It was clear to everyone that love, if there had ever been any between Tex and Helen, was long gone by the time he died, just over a year after they married, and four months after the birth of their son. Helen had resumed her social schedule almost immediately, and if she mourned the loss of either her husband or her child, she didn’t show it. She told everyone she planned to return to the U.S. as soon as she was permitted to do so, to start her life over.
But before she could do that, she was charged with murder and sentenced to die.
This is Helen Ford’s story. It is a tale of passion, lust, and greed. It is the story of justice perverted, of love poisoned by prejudice, of the dark side of high society.
This is the story they didn’t want you to know.
There was more, of course, 267 pages of it, to be precise. Even discounting a rather derivative title and the supermarket tabloid elements, it was a riveting tale. Helen Ford, nee Helen Fitzgerald, and her brother Robert had come to Bangkok with their parents right after the war. The father, who had been a member of U.S. special forces, had been stationed in Bangkok during the war, and succumbing to the lure of the East, moved his family there. He died shortly after, however, of wounds he had received in combat in the Pacific. The mother, too, died not much later.
There had been some money in the family, although not a lot of it, and it was important that Helen marry well. She was seen at all the best parties and apparently had a succession of suitors. But she loved someone else, someone unsuitable. In the mid-1940s, she began a liaison with a young Thai from a well-to-do family. They met clandestinely for at least two years. In a remarkable twist, given the times, it was not Helen’s family who objected to the relationship. It was his.
At some point, the man told his family he was going to marry Helen. They were horrified and would have none of it, considering Helen to be after his money. The family tried to pay Helen off, and needing money and perhaps seeing the hopelessness of her situation, she apparently accepted. The young man’s engagement to a Thai woman was announced a few months later. Shortly after that, Helen married Tom Ford. It was clearly a marriage of convenience. They had a son born eight months after the wedding. Ford was a drunk and a philanderer, according to Will. He may also have been a wife beater.
What seems clear is that Helen and her Thai lover continued to see each other. Will’s hypothesis was that Tom Ford caught them in their little love nest, a tree house in Bangkok that belonged to her brother, or that the Thai came upon Tom beating Helen. Whatever the reason for the meeting, at the end of it, Helen’s lover lay mortally wounded. He died from a stab wound before Helen could get help.
After that, Will’s story sinks into speculation. According to his account, Helen went berserk and did, indeed, stab her husband. Then, in an effort to ensure his body couldn’t be identified, probably with the help of her brother Robert, she hacked the body to pieces. She then killed her infant son. That body has never been found.
The story then enters the realm of public knowledge. Helen was tried, convicted, sentenced to die, appealed, won, and was instead jailed for about six years. She then disappeared from public view. It was a fascinating story at any time, but for me, at that moment it was a revelation. Because while at no time in the public record was either her lover nor, indeed, any other member of his family mentioned, Will Beauchamp felt no such compunction, naming Virat Chaiwong, Thaksin’s brother, the second young man in the family portrait, as the lover. Even then, the Chaiwong family’s power and influence must have been insurmountable. If the murder of Virat had been part of Helen’s defense, she might have gotten off with the lesser sentence right away, the justifiable homicide idea. But Will had combed the records, what there were, anyway, and could find nothing.
So there it was. If I’d thought that finding Will was a separate issue from Jennifer and the Chaiwongs, then clearly I’d been wrong. But what did it mean? The picture of Will that was emerging was contradictory at best. He had been in business with Wongvipa, a business that required two sets of financial statements for some reason, and it couldn’t be good. At the same time, or at least soon after, he wrote a book that was a damning indictment of Wongvipa’s family. The obvious conclusion was the Chaiwongs were trying to stop publication of the book and were prepared to murder Will to do it. But what about Chat? Was Helen Ford still out there somewhere, determined to take her revenge on the family through the next generation?
I went back to look at the portrait. I swear I stared at it for an hour: Helen Ford in her lovely celery suit standing behind a table on which was placed a stone Buddha, her hand seeming to reach out for it. She stared directly at me. Then I tried not looking at her, but my eyes kept coming back, not to her, but to the Buddha on the table.
“There’s something wrong with this painting,” I said aloud. It was something about the hands. She looked a bit as if she was reaching for the Buddha image, but the hands were not quite right if that was what she was doing. To me it looked more like a protective gesture of some kind, but why protect the Buddha? I picked up the phone and called David Ferguson.
“I heard about Chat,” he said. “What a terrible thing to happen. Is Jennifer all right?”
“She will be with time,” I said.
“And her dad? Have you talked to him? And you? What happened?”
“Drugs,” I said. “There must have been some mix-up. He thought he was taking painkillers for his headache.” I could almost hear his brain ticking over. He was thinking what everybody else was thinking, that Chat was a drug addict. It seemed Jennifer and I were in a very exclusive group that saw it differently. And I had no way of proving otherwise, not yet anyway.
“Look, David, I can’t talk long, and I’m nervous about using the telephone here, and yes, this is an unusual request under the circumstances, but I must know what the stuff on Will Beauchamp’s wall was. The stuff we thought might be blood. Someone must know.”
“Lara, why are you worrying about this now? You must be in shock or something.”
“Please, David,” I said.
“I’ll call you back,” he replied.
* * *
“Oil paint,” he said about an hour later. “The kind artists use. There’s some red pigment as well, and a thinner. The lab guy said he might have been cleaning brushes and managed to spatter it on the wall. That mean anything to you?”
“It does,” I said. “Thanks.” I grabbed the painting, had the security man call me a car, and headed into Bangkok.
“Oh, it’s you,” Robert Fitzgerald said, peering over the top of the railing. He was very pale, and his head was still bandaged, but he was home. “Come up,” he said. “I see you’ve found the painting.”
“Do you feel up to a little project?” I said.
“I think so,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t require running a marathon or anything.”
“I want to clean this area of the painting,” I said.
“The whole painting could use a little cleaning.”
“I want you to remove the Buddha,” I said, pointing. “Start right about here.”
“I don’t know that I should do that,” he said. “It’s a wonderful painting, and the artist is, after all, my father.”
“Just look at that painting for a minute,” I said. “Your father was an exceptional craftsman. His perspective was perfect. This is not perfect. Someone, maybe him, maybe somebody else, has changed this painting. Will Beauchamp thought so, too. He was starting to clean it when he was killed. See, if you look closely, you can see where he started.”