This got a look of mild surprise. “So you’re interested in taking this on?”
“Maybe.”
“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t. You seem so skeptical about everything.”
“Not everything. My, no.”
“But,” she said, “I think you’re skeptical about me.”
“A little.”
“Why would you be?”
I noticed that the flat-screen television set over the bar was tuned to CNBC, where a reporter who looked something like Mrs. Griswold was mouthing words that I supposed concerned the day’s main news topic, the crashing dollar. If I had been able to read lips I might have phoned my bank immediately and converted everything into Burmese kyat.
I said, “Mrs. Griswold — ”
12 Richard Stevenson
“Please call me Ellen. I think we’re more or less contemporaries.”
“Yeah, more or less. Ellen, this thirty-eight million dollars
— which, by the way, might now be worth somewhat less than it was worth ten minutes ago — this thirty-eight million your ex-husband has or had in his possession — to whom does it belong?”
“To Gary, of course. But the point is, there are indications
— and I’ll get to those — that Gary is throwing his money away. That’s the issue.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. That’s where a lot of my skepticism
— you’re right about that — comes in. Your gay ex-husbandbrother-in-law may well be over in the Land of Smiles, as the brochures call it, spending thirty-eight million dollars on things you would not necessarily spend thirty-eight million dollars on.
Beach houses, money boys, dried squid on a stick, who knows what. But spending money foolishly is what some people do.
And while the spectacle can be upsetting to others, nauseating even, especially to the spendthrift’s loved ones, there’s rarely anything anybody can do about it. Or needs to. Hiring a private investigator is seldom called for — even when it’s a family member who appears to have gone off the rails, fiscally speaking.”
She was looking increasingly unhappy. “So Bill and I should just — sit back?”
I said, “When you say your ex-husband has vanished, what do you mean by that?”
“It means what it sounds like. No one has heard from Gary for nearly six months. He doesn’t respond to e-mails. His snail mail letters don’t get answered. His home phone and Thai cell phone accounts have both been shut down. He just seems to have — you know.”
“I know.” Fallen off the face of the earth. She heard herself thinking the cliche and decided she was not someone who would use it.
“Gary was never much for staying in touch,” she said.
“Even during his Key West years, he rarely e-mailed or phoned.
Business matters with Bill, but little else. And after his and Bill’s parents died, we saw very little of Gary. Even though I think he was basically happy that Bill and I had gotten together — at some level, relieved even — he seemed to feel awkward around 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.”