Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye: True Stories From the Case Files of Warren Olson by Stephen Leather, Warren Olson Page B

trade all night. It used to be called yah ma, or horse drug, because it gave you the strength and stamina of a horse. The cops started calling it yah ba, the literal translation being Crazy Drug. The spin didn’t work. By the look of things, Ying was supplying the stuff. I hadn’t seen any money change hands so it looked as if she was giving them the stuff free of charge. So in just a few hours I’d caught Knight’s live-in lover in an outright lie and found her giving drugs to students. It wasn’t looking good, not if Knight figured she was the love of his life.
    I went back downstairs, thanked my new-found friend, and went over to brief the motorcycle riders. It looked as if we were in for a long night; if Ying and her friends were fired up on amphetamines it could well be that they might go on somewhere else.
    I sat in the rental car, keeping the engine running and the airconditioning going, sipping from a bottle of water that I always take with me on surveillance operations. Ying didn’t appear until two o’clock in the morning. There was a teenage boy with her, one of the restaurant workers I figured, with a designer hair cut and baggy jeans. They went to her BMW and a few minutes later I was following them across the city towards Ratchada. There are lots of late-night eating places Ratchada-way so I figured she was taking her friend for a meal. I was wrong. They pulled in front of a dingy apartment block, a far cry from Knight’s palatial accommodation.
    I watched them go in. The young guy had a keycard to open the main door so it was probably his place. I waited in the car until four o’clock in the morning by which time it was obvious that they weren’t going anywhere. Lies, drugs, and a toy boy. Young miss Ying was a piece of work, all right.
    I asked one of the motorcycle riders to stay outside the block with instructions to phone me as soon as they reappeared. If Ying was like every other Thai girl I knew, that would probably be after midday.
    As it turned out, it was after two when they reappeared. My guy phoned me while he was following them and I could barely hear him over the noise of the traffic but I met up with him outside a gold shop in Phaholyothin. Ying and her boy were inside, checking out gold necklaces. Ying was clearly being very generous with Greig Knight’s money.
    ‘Lucky lad,’ I said in Thai.
    ‘Huh?’ said the motorcycle taxi driver, frowning.
    Thai isn’t the easiest language, being tonal and all, so I said it again. ‘Lucky lad.’
    His frown deepened.
    ‘Pretty girl, buying him presents. Lucky, right?’
    He laughed and lit a cigarette. Inside the gold shop, Ying was fastening a gold chain around her friend’s wrist.
    ‘Never had a girl buy me anything.’
    The motorcycle rider squinted across at me. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
    I sighed. He obviously didn’t understand what I was getting at. ‘A girl, buying gold for a guy. It’s not something you see every day.’
    ‘You know that’s a girl, right?’
    ‘Of course I know it’s a girl. That’s why I’m following her. I’m just saying, she’s buying gold for the guy.’
    ‘That’s not a guy,’ he said.
    Now I was confused. ‘A girl?’
    ‘A tom.’
    ‘A tom?’
    ‘The girl you’re following is buying gold for a tom. The one with the short hair is a girl, Khun Warren.’
    I stared at the couple in the shop. Ying kissed her friend on the cheek, then they hugged. I groaned. My guy was right. Ying’s toy boy was a toy girl. Maybe a bit on the masculine side, but still a girl. I’d been so fixated on the possibility of Ying having a boyfriend that I’d missed the obvious. Lesbianism is fairly common in Thailand, more so than in the West. The problem was, how did I come up with the proof that Greig Knight would obviously want? Same-sex hand-holding is the norm in Thailand, and it’s not unusual for girls to share a bed without any sex being involved. In fact, all I had to go on was the kiss and hug