Death of a Red Heroine [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 01]

by Qiu Xiaolong

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Yu said. “Not as a cop.”

  “As a professional photographer,” Wu said, “I have traveled a lot. I know the ropes, believe me.”

  “There’s something else, Mr. Professional Photographer for the Red Star.” Yu could barely control the mounting sarcasm in his voice. “You not only registered under the assumed names, but also as a couple.”

  “Oh, that. I see why you’re here today. Let me explain, Comrade Detective Yu,” Wu said, taking a cigarette out of a pack of Rents on the desk, and lighting one for himself. “When you travel with a group of people, you have to share rooms. Now, some tourists are so talkative, they would never give you a break all night. What is worse, some snore thunderously. So instead of sharing the room with a stranger, Guan and I decided it might be a good idea to share a room between ourselves.”

  “So the two of you stayed in the same hotel room during the trip?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “So you knew her inside out,” Chen cut in, “knowing that she would keep her mouth shut when you were in no mood to listen, and that she slept sweetly, never snoring or tossing about in bed. Vice versa, of course.”

  “No, Comrade Chief Inspector,” Wu said, tapping his cigarette lightly over the ashtray. “It’s not what you might think.”

  “What do we think?” Yu detected the first slight sign of discomfort in Wu’s voice. “Tell me, Comrade Wu Xiaoming.”

  “Well, it was all Guan’s idea,” Wu said. “To be honest, there’s a more important reason why she wanted us to register as a couple. It was to save money. The travel agency gave a huge discount to couples. A promotional gimmick. Buy one and get the second at half price.”

  “But the fact was that you shared the room,” Yu said, “as man and woman.”

  “Yes, as man and woman, but not as what you are implying.”

  “You stayed with a young, pretty woman in the same hotel room for a whole week,” Yu said, “without having sex with her. Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “It surely reminds me of Liu Xiawei,” Chen cut in. “Oh, what a perfect gentleman!”

  “Who is Mr. Liu Xiawei?” Yu said.

  “A legendary figure during the Spring and Autumn War Period, about two thousand years ago. Liu once held a naked woman in his arms for a night, it is said, without having sex with her. Confucius had a very high opinion of Liu, for it’s against Confucian rules to have sex with any woman except one’s wife.”

  “You don’t have to tell me these stories,” Wu said. “Believe it or not, what I’m telling you is the truth. Nothing but the truth.”

  “How could the travel agency have permitted you to share a room?” Yu said. “They are very strict about that. You must show your marriage license, I mean. Or they will lose their own business license.”

  “Guan insisted on it, so I managed to get some identification materials for us.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I took a piece of paper with the company’s letterhead on it. I typed a short statement to the effect that we were married. That’s all. We did not have to show a marriage license. Those travel agencies are after profits, so such a statement is enough for them.”

  “It is a crime to fabricate a legal document.”

  “Come on, Comrade Detective Yu. Just a few words on an office letterhead, and you call it a legal document? A lot of people do it every day.”

  “It’s nonetheless illegal,” Chen said.

  “You can talk to my boss if you want. I did play a little trick, using a piece of paper with the official letterhead. It’s wrong, I admit. But you cannot arrest me for that, can you?”

  “Guan was a national model worker, a Party member with high political consciousness, and an attendant at our Party’s Tenth National Congress,” Yu said. “And you want us to believe she did it just to save a couple of hundred Yuan?”

  “And at the cost of sharing herself, an unmarried woman,” Chen added, “with a married man for a whole week.”

  “I’ve been trying my best to cooperate with you, comrades,” Wu said, “but if all you want is to bluff, show me your warrant. You can take me to the bureau.”

  “It’s an important case, Comrade Wu Xiaoming,” Chen said, “We have to investigate everyone related to Guan.”

  “But that’s all I can tell you. I took a trip to the mountains in her company. It did not mean anything. Not in the nineties.”

  “It’s definitely more than that,” Yu said. “Now, what is your explanation for your phone call to her on the night she was murdered?”

  “The night she was murdered?”

  “Yes, May tenth.”

  “May tenth, uh, let me think. Sorry, I cannot remember anything about the phone call. Every day I make a lot of calls, sometimes more than twenty or thirty. I cannot remember a particular call on a particular day.”

  “We’ve checked with the Shanghai Telecommunications Bureau. The record shows that the last call Guan got was from your number. At nine thirty p.m. on May tenth.”

  “Well, it’s possible, I think. We did talk about taking another set of pictures. So I might have called her.”

  “What about the message you left for her?”

  “What message?”

  “‘We’ll meet as scheduled.’“

  “I don’t remember,” Wu said, “but it could refer to the photo session we had discussed.”

  “A photo session after nine o’clock in the evening?”

  “I see what you are driving at,” Wu said, flicking cigarette ash at the desk.

  “We are not driving at anything,” Chen said. “We’re just waiting for your explanation.”

  “I forget the exact time we scheduled, but it could be the following day, or the day after that.”

  “You seem to have an explanation for everything,” Yu said. “A ready explanation.”

  “Isn’t that what you want?

  “Now where were you on the night of May tenth?”

  “May tenth, let me think. Ah, I remember. Yes, I was at Guo Qiang’s place.”

  “Who is Guo Qiang?”

  “A friend of mine. He works at the People’s Bank in Pudong New District. His father used to be the deputy director there.”

  “Another HCC.”

  “I don’t like people to use that term,” Wu said, “but I do not want to argue with you. For the record, I just want to say that I stayed at his place for the night.”

  “Why?”

  “Something was wrong with my darkroom. I had to develop some films that night. I had a deadline to meet. So I went there to use his study instead.”

  “Haven’t you got enough rooms here?”

  “Guo likes photography, too. He dabbles in it. So he has some equipment. It would be too much of a hassle to move things around here.”

  “A convenient answer. So you were with your buddy for the whole night. A solid alibi.”

  “That’s where I was on May tenth. Period. And I hope it satisfies you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Yu said. “We will be satisfied when we bring the murderer to justice.”

  “Why should I have killed her, comrades?”

  “That’s what we’ll find out,” Chen said.

  “Everybody’s equal before the law, HCC or not,” Yu said. “Give us Guo’s address. We need to check with him.”

  “All right, here it is. Guo’s address and phone number,” Wu said, scribbling a few words on a scrap of paper. “You’re wasting my time and yours.”

  “Well,” Yu said, standing up, “we’ll see each other soon.”

  “Next time, please give me a call beforehand,” Wu said, rising up from his father’s leather swivel chair. “You won’t have any problem finding the way out, I believe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Wu mansion is huge. Some people have lost their way here.”

  “Thank you for your important information,” Yu said, looking at Wu squarely. “We’r
e cops.”

  They had no problem finding the way out.

  Outside the gate, Yu turned back for another look at the mansion still partially visible behind the tall walls, and set off without saying anything. Chen walked beside him, trying not to break the silence. There appeared to be an unspoken understanding between them: The case was too complicated to talk about on the street. They continued to plod in silence for several more minutes.

  They were supposed to take Bus Number 26 back to the bureau, but Chief Inspector Chen was not familiar with this area either. At Chen’s suggestion, they attempted to take a shortcut to Huaihai Road, but found themselves turning into one side street after another, and then to the beginning of Quqi Road. Huaihai Road was not visible. Quqi Road could not be far from Henshan Road, but it appeared so different. Most of the houses there were the cheap-material apartment buildings from the early fifties, now discolored, dirty, and dwarfed. It was there, however, Detective Yu was finally able to shake off his feeling of oppression.

  The weather was splendid. The blue sky above seemed to transform the sordid look of the back street through which they were passing in silence. A middle-aged woman was preparing a bucket of rice field eels by a moss-covered public sink. Chen slowed his step, and Yu stopped to take a look, too. Having slapped an eel hard like a whip against the concrete ground, the woman was fixing its head on a thick nail sticking out of a bench, pulling it tight, cutting through its belly, deboning it, pulling out its insides, chopping off its head, and slicing its body delicately. She might be an eel woman for some nearby market, making a little money. Her hands and arms were covered with eel blood, and her bare feet too. The chopped-off heads of the eels lay scattered at her bare feet, like scarlet-painted toes.

  “No question about it.” Yu came to an abrupt halt. “That bastard’s the murderer.’

  “You handled him quite well,” Chen said, “Comrade Young Hunter.”

  “Thank you, chief,” Yu said, pleased with the compliment, and even more so with the invention of this nickname by his boss.

  At the end of the side street, they caught sight of a dingy snack bar.

  “Can you smell curry?” Chen sniffed the air appreciatively. “Oh, I’m hungry.”

  Yu nodded his agreement.

  So they made their way into the bar. Pushing aside the bamboo bead curtain over the entrance, they found the interior surprisingly clean. There were no more than three plastic-topped tables covered with white tablecloths. Each table exhibited a bamboo beaker of chopsticks, a stainless steel container of toothpicks, and a soy sauce dispenser. A hand-written streamer on the wall limited the menu to cold noodles, cold dumplings, and a couple of cold dishes, but the curry beef soup was steaming hot in a big pot. It was two fifteen, late for lunch customers, so they had the place to themselves. A young woman emerged from the back-room kitchen at their footsteps, wiping her flour-covered hands on a jasmine-embroidered white apron, leaving a smudge on her smiling cheek. She was probably the proprietress, but also the waitress and chef in one. Leading them to a table, she recommended the special dishes of the day. She brought them a complimentary quart of iced beer.

  After unwrapping the paper covers from their bamboo chopsticks, and placing a generous helping of curry sauce in their soup, the proprietress withdrew to the kitchen.

  “A surprising place for this area,” Chen said, chewing at the aniseed-flavored peas, as he filled Yu’s beer glass.

  Yu took a deep draught and nodded in agreement. The beer was cold enough. The smoked fish head was also tasty. The squid had a special texture.

  Shanghai was indeed a city full of wonderful surprises, whether in the prosperous thoroughfares or on small side streets. It was a city in which people from all walks of life could find something enjoyable, even at such a shabby-looking, inexpensive place.

  “What do you think?”

  “Wu killed her,” Yu repeated. “I’m positive.”

  “Perhaps, but why?”

  “It’s so obvious, the way he answered our questions.”

  “You mean the way he lied to our faces?”

  “No question about it. So many holes in his story. But it’s not just that. Wu had a prompt answer for everything, way too prompt—didn’t your notice? It echoed of research and rehearsal, just a simple clandestine affair would not have been worth all that effort.”

  “You’re right.” Chen said, sipping at his beer. “But what could Wu’s motive be?”

  “Somebody else had entered the picture? Another man? And Wu got insanely jealous.”

  “That’s possible, but according to the phone records, almost all the calls Guan got in the last few months came from Wu,” Chen said. “Besides, Wu is an ambitious HCC, with a most promising career, and a number of pretty women around him— not only at work, I would say. So why should Wu have played the jealous Othello?”

  “Othello or not, I don’t know, but possibly it’s the other way around. Maybe Wu had another woman or women—all those models, naked, from his work to his bed—and Guan could not take it, and made an ugly scene about it.”

  “Even so, I still cannot see why Wu had to kill her. He could have broken off with her. After all, Guan was not his wife, not in a position to force him into doing anything.”

  “Yes, that’s something,” Yu said. “If Guan had been found to be pregnant, we might suppose she was threatening him. I’ve had a case like that. The pregnant woman wanted the man to divorce his wife for her. The man couldn’t, so he got rid of her. But Guan’s autopsy report said she was not pregnant.”

  “Yes, I’ve also checked that with Dr. Xia.”

  “So what will be our next step?”

  “To confirm Wu’s alibi.”

  “Okay, I’ll take care of Guo Qiang. But Wu will have arranged things with him, I bet.”

  “Yes, I doubt if Guo will tell us anything.”

  “What else can we do?”

  “Interview some other people.”

  “Where are they?”

  Chen produced a copy of the Flower City from his briefcase, and turned to a full page picture of a nude female reclining on her side. She showed only her back to the camera, but all her lines and curves were soft, suggestive, her round buttocks moonlike. A black mole on her nape accentuated the whiteness of her body melting into the background.

  “Wow, what a body,” Yu said. “Did Wu take the picture?”

  “Yes, it was published under his pseudonym.”

  “That S.O.B. surely has had his share of peach blossom luck!”

  “Peach blossom luck?” Chen went on without waiting for an answer. “Oh, I see what you mean. Luck with women. Yes, you can say that again, but this picture is a sort of artwork.”

  “Now what’s that to us?”

  “I happen to know who the model is.”

  “How?” Yu then added, “Through the magazine?”

  “She’s a celebrity, too. It is not surprising that Wu, a professional photographer, uses nude models, but why she chose to pose for him, I cannot figure out.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Jiang Weihe, a rising young artist.”

  “Never heard of her,” Yu said, putting down the cup. “Do you know her well?”

  “No, not really. I’ve just met her a couple of times at the Writers and Artists Association.”

  “So you’re going to interview her?”

  “Well, perhaps you’re a more appropriate officer for the job. At our previous meetings, we discussed nothing but literature and art. It would be out of place for me to knock on her door as a cop. And I would not be able to exercise the necessary authority, psychologically, I mean, in cross-examination. So I suggest you go to see her.”

  “Fine, I’ll go there, but what do you think she will tell us?”

  “It’s a long shot. Maybe there is nothing. Jiang’s an artist herself, so it’s no big deal for her to pose without a shred on. It’s just her back, and she thought no one would recognize her. But if people know that i
t is her naked body, it will not be too pleasant for her.”

  “Got you,” Yu said. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll make a trip to Guangzhou.”

  “To look for Xie Rong, the tour guide?”

  “Yes, one thing in Wei Hong’s statement intrigues me. Guan called Xie a whore. It’s really something unusual for Guan, a national model worker, to have used such language. Xie, too, might be involved in some way, or at least she knows something about the relationship between Wu and Guan.”