A spell of silence fell over the room when she finished going over all the material in the folder.
“I really appreciate your coming over tonight,” she finally said, her eyes lambent in the flickering fluorescent light.
He glanced at his watch. It was past nine. She didn’t say anything about it’s being late, so he could choose to stay, perhaps, for a bit longer.
It wasn’t comfortable to sit in the same unchanging position for long, particularly in the cramped space between the desk and the bed. He was reminded of a so-called lovers’ room in a restaurant on the Bund in Shanghai. The tiny size lent itself to intimacy. He had been there with another woman-though not his lover-who was murdered shortly afterward. He shivered at the sudden, inexplicable premonition. He shifted on the chair, which warbled with a screeching sound.
She sat further back, her back touching the bare wall, her arms no longer clasping her knees, and her legs parted. She patted the bed, an invitation for him to sit alongside.
As his glance fell to the bed, he noticed a sauce stain from the noodles she had made earlier in the evening on the fleshy spot below her big toe. In the soft light, her toe looked rounded and snowy like a creamy scallop in a chef’s special. The absurd association only made her look appealingly vulnerable. As a Jin dynasty poet said, she’s so beautiful that she could be devoured. He thought he could read a message rippling in her eyes, reflecting back what he fantasized.
Instead he rose to leave.
They looked into each other’s eyes.
“It’s late, Shanshan. I think I have to leave. The center locks the entrance around twelve.”
It would be out of the question at this stage, Chief Inspector Chen knew, for him to do anything unacceptable for a cop, particularly for an incognito cop on vacation.
If he was going to help, he had to stick to his role as a policeman. There could be no conflict of interest, even if he kept his identity a secret from her.
ELEVEN
Friday morning, Sergeant Huang parked his car in the shade near the center’s entrance, rolled down the window, and waited. According to the plan Chen had discussed with him, the first interviewee of the day would be Mi, Liu’s secretary at the chemical company.
It wasn’t exactly a surprising move to Huang, who’d already talked to Mi before Chen involved himself in the case. Huang lit a cigarette, trying to guess which approach the chief inspector would use.
At the appointed time, Chen showed up at the gate, where an elderly security guard hastened to salute him obsequiously. Huang stepped out of his Shanghai Dazhong, which, as Chen specified, didn’t look anything like a police car.
“Thank you, Huang,” Chen said, sliding in to the front passenger seat. “Before we go to see Mi, I want to take a look at Liu’s home office.”
Huang jumped at the suggestion. His team had hardly finished working at the crime scene, with several reports still waiting to be processed by the lab, when Internal Security intervened and pushed them straight to a conclusion that left little for them to do. Being the youngest member of the team, Huang knew better than to protest when the other team members, older and far more experienced, chose to keep their mouths shut.
But it wouldn’t be difficult for him to show Chen Liu’s apartment, which wasn’t being watched at the moment. They had talked about the photos of the crime scene, but Chen’s going over the scene in person could make a difference. In Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective never failed to find something important yet previously unnoticed by others who examined the crime scene.
“No problem,” Huang said. “We’ve gone over it closely, but you should definitely take a look.”
Less than ten minutes later, they arrived at the apartment complex, which was located near the back of the chemical company plant. Sure enough, there wasn’t any sign of police stationed near the complex, and no residents were out walking in the area.
“It’s a relatively new complex and it’s not fully occupied yet,” Huang remarked. He showed his badge to the security guard standing as stiff as a bamboo pole under the white arch of the entrance.
“There has been a lot of new residential construction in the last few years, but with the soaring housing prices, few can afford one of the new apartments.”
“But Liu had his for free, and that was in addition to his large house,” Chen noted.
The apartment building in question was six stories tall with a pink-painted exterior that looked new and impressive in the daylight. They went up to the third floor without seeing anyone else.
Liu’s was a three-bedroom apartment. Huang opened the door with a master key. They stepped into a hallway with hardwood floors that led into a living room and an open dining room, which in turn was connected to a kitchenette. On the other end of the living room were the three bedrooms, one of which was a guest room, and another the office where Liu had been murdered.
Chen looked at each of the rooms before he came back to the office. The office was practically furnished. On the L-shaped oak desk facing the door sat a computer with a large monitor, a printer, and a combination telephone and fax machine. A couple of chairs stood against one wall near the corner and beside a custom-made bookshelf, which had books and magazines on it. A flat-screen TV hung on the opposite wall.
“The people who live in these new apartment buildings don’t talk to one another much. That was particularly true in Liu’s case. He was only here once or twice a week, and usually in the evening. On that particular night, no one in the building saw him or heard anything from his apartment. But when their doors are shut, people can hardly hear anything from the outside. According to a neighbor on the fourth floor, a young woman was walking down the stairs around nine, but the staircase was dimly lit, so he didn’t get a clear look. She could have been visiting anyone in the building.”
“Yes, she could have come from the fifth or sixth floor,” Chen said while picking up a framed picture from the bookshelf. It was a photo of Liu and a young man standing in front of that same bookshelf in the office. Liu was a robust man of medium height with wide-set, penetrating eyes, deep-lined brows, and a powerful jaw, and the young man was a lanky one with a pensive look on his fine-featured face.
“The young man is his son, Wenliang,” Huang said. “He interned here at the company last summer.”
Placing the picture back on the bookshelf, Chen started examining the books themselves. It was a curious mixture, including a number of fashion magazines.
“He read fashion magazines?”
“Well, Mi came here from time to time,” Huang said.
Chen nodded in acknowledgment, then said, “Tell me again what you see as unusual about the crime scene.”
“There is no sign of forced entry, and no sign of struggle, either. The murderer was likely somebody Liu knew well, and it was probably a surprise attack. The security guard didn’t register any visitors for Liu that night. So it was possibly someone who lived in the complex, or even in the same building.”
“But as you said, he didn’t mix with his neighbors,” Chen said. “Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for the murderer to be one of them. But what would be the motive?”
“That suggests another possible scenario. Someone familiar with the complex could have come in without stopping at the entrance. The security guard might make things difficult for a diffident visitor, but wouldn’t try to stop a Big Buck who was striding in with an air of confidence.”
“Or driving in a luxurious car,” Chen said, as if he had done the same himself before. “Do you have the pictures of the crime scene with you?”
“Yes,” Huang said, producing a folder of pictures. “You’ve already seen all of them.”
Chen placed a few on the desk, examined them, and then looked around the room a couple of times.