There’s a Thai female private detective who has been making the news recently. She specializes in adultery cases. Story here.
I love her quote: “The only man you can trust is a dead one. If they’re still alive, still breathing, then you can’t trust them.”
It’s quite common for Thai men to keep mistresses. Sometimes it’s actually a formal arrangement such as my father-in-law had, in which a ceremony is involved and although not legal, the status of the “minor wife” is recogized by society. (My mother-in-law was his “major wife,” or the main one. He kept two families complete with children in two separate houses.) Sometimes the arrangement is kept completely secret.
The story relates one woman’s experience after seven years of living with a man, then the girl became suspicious that he was seeing someone else and tracked down the “other woman” only to find out that that was his actual wife and, to her surprise, she’d been the other woman the whole time.
But the detective also has some male clients wanting their cheating wives investigated, so it’s not just a one-way street.
Isn’t investigating adultery what ALL private eyes spend most of their time doing?
I mean, isn’t that like a c-store clerk writing a book about jerkwad customers?
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I mean, there just aren’t enough maltese falcons and missing wives who turn out to be an illegitimate daughter who’d taken over the life of the legitimate daughter of a southern aristocrat to make a living at it. And most of the time, you don’t get paid for those jobs, because it turns out your client is actually the guilty one.
I bet the reaction would be different though if someone said “the only woman you can trust is a dead one. If they’re still alive, still breathing, then you can’t trust them.” Even though both statements are equally insulting.
No, actually. When I was a bank teller we had a customer who was a bit of a slob. He always wore a dirty trench coat, always had a newspaper under his arm, and smelled like a combination of tobacco and must. He never smiled and was pretty gruff.
It turns out he was a private investigator. What he investigated was people who were supposed to inherit money. Sometimes these people were hard to find, and he’d track them down and give them money. That’s a pretty benevolent PI!
Apparently someone in Hollywood thought he was very interesting, enough to make a TV series about him. They changed his location, changed the focus of his investigations to murder, and changed his name to Columbo.
Actually, I hear that statement quite often from the guys on the barstools.
Yeah, while there are enough adultery cases here to make it a full-time specialty, private eyes also investigate scams and such. A Kiwi who worked here as one but is now back in New Zealand has written a book about his experiences. Have not gotten around to reading it yet, but I hear it’s fascinating.
Oh, and I forgot missing persons. Those cases are numerous in Thailand. Sometimes they disappear in mysterious circumstances. Sometimes they want to disappear for whatever reason (many, many bank robbers seem to get tracked down here). But there are always lots of missing persons who were last seen in Thailand or make it here to live in obscurity and to hell with their past lives.
