you.”

  “I know.”

  “And the other thing is, how objective are you being about this? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Griswolds to hire somebody on the scene there instead of somebody who hasn’t set foot in Bangkok for years? Maybe,” he said, “your judgment is a bit off because you mainly want to get back to this part of the world you once found so compelling and do it at somebody THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 23 else’s expense. And maybe reconnect with Bank or Book or Mango or Dragonfruit or like that. Is what I have just described a distinct possibility, or isn’t it?”

  A relentlessly keen-minded piece of work was my beloved. I said, “Yes, all that is a distinct possibility. And I want you to know that I am resolving at this moment — thanks to you — to turn into a perfectly rational human being and to behave accordingly.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I added, “In my next life.”

  He seemed unamused by me, gave up and tried Jon Stewart.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The photograph of her ex-husband that Ellen Griswold had given me was about a year old, she said. In it, a lithe, well-tanned, curly-haired man in his midforties stood in front of a frangipani tree in splendid full bloom. Griswold wore khaki shorts and a lime green polo shirt. While not striking in appearance, he seemed a leaner, looser version of his older brother Bill, a tense and weary business traveler with a five o’clock shadow whom I met briefly at the Albany airport when his flight from Washington unexpectedly arrived only twenty minutes late.

  In the picture, Griswold’s dark eyes shone brightly as he peered confidently into the camera lens. His full-lipped smile, while not beatific, looked natural and relaxed. Buddhists say we inhabit our bodies only temporarily, but in this picture, at least, Griswold’s soul appeared comfortable in its then-abode.

  I looked at the picture and the other material on Griswold on the first leg of my Key West flight, a two-hour ride down to Atlanta. Ellen Griswold had provided regular-mail notes from Gary and hard copies of e-mails sent from Thailand. Nearly all were addressed to Ellen, not to Ellen and Bill. In his messages, Griswold spoke glowingly of his new home — he wrote, “the Thais are a truly free people” — and of the contentment he had found in Buddhist ethical systems and through daily meditation.

  He also mentioned being pleased with a condo he had purchased in Bangkok. This was about eighteen months earlier, and Ellen had included the street address in her packet.

  There were several references to what Griswold termed “the romance department.” All the romances seemed to be with Thai men. Early in his life in Bangkok, there was Keng, “a sweetheart of a man,” and later “delightful” Sambul, and then

  “quiet” Poom. No mention was made of any of these relationships ending. It seemed as if when one halted or dwindled out, Griswold just moved on to another. This left me 26 Richard Stevenson wondering what the exact nature of these liaisons might have been.

  The last boyfriend mentioned, in an e-mail dated the previous July 17, was Mango. Griswold called him “a beautiful man and a fantastic human being.” He also said, “This one’s a keeper, I hope.” This was a month before Griswold sold all his holdings in the US for thirty-eight million dollars and two months before he disappeared.

  The other material Ellen provided me, at Bob Chicarelli’s direction, was biographical and statistical data. I noted that Griswold had been a business major at Cornell with an art history minor. His resume consisted mainly of marketing positions with Algonquin Steel, the family company. He started low at Albany headquarters then climbed steadily, with his company career culminating in his becoming head of marketing in the US Southern region when he was in his early thirties.

  Then Griswold left the company and ran his Key West art gallery before departing for Thailand.

  On the smaller plane from Atlanta to Key West, I looked through the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand I had picked up that morning at Stuyvesant Books. In the “Dangers and Annoyances” section that Lonely Planet quaintly and helpfully includes in all its guidebooks, unscrupulous tuk-tuk drivers were listed, as well as fake-gem scams. No mention was made of drive-by shootings or police-run massacres. The emphasis in Lonely Planet’s Thailand was on the green landscape, the golden temples, and the smiles.

  “I have to admit,” Lou Horn said, “that in retrospect we should have seen it coming — Gary mentally and physically sailing off into the blue. There were signs.”

  Marcie Weems added, “Thailand, swell — nice people, nice place. And Buddhism, that’s fine, too — the ethics of tolerance and acceptance and nonviolence. And, of course, all those cute monks with their shaved heads and gorgeous orange robes. But astrology? Numerology? I don’t think so.”

  “And before his transformation Gary was so even-keeled most of the time,” Janice Romeo said. “And smart and fun to be around. The four of us took trips together, and Gary was always a delight. He was focused, yes, even obsessive about some things, like his bike racing and his good causes. But he was never really muddleheaded. And after he got out of the Algonquin Steel power job sturm and drang and opened the gallery, he was pretty relaxed too. Of course, it was also around that time that he started getting into the weirdness.”

  “He was weird, but still not weird,” Weems put in. “Gary was Mister Moderate-and-Conventional with most things — food, alcohol, dress. Key West is famous for its eccentrics, but Gary was hardly one of the seventeen thousand four hundred and twelve local characters.”

  “And men,” Romeo said. “Don’t forget men — another area where Gary was Mister Middle-of-the-Road. No Mangos or Pomegranates or Pomolos for the Gary we knew. He went for Lou, to cite a nearby example. An excellent, levelheaded choice. Lou, are you hurt that we all think of you as a merely reasonable object of desire?”

  They all laughed as Horn digested the ambiguous compliment. We were seated at a table at Salute, an open-air mainly Italian place along the Atlantic Avenue beach on the nocruise-ships quiet side of Key West. A half-moon hung in the evening sky behind palm fronds rustling in a warm breeze. I had my Sam Adams and the others their Ketel One vodka with a side of ice, apparently the national beverage of the Conch Republic.

  Horn was a broad-faced man in his late forties with a salt-and-pepper beard, a few skin-cancer scars scattered about, a one-time middleweight wrestler’s build now starting to respond to the tug of gravity, and a twinkle in both his eyes and his step.

  He had brought along Griswold’s two other closest friends in the keys. Both Weems and Romeo had moved to Key West twelve years earlier when the New York publishing house where Weems had been a senior editor was bought by Argentinean beef producers and most of the house’s functions were moved 28 Richard Stevenson to Buenos Aires. Now they ran a small B and B, Romeo said, and only served pork products for breakfast.

  Easy to look at in their pale cottons and silks, the two women seated across from me, one olive-skinned and ample, one creamy and svelte, were also merrily festooned with skin cancer Band-Aids, apparently a small price to pay for life in what was still a pretty good place for getting away from it all.

  Key West still had allure, despite cruise ships the size of the Pentagon lumbering in daily, and the influx of millionaires who had left the island unaffordable for lesser new arrivals. Gary Griswold had seemed more or less at home there, and his three friends said they were stunned when Griswold suddenly announced, after
a vacation trip to Thailand, that he was abandoning them and his life there for a country on the other side of the world.

  Horn said, “Gary and I were no longer partners in the personal sense by the time he left. So, emotionally it was more or less okay. That part of our relationship had petered out more than a year earlier, and we both had been seeing other people.”

  “ Seeing, ” Weems said. “Such a darling way of putting it.”

  “Anyway, I had always been the one to play around,” Horn said. “Gary, being more serious and focused about everything he undertook, was more of a serial monogamist.”

  “This is true,” Romeo said. “Marcie and I once certified Gary as an honorary lesbian.”

  “I sometimes wonder,” Horn said, “what would have happened if Geoffrey Pringle had never invited Gary over to Bangkok. Though, of course, Gary had begun to change almost a year before that. At the time, we thought maybe it had something to do with Gary falling off his bike, screwy as that might sound. Another biker ran into him in a race up near Ocala, and Gary wiped out and landed on his head. He was wearing a helmet, but he had a bad concussion, and the whole thing seemed to throw him for a loop like nothing else we’d ever seen. He went around in a daze for a week after he got out of the hospital. And it was not too long after that that he got the astrology bug, and he started seeing a woman on Stock THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 29

  Island who claims to help people get in touch with their past lives. I’ve read that head injuries can sometimes cause personality changes, temporary or even permanent, and we all wondered at the time if Gary hitting his head had somehow jarred loose his bullshit detector.”

  I asked, “Who is Geoffrey Pringle?”

  “A longtime Key West full-timer who moved to Thailand four or five years ago,” Horn said. “It was Geoff who invited Gary over for a two-week visit.”