Death of a Red Heroine [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 01] (50 page)

“What about Wang Feng?”

“She is going to join her husband in Japan.” He added, “And I’m helping her get the visa.”

“Well—”she said, with no disappointment in her voice, “it might not be a bad thing for you, son. In fact, I’m glad. She is married—at least in name, I know. Not to break up someone’s marriage is a worthy deed. Buddha will bless you for it. But since you parted with that girl in Beijing, Wang seemed to be the only one you really cared for.”

“Let’s not talk about it, okay?”

“Remember Yan Hong, the anchorwoman? She’s really famous on the Oriental channel now. Everybody says how wonderful she is. A golden voice, and a golden heart, too. I ran across her in the First Department Store last week. She used to call you in the evening—I recognized her voice—but you did not return her calls. Now she’s a happy mother with a chubby son, but she still called me ‘aunt.’“

“Our relationship was totally professional.”

“Come on,” she said, sniffing at the jasmine blossom in her tea, “you’ve withdrawn into a shell.”

“I wish I had a shell. It might protect me. For the last two weeks, I have had so many matters to deal with. Today is the first time I could steal a couple of hours,” he said, trying to change the subject. “So I’ve come here.”

“Don’t worry about me, “she said, “and don’t change the subject either. With your current pay and position, you should not have too much difficulty finding someone.”

“I give you my word, Mother,” he said, “I will find a wonderful daughter-in-law for you in the near future.”

“Not for me, but for yourself.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“You have time to have supper with me, I hope?”

“As long as you don’t make anything special for me.”

“No, I won’t.” She stood up. “I’ll just need to warm up a few leftover dishes.”

Not too many dishes, he suspected, looking into the small bamboo food cabinet on the wall. She could not afford a refrigerator.

The small cabinet held only one tiny dish of cabbage pickles, a bottle of fermented bean curd, and half a dish of green bean sprouts. But a bowl of watery rice porridge and pickle tasted quite palatable after a week of exotic delicacies in Ouyang’s company.

“Don’t worry, mother,” he said, adding a tiny bit of the bean curd to his porridge. “I’m going to attend a Central Party Institute seminar in October, and after that I’ll have more time for myself.”

“And are you going to be a cop all your life?” she said.

He could not help staring at her. That was not a question he was prepared for. Not this evening. He was startled by its bitterness. She had not been pleased with his career, he knew. She had hoped that her son would become an academic like his father. But being a police officer had not been a matter of his choice. It surprised him that she should have brought up the subject now that he had become a chief inspector.

“I have been doing fine, really,” he said, patting her thin, blue-veined hand. “Nowadays, I have my own office in the bureau, and a lot of responsibility, too.”

“So it has become your career for life.”

“Well, that I don’t know.” He added after a pause, “I have been asking myself the same question, but I have not got the answer yet.

That, at least, was truthful. Occasionally he still wondered what would have become of him had he continued his literature studies. Perhaps he would be an assistant or associate professor at a university, where he could teach and write too, a career he had once dreamed about. In the last few years, however, he had somehow come around to a different perspective. Life was not easy for most people, especially during China’s transitional period between socialist politics and capitalist economics. There might be a lot of things of more importance or at least of more immediate urgency than modernist and postmodernist literary criticism.

“Son, you still yearn after the other kind of life, don’t you— study, books, all that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Last week I happened to read a critical essay, another interpretation of the poem about a butterfly flying in
The Dream of the Red Chamber.
The thirty-fifth interpretation, the author claims proudly. But what is all that to our people’s life today?”

“But—but don’t you want Fudan or Tongji University anymore?”

“I do, but I don’t see anything wrong with what I’m doing.”

“Is police work a preferable way of making a living?”

It was just one way to make a living, he thought. And literature, too, might be just another commodity, like everything else in today’s market. If an academic career provided him with no more than secure tenure and a middle-class living standard, would he feel more rewarded?

“I don’t mean that, Mother. Still, if I can do something in my work to prevent one human being from being abused and killed by another, that’s worth doing.”

He did not say anything more. There was no point elaborating on his defense, but he remembered what his father had once said to him. “A man is willing to die for the one who appreciates him, and a woman makes herself beautiful for the one who appreciates her.” Another quotation from Confucius. Chen did not worship Confucius, but some of his sayings seemed to stick with him.

“You have been doing quite well in Party politics,” she observed.

“Yes,” he said, “so far I’ve been lucky.”

But his luck might be changing at that very moment. It was ironic that in the defense of his career choice, he had momentarily forgotten the trouble hanging over his head. He did not want to discuss it with his mother. She had enough worries of her own.

“Still, I’d like to give you a piece of my mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve got luck, and talent, but you don’t have the inner makings for such a career. You’re my only son, I know. So cut your losses. Try something that really appeals to you.”

“I will think about it, Mother.”

He had thought about it.

If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.

That was the line he had written under the poem “Miracle” to that friend far away in Beijing. It could be about poetry, but also about police work.

* * * *

Chapter 28

t was already nine o’clock when Chief Inspector Chen reached his apartment.

A message light blinked on his machine. Too many messages in one day. Again he sensed a dull pounding at his temples—a new headache coming on. It could be an omen, a signal for him to stop. But he pushed down the button before he dropped his briefcase.

“Comrade Chief Inspector Chen, this is Li Guohua speaking. Please give me a call when you return. I’ll be working late in the office tonight. Right now it is ten to five.” It was Party Secretary Li’s voice, formal and serious even when leaving a message.

He called the bureau; the phone was picked up on the first ring. Li was waiting for him.

“Come to the office, Chief Inspector Chen. We need to have a talk.”

“It’ll take me about thirty minutes. Will you be still there?”

“Yes, I’m waiting for you.”

“Then I’m on my way.”

Actually it took more than thirty minutes before he walked into the Party Secretary’s fifth-floor office. Li was having instant beef-flavored noodles. The plastic bowl stood amidst the papers scattered across the mahogany desk. There was a small heap of cigarette butts in an exquisite tray of Fujian quartz with a dragon design.

“Comrade Party Secretary Li, Chief Inspector Chen Cao reporting, “ Chen said, observing the correct political form.

“Welcome back, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s everything?”

“Everything is fine,” Chen said. “I tried to report to you this morning, but you were not available. Then I had to be out for the most of the day.”

“You have been busy investigating the case, I know,” Li said. “Now tell me about it.”

“We’ve made some real progress.” Chen opened his briefcase. “As Detective Yu may have reported, we targeted Wu Xiaoming as the chief suspect before my trip to Guangzhou. And now we have several other leads and they all fit together.”

“New leads?”

“Well, one is the last phone call Guan received on May tenth. According to the stub book of the public phone station at Qinghe Lane, it came in around nine thirty, about three or four hours before her death. That call was made by none other than Wu Xiaoming. It’s confirmed.” He put a copy of the record on the desk.

“It’s not just this one particular call. For more than half a year, Wu made a considerable number of calls to her—three or four a week, on the average, some quite late at night. And Guan called him. Their relationship was apparently something more than what Wu admitted.”

“That might mean something,” Li said, “but Wu Xiaoming had been Guan’s photographer. So he could have contacted her from time to time—in a professional way.”

“No, it’s much more than that. We’ve also got a couple of witnesses. One of them is a night peddler on the corner of Hubei Road. She said that on several occasions shortly before Guan’s death, she saw Guan returning in a luxurious white car, in the company of a man, late in the night. Wu drives a white Lexus, his father’s car.”

“But it could have been a taxi.”

“I don’t think so. The peddler saw no taxi sign atop the car. She also saw Guan lean into the car and kiss the driver.”

“Really!” Li said, throwing the empty plastic bowl into the trash can. “Still, other people have white cars, too. There’re so many upstarts in Shanghai now.”

“We’ve also found, among other things, that Wu made a trip to the Yellow Mountains in Guan’s company last October. They used assumed names and fabricated documents, registering as a married couple so that they could share a hotel room. We have several witnesses who can testify to this.”

“Wu shared the same hotel room with Guan?”

“Exactly. What’s more, Wu took some nude pictures of Guan there, and then there was a violent quarrel between them.”

“But in your previous report, you said Guan was not involved with anyone at the time of her death.”

“That’s because they kept the affair a secret.”

“That is something.” Li added after a pause, “But an affair does not necessarily mean a murder.”

“Well, things went wrong between them. They had a violent argument in the mountains. We have a witness to that. Guan wanted Wu to divorce his wife; Wu would not. That’s what caused the fight, we believe.”

“So you assume that was why Wu Xiaoming killed her and dumped her body into the canal?”

“That’s right. At the beginning of our investigation, Detective Yu and I established two prerequisites for the case: the murderer’s access to a car, and his familiarity with the canal. Now, as an educated youth during the seventies, Wu Xiaoming had lived for several years in a small village about fifteen minutes’ walk from the canal. Wu must have hoped that her body might lie at the bottom of the canal for years, until, finally, it disappeared without a trace.”

“Supposing your theory is right—hypothetically, that is—that Guan and Wu had an affair, and things went wrong between them,” Li said more slowly, seeming to be weighing every word. “Why should Wu have gone that far? He could simply have refused and stopped seeing her, couldn’t he?”