She looks away again, at a bamboo tree soaring out of a gigantic pot. “I met Frank Charles years ago. It must be almost a decade. He didn’t know Thailand so well at that time and was using contacts he made in LA to introduce him to society people over here. I met him at a ball that was part of a film festival.” She flashes me a glance. “Of course, I knew he was fantastically rich, so I spent some time with him. He was very good-looking-that was before he got so fat. We were never lovers, if that is your next question. I don’t do sex. It’s a mug’s game, if you ask me.”

“But you saw him from time to time, after that ball?”

“Yes. For a while he showed up at a lot of society events, mostly balls and dinner parties. I think that was before he decided the red-light districts were more interesting. He dropped off most radar screens pretty quickly after that.”

“But you remained friends? Let me be frank, Khun Doctor. Your conversation is intelligent, witty, educated, and charming. You also talk openly about drugs. For a farang new to Thailand who would certainly have been familiar with that kind of recreation, you would have seemed like an oasis.”

She makes a face, then her eyes sweep the room with the peculiar intensity of one who finds few of interest among our species, but who nevertheless lives in hope. “You’ll have to give me immunity if you want me to talk.”

“If you mean immunity from prosecution for sharing a few of your favorite molecules with him, yes. Nothing beyond that, though.”

She thinks about it, takes another sip of tea, shrugs. “He’d been to a lot of parties in Beverly Hills. He knew the names of a lot of chemicals. I told him I could get him anything he could get in LA, usually at about twenty percent of the price. Pharmacists over there really know how to turn a profit. I never made any money out of it at all. I let him have stuff at cost.”

I lean forward a little for emphasis. “Khun Doctor, I will approach Colonel Vikorn just as you have asked. But you know as well as anyone that there are many ways of asking a favor. If you want me to ask my Colonel to help you in a way that will have effect, if you wish me to give my plea on your behalf the urgency and importance it deserves, you will have to be more expansive. You are making this interview hard work for me, Khun Doctor.”

She looks at me curiously, as if it has been a long time since anyone pressured her about anything and she is finding the experience novel. One more sip of Darjeeling and she starts to talk.

“He was not so unusual for a farang. He was very smart, sensitive, aware, clever with money, but frustrated, disillusioned, and thoroughly self-obsessed. In his youth he had wanted to be a great artist of the big screen-perhaps even a kind of cinematic Shakespeare. He was convinced of his own talent, but he never seemed to produce anything beyond the obvious. Actually, his problem was the eternal adolescence of America -emotionally, he never got past the golden-sunset school of fucking.” She pronounces the vulgarism with perfect aplomb. “You know, as if one apocalyptic screw is going to provide the meaning of life. So, of course, he’s in a permanent mess, psychologically. The girls in the bars may have been social and economic simpletons, but they were happier than he was. He was fully smart enough to see the significance: dirt-poor Asian whores in better psychological shape than the very flower of American manhood. His incredibly expensive, constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness hadn’t even gotten him into the third-world league. He needed chemicals, and I found them for him in the name of friendship.”

“There must have been something in it for you, Khun Doctor?”

“Beyond endless invitations to watch private screenings in LA, which I never went to? Yes. We were friends. Different as we were, we were both pariahs of an unusual kind. The rich and successful kind. Our talk would probably have been considered dangerous and revolutionary, if anyone had overheard. We offered each other the opportunity to be intelligent without restraint. He cried on my shoulder about his condition of chronic mental and emotional unease, I moaned about not having a license anymore to practice pharmacy and play with drugs. We sort of understood each other.”

“Khun Doctor, this sounds very much like a real friendship.”

She nods. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. He was certainly more fun to talk to than any of my women friends.”

“And so it remained until he died?”

She shakes her head and speaks slowly, thoughtfully: “No. Not really. There was never any kind of schedule, any consistency in our friendship. If he heard of some new drug he wanted to try, or if he wanted industrial-quality cocaine or LSD, I would get it for him. He was a child of the sixties: he liked acid and saw value in it. When he needed to talk, we would meet. Sometimes I felt like a kind of nurse.” She shrugs. “To be frank, there was the thought in the back of my mind that he might one day be able to put in a word for me with the Thai authorities through the U.S. ambassador, with whom he was friendly. But our meetings were intermittent. He commuted between here and LA. I was often out of the country myself. And when he stopped going to society events, we ceased to have any acquaintances in common.”

“Did he speak to you about visits to Nepal?”

A quick glance from her shrewd black eyes. “Sure. I think it was Nepal that screwed him up. I would look there for the reason for his death, if I were you.”

“Why?”

“He got involved with a girl up there. It sounded quite ridiculous. She was some Tibetan refugee who knew a little mystical mumbo jumbo, and because it was the Himalayas he fell for it. I lost respect for him then. He felt he couldn’t talk to me about this new mysticism of his because I would laugh at it. When I told him it was all about chemicals-with the right dopamine precursor I could introduce God to anyone-he got all passionate and evangelical and I left early. It was more than a year before he called me after that. And he’d started to get so horribly fat. It was like watching a catastrophe happen in slow motion, the way he just grew and grew-he stopped shaving, too, and I hate beards. I urged him to take some orlistat, or sibutramine, but he was weird about his obesity. It was as if it were part of his new path, his very own personal martyrdom.”

“How long ago was that?”

“It was an estrangement that happened gradually. We never fell out, we drifted apart. Since we had never been lovers there was no need for formalities-much less for murder,” she adds with a smile: one of those in which the extremes of the lips crawl slightly up the incisors.

“So you were surprised when he called you that night from Soi Cowboy?”

“Not really. I didn’t think he would be able to stay away from me forever. I supplied the two farang necessities he couldn’t shake: chemicals and intelligent conversation in English.” She takes another sip of tea and scans the room. “He was in a bit of a state, though. His Tibetan dream had gone badly wrong and he needed a pharmacist. I’m afraid I was quite merciless. I gave him some Depo-Provera to kill the sex drive, crystallized THC so he could get to God without a mandala, cocaine because that was what he was used to. And some acid.”

“How did you get LSD? I haven’t heard of it on the street for ten years. Have you been synthesizing again?” There is no need to mention Sukum in this context; she knows what I’m talking about.

For the first time she shows signs of discomfort. She pulls girlishly on a section of her long black hair and makes an apologetic face. “He begged me. And it wasn’t easy to get. I didn’t dare make it myself, so I had to go underground. It came all the way from Goa in a baby’s dirty diaper, if I recall.”

“And that was the last time you saw him?”