The 38 Million Dollar Smile, стр. 1

“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

MLR PRESS AUTHORS

Featuring a roll call of some of the best writers of gay erotica and mysteries today!

Maura Anderson

Samantha Kane

Victor J. Banis

Kiernan Kelly

Jeanne Barrack

JL Langley

Laura Baumbach

Josh Lanyon

Alex Beecroft

Clare London

Sarah Black

William Maltese

Ally Blue

Gary Martine

J.P. Bowie

ZA Maxfield

P.A. Brown

Jet Mykles

James Buchanan

L. Picaro

Jordan Castillo Price

Neil Plakcy

Kirby Crow

Luisa Prieto

Dick D.

Rick R. Reed

Jason Edding

AM Riley

Angela Fiddler

George Seaton

Dakota Flint

Jardonn Smith

Kimberly Gardner

Caro Soles

Storm Grant

Richard Stevenson

Amber Green

Claire Thompson

LB Gregg

Kit Zheng

Drewey Wayne Gunn

Check out titles, both available and forthcoming, at

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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.

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,”