The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 1
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“Smile is a rattling good read with the trademark intricacies
of plot and felicities of language, added to which this time are remarkably subtle sketches of the sights, politics, religion,
customs and pleasures of Thailand (the latter both gustatory
and sexual) and one unforgettable character: wily, intrepid,
unflappable Bangkok private eye, Rufus Pugh.”
Frank Kelly
poet and co-author of the beauty-pageant musical
Pageant and The Texas Chainsaw Musical
“Donald and Timmy are so real to me that I keep forgetting
I can’t phone or email them to check what’s up. No, I have to
wait until Richard Stevenson permits me access to these
gaychums of mine by giving up a new book. This time it’s The
38 Million Dollar Smile, and I got to go to Bangkok with my
buds for a heaping help of illicit gay sex, murder, Naked Thai
Boys Swimming, and Buddhist enlightenment from an angle
even the Kama Sutra couldn’t imagine.”
Mark Saltzman
screenwriter of Third Man Out
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Ally Blue
Gary Martine
J.P. Bowie
ZA Maxfield
P.A. Brown
Jet Mykles
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Kirby Crow
Luisa Prieto
Dick D.
Rick R. Reed
Jason Edding
AM Riley
Angela Fiddler
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Richard Stevenson
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A Donald Strachey Mystery
The 38 Million
Dollar Smile
RICHARD STEVENSON
mlrpress
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2009 by Richard Stevenson
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Published by
MLR Press, LLC
3052 Gaines Waterport Rd.
Albion, NY 14411
Visit ManLoveRomance Press, LLC on the Internet:
www.mlrpress.com
Cover Art by Deana C. Jamroz
Editing by Judith David
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN# 978-1-60820-014-6
Issued 2009
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Two books have been especially helpful to me as I have
worked to understand Thailand. Thailand Confidential and Bangkok Babylon, both by Jerry Hopkins, are shrewd and
insightful guides to Thai life and culture. When I wrote this
book, Warren Olson’s Confessions of a Bangkok Private Eye
provided an eye-opening and somewhat alarming picture of the
Thai criminal justice system.
Also helpful were numerous Thai and farang friends and
acquaintances in Bangkok — you know who you are — as well
as a forthcoming and mildly conscience-stricken Bangkok police
official who prefers not to be named.
OTHER NOVELS IN THE
DONALD STRACHEY MYSTERY SERIES
Death Trick
On the Other Hand, Death
Ice Blues
Third Man Out
Lambda Finalist
Shock to the System
Lambda Finalist
Chain of Fools
Strachey’s Folly
Lambda Finalist
Tongue Tied
Death Vows
The 38 Million Dollar Smile
CHAPTER ONE
“Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I’ve never given it much thought.”
“So you won’t mind my telling you, I think the whole idea is
perfectly absurd.”
“Go ahead.”
It had been Ellen Griswold’s idea to meet in the bar at the
Albany airport at six thirty. She was picking her husband up
from the US Airways flight from Washington that theoretically
got in at seven forty but sometimes arrived around nine or ten.
So we had plenty of time for going over the mysteries of life.
“I know you’ve spent time in Southeast Asia,” she said. “So
I assume you know something about Buddhist philosophy.”
She was nicely turned out in a beige linen suit, the sea green
silk wrap she had been wearing against the early April chill now slung over the chair next to her. Still on the underside of fifty, I guessed, Mrs. Griswold was raven haired, with clear dark eyes, a handsome beak, and apparently had had some minimal
cantilevering and other structural work done on her chin and
cheeks, though nothing that would have overtaxed Le
Corbusier.
I said, “I was in the war there, so I know a little. But even in Army Intelligence, my thinking was focused and practical. The
larger questions relating to the Asian psyche were left to the
deep thinkers at the Pentagon. How did you know I was in
Vietnam?”
“Bob Chicarelli told me.”
A lawyer I knew. “I’ve done work for Bob.”
“And have played squash with him. He also says you’re gay.
That’s good, because so is my ex-husband, who is the problem
here, I think.”
“Ah, the problem.”
8 Richard Stevenson
I liked that she drank beer. She had a large bottle of Indian
Kingfisher she was working on, savoring each sip but without
making a spectacle of it, like Timmy’s and my lesbian friends
who drink beer while they inexplicably watch men play football
on television.
Mrs. Griswold said, “My ex-husband, Gary, believes that in a
previous life he was Thai. What do you make of that?”
“Thai, as in a person from Thailand?”
She sipped her Kingfisher, and I sipped my Sam Adams.
“Gary not only believes that he was Thai, but that he will be
Thai again in his next life. This is a man I was married to for six years.”
“It sounds as though he may have been problematical for
you on multiple fronts.”
This got a little half smile. “Well, yes. We were married on
January seventeenth nineteen eighty-one. I should have known.
It was three days before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.”
“An auspicious week, as a sometime-Thai like your former
husband might say.”
A curt nod. “I think he would say that, yes. Not back then
necessarily. But now Gary would think of it in exactly those
terms. Astrology, numerology, karma, reincarnation, the whole
nine yards. All that new age hooey. It’s really disappointing.
When I married Gary, he had his obsessions, which were
generally harmless — bicycle racing, and so on. But he was also
one of the most rational people I knew.”
I said, “East Asians don’t think of karma and reincarnation
as new age hooey. They think of them as the way the universe is
ordered.”
I meant this as a point of information, not a lecture, and she
seemed to take it that way, unperturbed. “That’s fine if it works for the Asians. I’ve lived and worked abroad, and cultural
relativism is fine with me. But for Gary, Eastern ideas turned
into a kind of trap, I think.”
“How so?”
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 9
“As a way of avoiding responsibility.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think of myself as an overly materialistic person,”
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