by Xiaolong Qiu
Supposing the motive for the hotel murder was to silence Min, then what about the first two? The Party authorities might not have been pleased with Min’s celebrity status as symbolic of the Republican values, but it would not have been difficult to have her finished off in a far less dramatic way. No need for all the unsavory publicity.
Besides, where did Old Hunter’s client come in? To say the least, Sima was another one with government information, having learned so fast about the murder in the Moller Villa Hotel.
For that matter, where did Huang come in? Huang could have agreed to reveal some things about Min and her private parties, but the ex-inspector did not think such a possibility would have led to the killing.
With one question leading to another, Chen soon felt overwhelmed. Things were developing so fast. It was less than a week since he had first heard of the Min case.
That morning he had planned to read Poets and Murder through the day before getting the phone call from Old Hunter. Again, he was reminded of the twists and turns encountered by Judge Dee in Van Gulik’s novel.
And what he had learned from Judge Liu confirmed one of his earlier assumptions: with powerful people high above involved in the Min case, it was more complicated than he had imagined. In other words, it was just like in the Judge Dee story.
Was it possible that in those cases revolving around Min, crimes had been committed for different reasons? Related yet unrelated, like in the Judge Dee story – in a way still beyond his knowledge. In the Buddhist saying, things as small as a sipping or a pecking are pre-destined and pre-destining, but it is difficult for ordinary people to see.
For that matter, could his picking up Gulik’s novel have also turned out to be such an instance? It was possible to paraphrase the saying as ‘things connected and connecting under the sun’.
It was coincidental, or providential, that an email came in at that moment, from Mr Gu, the head of the New World. It was a short one with an attachment.
‘The video of the shopping mall’s garage for that Friday night. Enjoy.’
Mr Gu had kept his word, as always, delivering without even asking why Chen needed the video.
In the socialism with China’s characteristics, people could hardly do anything without connections, though Chen did not want to take Mr Gu just as one of those connections.
Before he downloaded the attached file, Chen took out the video produced at Min’s lane, which he had already viewed several times, ready to press ‘play’ one more time, to make sure that some of its details were etched in his memory before viewing the one recorded at the garage. Then he thought better of it. He put the memory stick from Jin into a laptop, and downloaded the attachment in Mr Gu’s email at the desktop computer. When ready to compare the two, he started by watching the scenes from the shopping mall garage, which was equipped with surveillance cameras at various angles, both at the entrance and the exit, with the time recorded in the upper right corner.
The video showed a man in a light-colored jacket striding toward the garage around ten past eleven, but as he drew nearer to the garage entrance, he slowed to a stop before he turned back and walked away in another direction. He was soon out of the camera’s view.
It was not until one fifty-five that the video showed the man in the light-colored jacket coming toward the garage again. This time he walked straight into the garage. The video recorded at the exit of the garage then showed a black BMW pulling out five minutes later.
The face of the driver appeared rather blurred, but at that time of the night there could be little doubt that it was none other than the man who had entered wearing the light-colored jacket.
Then Chen retrieved the images in the video as well as the pictures Jin had obtained for him. Comparing them closely, he felt he could be pretty sure about the identity of the man in question.
Still, he stopped the video and wrote down the license number of the black BMW on a piece of paper. There was one thing he needed to do early next morning.
DAY FIVE
Early in the morning, Chen was meeting with Old Hunter at the hot water house on Xinchang Road, which had been repeatedly recommended by the old man.
It was just six thirty. They were the only customers there. The owner had opened the door for them with reluctance.
‘You can have as much hot water as you like, you know, and you will have your own special tea leaves, I know,’ the owner said with sleepy grouchiness, pointing at the big brick stove. ‘The earthen stove cake maker won’t come here until seven thirty if you want to wait, but I want to sleep for a couple of hours more.’
Without further ado, the owner withdrew with a limp into the backroom and closed the door after him.
Old Hunter filled a hot water bottle, sat with Chen on the unpainted wooden bench at the unpainted wooden table in the middle of the room, and poured out two cups.
Out across the street, Chen saw another side entrance of People’s Park, where, after venturing into the matching corner, the two of them had had their first discussion about the Min case less than a week earlier.
‘Under your influence, I too am being a Suzhou opera fan this morning,’ Chen said, unfolding a paper fan with a dramatic flourish. ‘As you have said so many times, a story has to be told from the beginning. So please be patient for the story that started in the park – we are having our roles reversed today.’
‘Finally, you have come to appreciate the art of Suzhou opera, I’m so happy to hear that. Like a loyal Suzhou opera audience, I’m all ears.’
‘As we have discussed from the beginning, there’re a lot of things so puzzling about the case, related or interrelated. When I try to unravel them as parts of the whole, they appear more inexplicable in confusion. So, how about tackling just one part first? It was hardly conceivable, we both thought, for Min to kill Qing for something like her quitting for another job, and inconceivable too for someone to break into Min’s shikumen house with Qing as the target that night. No imaginable motive whatsoever for either scenario. On the other hand, if Min instead of Qing was the real target, how could the perpetrator have known about Min sleeping in a drunken stupor that night? Unless he happened to be one of the four guests that night.’
‘Hold on, Chief. In that scenario of yours, how could one of the four guests have gotten back into the shikumen house without a key? There are no signs of forced entry. None of the four had a key, either. Of course, no one would have admitted so with a murder case under investigation. But if it’s one on such intimate terms with Min as to have a key for him to come over any time, why would he have chosen that night?’
Old Hunter, who claimed himself as a veteran Suzhou opera fan, had a hard time stopping himself from raising his questions.
‘Come on, you know better than to push. It’s not the way to enjoy the opera,’ Chen said, taking a deliberate slow sip, imitating Old Hunter’s dramatic way of narrating. ‘At that stage, it’s just a scenario with a lot of guesswork. But remember the Starbucks in the New World? The café is not far from Min’s lane on Madang Road. After our meeting in the café, I took a walk in the area, where I noticed one thing. It’s a narrow side street, with a number of the old buildings not yet demolished, so a visitor to the neighborhood would have a hard time finding a parking spot for his car. Some of them would have to go to the public garages near Huaihai Road and the New World.’
‘They had their own chauffeurs and cars to pick them up after the dinner party with Min, I remember reading about it in their statements.’
‘But not necessarily that night, not necessarily every one of them. As it happens, my new office secretary, a very capable young girl named Jin, did a lot of research for the office. The Min case being such a sensational one for the moment, she went to Min’s neighborhood committee for something like a background checkup. With the area being close to the New World, several surveillance cameras were installed along the street, and at both entrances of the lane too.’
‘What did she find?’
>
‘Something very intriguing. But like in Suzhou opera, let me hold on to it for a little while more. Suffice it to say that it led to another clue.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Here is a car license number. Can you check the identity of the car owner?’
‘That should not be too difficult. I still have some old connections.’
‘Once you’ve found it, let me know. The name of the car owner. The model of the car. We can then act in light of the information. That’s about all I can tell you for the moment, but a breakthrough is close, I promise you.’
‘You have surely learned the art of Suzhou opera, Chief Inspector Chen.’
After parting with Old Hunter outside the hot water house, Chen walked on along West Nanjing Road, surrounded by the oppressive mass of light- and deep-gray concrete high rises where he heard a sparrow twittering. A tiny sound that was rare in the increasingly mega-metropolitan city.
And the morning was coming to consciousness, with the smells of stale beer from a cheap-looking bar, a workman spray-washing the windows from outside. The city presented an amazing mixture of the old and new. An elderly drunkard, stripped to his waist, was loitering there and beating at his own chest, his ribs visible like a washboard.
‘The Cultural Revolution is coming again!’
It was then that a WeChat message from Jin appeared on his phone screen: ‘With Z, to H’s with the key, for some—’
After the unfinished some, an emoji of a young girl crying in horror.
It was not at all like Jin’s usual messages.
Too short. Too fragmented. Too hasty. Not even finished.
And the emoji also appeared too exaggerated for a young, cool girl like Jin.
A black Maserati came out of nowhere, honked rudely, shot by like crazy, and left behind a trail of fumes and dust.
He must have been moving too close to the traffic while brooding hard over the message.
But what could that message of hers possibly mean?
She was with someone, going to somebody else’s place, but not in a position to compose the text message properly.
Not enough time for such a short message?
For fear of being detected by somebody in her company – detected by somebody named Z?
But who the devil was Z?
Presumably, somebody Chen also knew, or she would not have used just the capital letter, and for that matter, was H somebody connected with Z as well?
And the two letters that should have made sense in the context of what had happened during the last several days.
What about the dangling phrase ‘with the key’?
H being not at home?
Z having the key to his place?
But Chen found his mind rapidly turning into a pail of starch paste stuck and hardened with so many question marks.
He looked up to see a white-haired man flying a dragon-shaped kite in a small garden-like public area across the street, reeling out the thread with a tremulous hand, grinning, jumping like an excited child. It seemed as if the kite had been the one and only thing that really mattered in the entire world – like the moment another old man bit into a soft, warm rice ball on a long-ago cold morning.
There was an angry glare of kite tearing through the late morning light, which struck him like a flash of lightning.
Z stood for Zheng, the one who had attended Min’s private kitchen dinner party that night on behalf of Huang; and H, for Huang, the antique businessman who had been killed just a couple of days earlier in Yangpu District.
Zheng wasn’t related to Huang as an actual nephew, but was a capable assistant in the antique business for the old man. As such, he was aware of Huang’s early morning routine, so he could have ambushed Huang on that street corner.
The ex-inspector came to an abrupt stop in front of a street peddler hawking stinky tofu in a large wok on a portable gas tank, busy frying the pieces into a golden color, and ladling them into a white plastic container.
Chen had told Jin about his talk with Huang, though he failed to recall what details he might have mentioned to her. In her ‘research’ for the office, she could have come across Zheng’s name in one way or another.
And she could have somehow connected Zheng and Huang in her own way, and moved ahead without his knowledge.
If so, it further confirmed his suspicion about what he had gathered from the videos at the lane and at the shopping mall garage.
He shuddered at the thought of what might have happened to Jin.
In his phone he had stored a picture of Huang’s business card, which carried Huang’s home address. He retrieved the picture and sent it to Detective Xiong with a message:
‘Go to the address on the card. Immediately. A matter of life and death! I’m going there too.’
He got to Huang’s house in the quickest possible time. It looked more like a European-style villa, in front of which he saw a black BMW parked along the curb. He recognized the car as the one that had driven out of the garage of the Pacific Ocean Shopping Mall that Friday night, after the dinner at Min’s shikumen house.
So Zheng and Jin must have gone inside.
The front door was locked.
Chen moved around to the back of the house in haste. In the back yard, rank with tall weeds, he saw a cedar deck adjoining a white-painted French window door.
He got up onto the deck and tugged at the handle of the door, which was supposed to open into a sort of breakfast area. With the door locked from the inside, he could only peep in through the wooden blinds. He saw nothing. But then he heard a female voice inside the house, screaming from the direction of the living room.
He froze. Time stopped. But not a single minute could he afford to lose. He turned around, picked up a large flowerpot from the deck, and crashed it into the French window. It sounded like the whole world splintering into thousands of pieces, shouting, glaring in the light, as he threw himself in through the opening.
The scene in the living room turned out to be as surreal as a tableau in a Judge Dee novel drawn by Gulik himself, but Chen took in every one of its real details.
Jin lying on her back on the floor, the man recognized as Zheng bent over her, his right knee pressing against her left thigh, and his hand crushing her chin and mouth. Her blouse badly torn, revealing a large part of her bare bosom, and her skirt also pulled partially down. She was raising her right leg and pressing hard against his chest with the sole of her bare foot.
The scene galvanized Chen with horror, regret and insurmountable rage.
He ran several steps and hurled himself at the man on top of Jin.
Jerking at the noise of the shattering window, Zheng released his grip, jumped up and bumped his head hard against a large willow-patterned vase behind him. It wobbled, and in spite of his efforts to balance himself, he lurched with Jin struggling underneath him and pulling his leg left in desperation, so he fell under the falling vase. It crashed down on Zheng’s head with full force and knocked him out. Chen sprang over and finished the job by hitting him on the neck with the back side of his right hand, which had been badly cut by the sharp broken pieces of the vase, leaving a bloody trail on Zheng’s neck and face.
All the details unfolded before his eyes in a slow-motion movie scene of absurdity, unbelievably, until it stopped with a sudden blackout.
Jin was the one that remained unhurt, except for her badly torn shirt and a couple of bruises visible above her collarbone. Neither of them had anything to do with the overturned vase, possibly a Ming dynasty antique, treasured by the late Huang, a silver-haired, Daoist-costumed old man who looked fondly out of a mahogany-framed portrait on the wall.
It was then that the siren of a police car came piercing through the gray smog.
Detective Xiong came bursting into the living room of Huang’s mansion, looking flabbergasted at the scene.
Chen was the only one standing up, still reeling, with his hand bleeding, pointing at the broken pieces of a tall
Ming dynasty vase by way of explanation, before he took off his jacket and put it around Jin’s shoulders. She was making an effort to sit up, pushing her elbow against the floor. Having lost her shoes in the struggle, she tried to reach out to them underneath the coffee table.
Zheng remained lying unconscious on the floor. A large chunk of the vase could be seen glittering near his temple, which registered a thin streak of blood.
‘The vase knocked him out. It fell cracking down on his head. Zheng is the killer of Huang and Qing, and he just attempted to kill Jin,’ Chen said, still gasping. ‘I’ve called for an ambulance. Probably nothing but a concussion. I’ve checked his breathing. Quite even. The Ming dynasty vase must have been worth a huge fortune. It was a piece so invaluable to Huang. A providential revenge for the old man.’
Detective Xiong was still at a loss for words, staring hard at Chen, and then at Jin. It took more than a minute for the confounded detective to recollect himself.
‘But how did you and Jin come to be here, both of you, together with Zheng, Director Chen?’
Jin was tugging at the jacket Chen had put on her.
‘You are not hurt, Jin?’ Chen said miserably, turning to her without answering Xiong’s question.
‘I’m fine. You came in the nick of time, Director Chen. But for you, I would have been the one lying unconscious on the floor now.’
‘You should have told me earlier, Jin. I could never have forgiven myself—’
‘What are you two talking about?’ Xiong snapped. ‘So you have been investigating the Min case in secret all along, Chief Inspector Chen!’
‘No, it’s just an unbelievable chain of coincidences, Detective Xiong, but I should have seen it coming earlier, much earlier, it’s my fault.’
‘Please be so kind as to enlighten me, Sherlock Holmes of China.’
