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

more girls and send them on a tour around the region’s hotels, splitting the profits with the other hotel owners. Anyway, two of the family members became infatuated with the same Russian girl. One was an old guy, the other was much younger, but both were rich and neither wanted to back down. Eventually the younger guy had the older one murdered and the shit hit the fan. The local police chief had no chance of keeping a lid on the scandal, the family sold the hotel and moved to the United States, and I found myself out of a job. I went back to Bangkok and booked into a cheap hotel on Sukhumvit Soi 8. I took a long, hard look at myself. I didn’t want to work with horses again, and I was fed up with the hotel business. I was fairly proficient at speaking Thai and Khamen, and I knew pretty much all there was to know about bargirls. I didn’t fancy running a bar, but after a few tourists asked me to check up on their temporary girlfriends after they’d gone home, I had the idea of setting up a private detective agency. I figured that way I’d be paid to do what I did best: to hang around with bargirls and drink Jack Daniels.
    When I’d set up as a private eye, I had no idea that my first paying customer would be a middle-aged Thai lady who wouldn’t dream of setting foot inside a go-go bar. But I was determined to do my best for her. The problem was, all I could do was to wait. And wait.
    It was a month before the Thonglor police phoned me to say that the Reverend Armitage was in custody in Nong Khai and that they’d sent a pick up truck to bring him back to Bangkok. I phoned Khun Bua to give her the good news, then I went down to an internet café and fired off emails to the two brothers, telling them that Marcus was in custody and that he would be facing serious jail time. I gave them a few details of what life was like in a Thai prison—based on my own experience, since you ask—and told them that the only way to avoid a long spell in a cell with an open toilet and wall-to-wall mosquitoes was for Marcus to pay back the money he’d stolen.
    The next day Armitage was in a holding cell at Thonglor police station. I went in to have a look at him. He didn’t look like a man of the cloth. He was wearing faded blue denim jeans, a Chang Beer T-shirt and a baseball cap, and there were shackles on his legs. He was complaining to anyone who would listen to him that he was going to complain to his embassy, that he was a Canadian citizen, that they had no way to treat him like this, and so on. The fact that the three guys he was sharing the cell with and most of the officers at the station spoke absolutely no English meant that he was wasting his breath. And even if he was able to make himself understood no one there would have given a damn. Armitage was a farang and the Thai legal system showed farangs no favours. Innocent until proven guilty had no standing under Thai law. He would stay in custody until his trial. He would be found guilty for sure, and he’d get three years in the Bangkok Hilton—the infamous Thai prison—unless he bought his way out.
    At first Armitage thought I was from the Embassy but as soon as he heard my New Zealand accent he started getting cagey, telling me that he wouldn’t speak to anyone but his lawyer. I told him that Khun Bua was well in with a Supreme Court judge and that there wasn’t a lawyer in Thailand who could keep him out of prison. And once the court heard how he’d defrauded a good Christian woman they would throw away the key. Thai prisons are seriously nasty places. Up to forty men sharing a cell with an open toilet, the lights on all day and night, prisoners sleeping like sardines on the floor, no airconditioning, rampant disease and god-awful food. Armitage was facing a long sentence and I told him that I didn’t think he’d survive more than a few months.
    There was only one way he was going to stay out of prison, and that was to pay back the money he’d stolen.