by [Chief Inspector Chen Cao 05] Red Mandarin Dress [v1. 0] [epub]
But what about those years in between?
History is not like a soy sauce stain, easily wiped away by the pink napkin in the hand of the pretty waitress who was leading him to a table by the tall French window. He asked her a question about how the mansion became a restaurant.
She said with an apologetic smile, “Our general manager paid a large amount to the original residents, more than ten families, and then refurbished the whole house. That’s about all I know.”
He opened the menu, which was almost as thick as a book. Turning to the last two pages marked as “Mansion Specials,” he noticed one called Live Monkey Brains, probably like what he had seen in the vacation village, and another, Live White Rats. He doubted that Mei would have served those dishes in her elegant mandarin dress.
The waitress stood beside his table, observing with an attentive smile.
“Can I have just a cup of coffee?”
“Coffee is served only after dinner. The minimum expense is two hundred Yuan here,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit late for coffee?”
She was right about that. After that scary morning, he really should be wary of coffee.
“A pot of tea, then. And a couple of cold dishes for the minimum expense—let’s see, pork tongue in Shaoxin wine, lotus root stuffed with sticky rice, deboned goose feet in special house sauce, and cold tofu mixed with chopped green onion and sesame oil. Don’t bring up the dishes in a hurry. Just tea for now.”
“Whatever way you like,” she said. “Here is the tea.”
He realized he must be one of those “cheap customers” here, choosing the inexpensive dishes. He thought he detected a touch of snobbishness in her voice.
He poured himself a cup of tea. It wasn’t that strong. He started chewing a tea leaf, thinking of the information he had gathered during the day.
According to Auntie Kong, the old photographer got into trouble because of the picture, so could Mei as well. Her mandarin dress in the picture appeared to be identical to those in the serial murder case. According to Professor Xiang, Comrade Revolutionary Activity, possibly responsible for her death, was none other than Tian, and his daughter Jasmine was the first victim. And according to Comrade Weng, the circumstances of her death were suspicious, with a man possibly involved.
Now he at least had a better grasp of the connection between Mei in the original mandarin dress and the victims in the red mandarin dresses. As he had discussed with Yu, Jasmine, the first victim, could have been the real target, and the rest, possibly picked for a different reason. The murderer could be someone connected with Mei, knowledgeable about her death and how it was related to Tian.
And he had partial answers to some of his other questions. The long wait between Mei’s death and Jasmine’s, for instance. The murderer might have taken delight in Tian’s long years of suffering instead of making one fatal strike.
So meeting with the neighborhood cop could be crucial. He was probably the only one knowledgeable about the exact circumstances of her death and about the relationship between Tian’s revolutionary activity and Mei’s death.
Only with that established could he move forward with the scenario in his mind.
The waitress started serving the cold dishes on his table.
“We also have special Dongzhi dishes,” she said. “Would you like to try some of them?”
“Oh, Dongzhi dishes,” he said. “Not now, thanks.”
He had no appetite, though the color combination of the white tofu and green scallion looked quite enticing. He tried a spoonful without tasting it, then he took out his notebook again.
It was too late to contact Yu at home, so he dialed Yu’s cell phone. No one picked up.
He hadn’t called his mother, either, since the day he had left for the vacation village. She usually went to bed late. So he dialed her number.
“I knew you would call. Your partner Yu has already contacted me,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, but take good care of yourself. In my eyes, you’re still Little Cao.”
“Little Cao” was something he hadn’t heard for a long time. She, too, was sentimental on the eve of Dongzhi Festival.
And he was vaguely aware of something stirring in the recesses of his mind.
“I’ll try to come over as early as possible, Mother.”
“Tomorrow night is Dongzhi. If you can make it, that will be great,” she said at the end of their talk, “but it doesn’t matter if you can t.
He finished the tea, making a gesture for the waitress to add hot water. She came with a tray that also contained the bill.
“Can you pay the bill now, sir? It’s late.”
He tossed out two hundred fifty Yuan. “Keep the change.”
People were not supposed to tip in the socialist China, but the restaurant was owned by a “capitalist.”
He tried to make a plan for the coming day. He had only one day’s time, and it had to be a plan that would work against all possible odds.
When he looked up again, he noticed the waitresses clearing away the other tables in the dining hall. He was the last diner sitting there. Because of the tip, perhaps, she did not come to hurry him up.
At the back of his mind, he seemed to hear the refrain from a poem he had read long ago. Hurry up. Please, it’s time.
He stood up, leaving most of the dishes untouched.
“Good night, sir,” a new hostess said at the gate, slightly shivering. “Good night.”
Again, he hesitated at the prospect of going back home.
He had to be here early the next morning. Hurrying back and forth like that, he wouldn’t be able to get much sleep anyway. Nor was he sure that he could get a taxi at around five o’clock in the morning—for a meeting he couldn’t afford to miss.
Perhaps an all-night café in the neighborhood would be an alternative, so that he could easily walk to the food market around five thirty.
The night was a deep metal blue against the neon lights. He reached for a cigarette, aware of a woman approaching him from the shadow of the restaurant.
“I’m a madam for the Henshan Nightclub,” she said in a Beijing dialect. “Come with me, sir. There are hundreds of girls for you there. Only one hundred Yuan for the room fee. No minimum expense.”
He was confounded, as if dragged into a movie scene of the old Shanghai red quarters. Little did he expect that it could have happened to him.
For once, he didn’t instantly reject the offer.
He hadn’t been unfamiliar with three-accompanying services. In the company of Big Bucks, however, Chen had never gone “all the way,” feeling obliged to keep up the police officer image when with people like Gu, who made a point of paying for everything.
But it was different tonight. He wasn’t going all the way, but some intimate knowledge of the profession might be helpful for the investigation.
And he could spend the rest of the night there, cozy and comfortable in the company of a young girl, instead of wandering like a homeless skunk, running about in the cold night.
“Please, Big Brother,” she went on with a pleading smile. “You are a man of distinction. I wouldn’t pull your leg.”
His distinction probably came from the fact that he emerged from the Old Mansion, one of the most extravagant restaurants in the city. Still, he thought he had just over a thousand Yuan left in his wallet, not including the small change in his pockets. Enough for a night in the club.
“Our girls are so beautiful, and talented too. You don’t have to sing if you don’t want to. Some of them are highly educated, with BA or MA degrees. They talk like understanding flowers.”
“Show me the way, then,” he said in Shanghai dialect. He might learn something from talking to a girl there, the way he wouldn’t have talked to White Cloud.
There were several tough-looking men standing at the entrance of the nightclub, yawning, turning suspicious eyes on Chen, who didn’t look like a regular client.
The woman led him to a room on th
e second floor. Barely had he seated himself on a black leather function sofa when a bevy of girls swarmed in, wearing slips or bikinis, their bare shoulders and thighs flashing against the wall behind them, like a jade screen of female bodies.
“Choose one,” the madam said with a broad grin.
He nodded toward a girl in a black mini slip, who had almond-shaped eyes and cherry lips curving into a sweet smile. Probably twenty-five or twenty-six, slightly older than the rest. She slid down beside him, her head resting against his shoulder naturally, as if they had known each other for years.
After the others moved out, a waiter came in, put a fruit platter on the coffee table, and handed over the menu to him. Too embarrassed to study the menu carefully with the girl nestling against him, he settled on a cup of tea, and she, a cup of fruit juice. Juice wouldn’t be too bad, he thought, having heard stories of how these girls made a huge killing by ordering the most expensive wine.
“I’m beat tonight,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
“That’s fine. Whatever topic you like—about the cloud and rain, coming and becoming each other, about the peach blossom giggling at the spring wind, or about boring holes to steal a sight of each other. You must have seen the world. By the way, my name is Green Jade.”
Cloud and rain again, so much quoted in the classical love stories, and boring holes for a sight of each other was a negative metaphor from the Mencius. She was clever, perhaps like in Liu Guo’s poem, capable of wiping a hero’s tear with a red handkerchief pulled out of her green sleeves.
Except that her slip was sleeveless, backless. She kicked off her high heels, drew her legs under her, and cuddled up closer on the sofa.
“Please tell me something about your work here,” he said.
“If that’s what you’d like, sir,” she said, taking a gulp of her juice. “The job doesn’t bring in easy money as people would like to think. Of course, I earn a tip from a generous client like you, two to three hundred Yuan. On a lucky streak, I may have two customers a night. With so many girls competing, however, it’s possible to go without a client for days. The club doesn’t pay me a single penny. On the contrary, I have to pay the club the ‘table fee.’”
“Why? That doesn’t make sense. You do the work, not the club.”
“According to the club owner, he has to pay the rent, for the management, and for protection too—both to the gangsters and the police.”
“What about other services apart from the karaoke part?”
“Depends what you need, where and when. You have to be specific,” she said. “Let me sing a song for you first.”
Perhaps his manner of questioning bothered her. She had to sing a song or two for her tip, anyway. Her choice was a surprising one—Su Dongpo’s “Shuidiao Getou,” about the mid-autumn festival. She started singing and dancing, her bare feet floating sensually like lotus flowers on the red carpet, flowing to the second stanza of the poem.
Moving around the vermilion mansion, / coming through the carved window, / the moon shines on the sleepless. / No cause for it to be / so spiteful as to choose / to appear full, bright, / when we stay in separation? / As people have sorrows and joys, / meeting or parting, / as the moon waxes and wanes / in clear or cloudy skies, / things may never be perfect. / May we all live long, sharing / the same fair moon, / though thousands of miles apart. . . .
The madam came back like an apparition from the moon. “What a marvelous girl! You know what, she used to study ballet. May we all live long, sharing the fair moon. A generous tip for my introduction, please.”
“You did not tell me that,” he said, producing two ten Yuan bills.
“Every Shanghainese knows that,” she snapped, pocketing the money as she stalked out. “So cheap! You want me to live on the howling western wind?”
His Big Buck connections might have paid more, but he didn’t know.
“Don’t worry about her,” Green Jade said, perching herself on his lap. “She’s no real madam. Just a pimp.”
Perhaps he’d better ask his questions quickly, and then call it a night.
“I’ve heard that there’s a serial murderer stalking around, going after girls in the entertainment business. Are you worried, Green Jade?”
“You bet,” she said, squirming uncomfortably against him. “One of the victims worked in a nightclub like this, I’ve heard. Everybody is on alert. But it’s useless.”
“Why?”
“Why? You are a new customer here. A successful man—not simply a money-stinking upstart, but a man of learning, a successful attorney or something like that. That much I knew at first sight. But that’s about all. Still, if you ask me out, I will follow you without raising any questions. Our business has suffered because of the case. Customers are worried about police raids, like at the Joy Gate. Some of them will wait until the storm blows over—”
There was a light knock on the door.
Before she said anything, the door opened and a boy of five or six came in. “Mom, Uncle Brown Bear wants you to sing the Weeping Sand for him. Madam wants me to tell you that.”
“I’m sorry. He’s my son. There’s no one to take care of him at home tonight,” she said. “Brown Bear is a regular customer. It’s his favorite song. I’ll come back soon.”
“Brown Bear is your regular customer,” Chen said. Whether it was a deliberate arrangement with the madam, he didn’t know. Green Jade must have figured out he was anything but a real Big Buck.
“You are different, I know,” she said, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead before she turned to her son. “Go back to the office. Don’t come out again.”
For a moment, Chen didn’t know what to do, left alone in the room. Looking around, he saw it was not so different from other KTV rooms, except that it was more luxuriously furnished. And he was disconcerted by the light footsteps pattering outside the room. Perhaps the child’s. She shouldn’t have brought her boy to such a place. Fortunately he was “different,” not a regular. Or the little boy could have stumbled upon a traumatizing scene. . . .
Suddenly, he shivered.
Now he had one suspect with a motive—Mei’s son.
On that fatal afternoon long ago, when Mei’s son returned home, what he stumbled upon was his widowed mother having sex with another man. That explained his running away in shock and her running out naked after him.
All the information gathered about him was coming back. He had the motive, he knew the dress, and he was familiar with things about her life.
That would explain a lot of things—the revenge against Tian and Jasmine, the exact duplication of the dress, the location of the first body. . . .
But what kind of a man was he now? Neither Professor Xiang nor Comrade Wong knew much. He hadn’t disappeared, however. He had come back and sold the Old Mansion for understandable reasons.
All of this fit into a psychological profile Chen had discussed with Yu—a loner with a trauma in-his childhood, possibly during the Cultural Revolution, and possibly with an attachment to his mother. . . .
Another waitress walked into the room, this one wearing an apron that bore an image of a bag of popcorn. She placed a small basket of popcorn on the coffee table. Chen took out a ten Yuan bill.
“It’s fifty.”
“Fine.” He tried to behave like a good customer, taking out his wallet. For the moment, he would like to, for a new scenario had just dawned on him in this very room. He put a hundred Yuan bill on the table and motioned to her to leave.
“Thank you, sir. I used to be a model, but it’s a profession of only three or four years.”
It was then that Green Jade returned, staring at the popcorn girl like an intruding alien, who turned to leave in a hurry.
“Sorry,” Green Jade said. “Can I have another cup of juice?”
The drink came, along with another fruit platter. Maybe it was conventional in the house. The waiter didn’t even bother to ask for his approval.
That concerned him. The sm
all fees were adding up, though he didn’t have to worry about extra service, like “the rain and cloud,” Green Jade had suggested. She started peeling an orange for him.
He excused himself and went out into the corridor toward a rest-room in the corner. Closing the restroom door after him, he counted the money left in his wallet. He still had about nine hundred Yuan. That should do for the night. But he didn’t want to go back immediately. He wanted to straighten out his thoughts, and it was difficult for him to do so with Green Jade and other waitresses coming and going all the time.
