The 38 Million Dollar Smile - Stevenson Richard - Страница 3
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us. He had a couple of boyfriends in Key West — one of them
fairly long-term — but we never met them or knew exactly who
they were. Whether it was internalized homophobia or
something else, I don’t know. What I do know is, Gary didn’t
seem to fully come out and grow up as a gay person until he
went to Thailand.”
She blinked a couple of times, realizing she may have
blundered.
“So your ex-husband is not a grown-up, and at the same
time he is a grown-up?”
“What I meant,” she said, recovering handily, “was that on
the one hand Gary seems finally to have found a way of being
comfortably gay. While on the other hand, his long-term
happiness and well-being have been seriously jeopardized by his
fiscal irresponsibility, his susceptibility to Eastern religions —
there was at least one sizable investment decision Bill and I
learned was suggested by his astrologer — and by his choice of
boyfriends over there. The last one he mentioned to me — in a
short note about some estate business before we stopped
hearing from him — was a Thai man named Mango.”
“That’s vivid.”
“You’ve been there, and you may know better. But I would
find it very difficult to take seriously a man named Mango.”
I said, “On some Bangkok R and R from Saigon, I once
spent a pleasant weekend with a Thai man named Bank. He had
a brother named Book. Thais sometimes give their children
English nicknames of objects they value. So I wouldn’t make
too much of that.”
14 Richard Stevenson
Mrs. Griswold took a good swallow of beer and said, “Well,
then, Don, let me run a very different name by you, and let’s see if this gets your attention.” She waited.
“Ready when you are.”
She said, “Algonquin Steel.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Max J. Griswold.”
“Oh, so you all are those Griswolds. If you were Thai, you might have named your son Blast Furnace. Or your daughter.”
“The company Gary and Bill’s grandfather founded is
publicly traded now,” she went on. “But Gary and Bill both
retained substantial holdings. Last August, Gary sold his shares for thirty million dollars and change. Bill learned this from Alan Rainey, the company treasurer. Alan also told Bill that when
Alan questioned him, Gary said he had been offered an
investment opportunity that was too good to pass up and would
lead to his recouping his investment many times over in a short
period of time. It was easy enough, also, for Bill to learn from Angie Hogencamp at Hughes-Weinstock, our brokerage, that
Gary had liquidated all of his remaining eight million in assets and had all of it — thirty-eight million in toto — wired to a
bank in Bangkok.” She eyed me coolly and waited for my
reaction.
I said, “Remind me never to do business with Hughes-
Weinstock if I want my portfolio activity kept confidential.”
She ignored this and added, “All of this bizarre and
potentially disastrous financial activity coincided with the arrival of Mango on the scene and came a little less than a month
before Gary…”
She waited and I said it. “Seemed to fall off the face of the
earth.”
“And by the way,” Mrs. Griswold said. “Blast Furnace
would not be an appropriate Griswold name. The company has
steel wholesale and fabricating facilities in eleven states — plus, of course, the nationwide Econo-Build home and building
supply chain of stores — but no actual steel mills. Anyway,
THE 38 MILLION DOLLAR SMILE 15
most of the steel sold and used in the United States these days
comes from Japan, Korea, Russia and Brazil. I think it’s safe to say few Griswolds have ever laid eyes on a blast furnace.”
I did not reply that Bill and Ellen Griswold might then have
considered naming their only son Middleman. I thought about
it quickly and said, “I guess I have to agree, Ellen, that the
situation you have described to me does sound worrisome.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Thirty-eight mil?” Timothy Callahan was impressed.
“That’s getting close to being real money these days. Not for
some major CEO, who might find thirty-eight million stuffed
into his Dick Cheney’s-birthday-bonus envelope. But for the
family screwup, it sounds like a perfectly respectable sum to
fritter away in the tropics.”
We were dining late at a Thai place on Wolf Road after my
meeting with Ellen Griswold and were enjoying some decent
tom yam kung and steamed rice. I was eating around the
flavorsome but inedible debris in my soup bowl — the
lemongrass, galangal root and kaffir lime leaves — and Timmy
was picking his out of the bowl, bit by bit, and arranging them
on a separate small plate he had requested.
I said, “Gary Griswold wasn’t always a screwup, and that’s
partly why his family is concerned. He did the marketing for
their Econo-Build stores in Florida for six years and turned
them into serious competitors with Home Depot. Then he ran
an art gallery in Key West that wasn’t a big moneymaker, Ellen
Griswold said, but apparently succeeded well enough. It wasn’t
until he discovered the quirky charms of Bangkok that he
apparently flipped out money-managementwise. If, in fact, he
did. Griswold claimed he was investing the thirty-eight million
in a sure bet with a quick payoff.”
Timmy transferred another reed of tough lemongrass out of
his soup bowl and said, “My Aunt Moira once lost five
thousand dollars in a Ponzi scheme.”
“I’ll bet a priest told her it was okay.”
“He was probably running it.”
“Another reason to worry,” I said, “is this business of the
astrologer Griswold once accepted investment advice from.”
“Griswold bought Enron?”
18 Richard Stevenson
“No, Ellen said it actually worked out. Some land deal in
Bangkok. But all the Griswolds were fit to be tied at the time.”
“There you go. You’re always so skeptical about the relative
positions of the planets and stars on erroneous charts drawn up
centuries ago affecting people’s personalities and events in their present-day lives. Let this be a lesson.”
“Anyway, in the go-go Southeast Asian economy, most land
deals probably work out these days. Also, that investment was
about three hundred K, and now we’re talking thirty-eight
million, Griswold’s entire net worth. And the fact that he seems to have broken off all contact with his family sounds bad. He
never said a word to them about moving or dropping out of
sight or that anything had gone wrong. All he said in his last email was that something had come up that would keep him
busy for a while and he might be out of touch, but not to worry.
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.”
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