Don't Cry Tai Lake (6 page)

To Chen's pleasant surprise, Huang turned out to be one of the officers working on that very case. He had been at the chemical company discussing the case with his colleagues when he got Chen's call.

“You've heard about it? Of course you have,” Huang said, his face flushed with anticipation. “You're not really on vacation here, are you?”

Chen kept sipping at his tea without immediately contradicting him. To the local police, his vacation couldn't help but be suspicious, even before he expressed interest in the murder. He was known for covert investigations in several highly sensitive cases.

“Well, I thought it would be great to come here, and relax for a week or so, with nothing to do. But in just one day, I've already found it kind of boring. I'm not complaining, but maybe I have a cop's lot cut out for me, as both Detective Yu and his wife Peiqin have said before. Then I happened to hear about the case,” Chen said. “I'm not going to try to investigate: it's not my territory, and I know better. I simply want to kill some time.”

“Sherlock Holmes must have something to do. I totally understand, Chief. Can I just call you Chief, Chief Inspector Chen?”

Whether Huang believed him or not, the young local cop was eager to model himself on those fictional detectives he admired. So he provided a quite detailed introduction to the case, focusing on what he considered strange and suspicious.

The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company's being the largest in Wuxi and Liu's being a representative of the People's Congress of Zhejiang Province combined to make the murder the top priority for the Wuxi Police Bureau. A special team had been formed for the investigation; Huang was the youngest member of the team.

They had started by building a file on Liu Deming. Liu had worked at the company for over twenty years. When he took over the top position of the state-run company several years ago, it was on the brink of bankruptcy. He managed to lead the company out of the financial woods, then make it profitable, and then to successfully expand. Capable and ambitious, Liu had established himself as an important figure in the city—a “red banner” in the economic development of the region.

In recent years, however, Liu had been involved in some controversies. For one thing, the company was in the process of going public, turning into something between state-owned and privately-owned—a new experiment in China's economic reform. It was the first company attempting to do this in Wuxi, and Liu himself stood to become the largest shareholder, with millions of shares in his own name. He was going to be a capitalist Big Buck, so to speak, though still a Party member and general manager of the company.

No less controversial was the pollution that was the result of his increasing production and maximizing profit by dumping tons and tons of untreated wastewater into the lake. It was an open secret, and his company wasn't the only one to dump industrial waste wherever it liked. With the deteriorating water quality of the lake, however, local people had begun to complain. The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company was the largest plant by the lake, so it was an easy target. The city authorities had tried to exercise a sort of damage control, hushing up the protest, but with limited success.

On the night of the murder, Liu had been working at his home office—an apartment about five minutes' walk away from the plant—not at his home, which was about five miles away. It wasn't uncommon for the busy boss to spend the night at his home office when he was overwhelmed with work. The last several weeks had been a hectic period for the company, with lots of things going on, in particular all the preparations and paperwork for the forthcoming IPO. Not just Liu but several other executives and their secretaries had come in to work on that Sunday. Liu was last seen walking by himself, entering the apartment complex around seven
P.M.

The next morning, his secretary, Mi, didn't see him show up at work. She called his home, home office, and cell phone, with no response at any of them. So thinking that he might have overslept, she walked over to his home office. Liu sometimes had trouble falling asleep, especially when working late, so he took sleeping pills. She saw his shoes outside the door—he always changed into slippers in the apartment. When no one came to open the door after she knocked for several minutes, she called the police.

Liu was found dead in his home office, killed by a fatal blow to the back of his head. The wound appeared to have been inflicted with a heavy blunt object, which was confirmed in the preliminary autopsy report. The cause of death was massive skull fracture with acute cerebral hemorrhage, but there was hardly any blood at the scene. There was no bruising or abrasions on his body. There was no tissue, blood, or skin under his nails.

The time of death was established to be between 9:30
P.M.
and 10:30
P.M.
the previous night. The crime scene people found no sign of forced entry, nor of any struggle. There was no murder weapon or fingerprints found—except for one on the mirror in the bathroom, left by his secretary, Mi. That didn't mean anything, though, since Mi sometimes worked there as well.

There didn't appear to be anything valuable missing from his apartment, either. Both Mi and his wife checked and confirmed this.

The police suspected that the murderer was no stranger to Liu. The home office was in an expensive, well-guarded apartment complex. According to his neighbors, Liu didn't stay there often, and he barely mixed with them. Occasionally, he was there with Mi, working late into the night with the door shut tightly. As far as the security guard could recall, however, Liu was alone that evening, and no stranger came to visit him later. Non-residents had to check in with security and leave the name of the resident they were visiting.

The local cops had also interviewed a number of people close to Liu. There were hardly any promising leads there, either.

Mi maintained that Liu hadn't mentioned expecting a visitor that evening. Mrs. Liu reported that Liu had called earlier in the day and told her that he was going to work on some important documents and wouldn't be coming home. After speaking to him, she went to Shanghai in the late afternoon and didn't return until the next day. Fu Hao, the associate general manager of the company, now the acting general manager, said that Liu had been so busy of late that they'd hardly talked during the day.

At the end of his briefing, Huang took a sip of the lukewarm tea and leaned over across the table.

“You're no outsider, Chief. There's something about this case. Not only was a special team formed, but that the governmental authorities—not just at the city level—have been paying a lot of attention to the investigation. We've gotten several phone calls from the city government. I've heard that even Internal Security is looking into it, working sort of parallel investigation.”

“Internal Security,” Chen repeated. “Have they done anything?”

“For one thing, Liu's phone records were snatched away before we could examine them.”

“That's something. You're very perceptive, Huang.”

“But I haven't met with any of them—face to face, I mean. So I'm not sure how involved they are.”

“Yes, find out for me,” Chen said before he realized that he had unwittingly slipped back into his familiar role, talking as if he were in charge of the case and Huang his subordinate. While he hadn't yet decided whether he would attempt to do anything about the investigation, it wouldn't hurt, he thought, for him to take a look. “I've heard about the company. About its success at the expense of the environment, with the lake water and food around here being badly contaminated. ”

That enquiry, suggested by his talk with Shanshan, could also be seen as being in line with Comrade Secretary Zhao's instructions. It was time for Chen to start paying attention to the problem. Still, he thought he had better not ask too many questions at this stage, or he could raise unnecessary alarm.

“Well, it is said that some people are getting sick by drinking the water or eating the fish, but nothing is really proven,” Huang said, scratching his head. “I don't think it's something relevant to the murder. There are many factories like Liu's here. Wuxi has been developing rapidly, and as Comrade Deng Xiaoping put it, ‘Development is the one and only truth.'”

It wasn't up to Chief Inspector Chen, coming from Shanghai, to debate economic development in Wuxi. And he wasn't an environmental expert like Shanshan.

“Oh, another thing, Huang,” he said, on the spur of the moment. “Someone I know here has been getting threatening calls. Can you check on it for me?”

“What's his name and number?”

“Her name is Shanshan, and here is her number.” He copied her number onto a scrap of paper and handed it to Huang.

“Shanshan?”

Chen thought he caught a fleeting hint of surprise in Huang's expression. “Do you know her?”

“No, I don't. You know her well?” Huang asked.

“No, I met her yesterday.”

“I'll check it out for you, Chief,” Huang said, glancing at his watch as he stood up. “I think I have to go back to the team. It's almost five.”

“Thank you so much, Huang. Call me when you learn anything new.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “Send me some information about the case.”

He watched Huang's retreating figure disappear into the crowd, which began to thin out with the approaching dusk. Chen remained sitting there, brooding, and staring into his empty cup of tea.

After several minutes, he looked up at the bronze turtle statue, which must have overheard—if endowed with supernatural powers as in those folk tales—just another tale of human tragedy. But the brown turtle remained squatting, meditating, impervious to human suffering. What kind of a man was Liu? Chen hadn't even seen a picture of him, but Liu might have come here himself, sitting, sipping at his own tea, and staring at the turtle statue.

Chen swept his gaze over to the tilted eave of a multistory wooden tower silhouetted against the evening spreading in the distance. The time-and-weather-worn tower suddenly appeared melancholy. He was struck with a sense of déjà vu—possibly from recollecting more lines by Su Shi, his favorite poet from the Song dynasty.

It is nothing but a dream, / for the past, for the present. / Whoever wakes out of the dream? / There is only a never-ending cycle / of old joy, and new grief. / Someday, someone else, / in view of the tower at night, / may sigh deeply for me
.

FIVE

THE CENTER WAS A
nice place, after all.

Chen took a walk around early Tuesday morning and began to get a better sense of the layout. The location spoke volumes for the center. Originally a huge lakeside area of the park, it had been converted into the Cadre Recreation Center for the benefit of veteran cadres, so they could enjoy the lake in peace and quiet without having to mix with the noisy tourist crowd.

There were several others like him walking around at a leisurely pace. Every one of them must have led a quite different life somewhere else, in a provincial town or in a large city, each powerful and privileged in their respective ways. In the blue-and-white-striped pajamas of the center, however, they appeared anonymous for the moment.

Even here, though, there was a sort of recognizable hierarchy. In the two gray multistory buildings near the entrance, the rooms were probably like those in a hotel; though still quite nice, each of them boasting a small balcony, they were probably not for very high-ranking cadres. In contrast, there was another building close to the center of the complex, and the size of the balconies indicated much larger rooms inside. Looking up, Chen saw a white-haired man step out onto a balcony on the third floor, stretch, and nod at him. Chen nodded back and moved on.

Soon, he saw a teahouse built in the traditional architectural style. It was much like the one he had seen in the park, but it stood embosomed in green foliage on the top of a raised plateau, adjacent to a modern-style building. From the distance, he could see several elderly people sitting outside by the white stone balustrade, drinking tea, talking, and cracking watermelon seeds.

It might be a good place, he reflected, for him to sit and study the initial report Sergeant Huang had faxed him that morning. The chief inspector was still debating as to whether he should get actively involved in the investigation.

He was surprised at the sight of a waterproof escalator stretching up the hill, leading directly to the teahouse. It wasn't so much the technology of the escalator that surprised him but the fact that it was installed on the slope in the first place. Anyone who couldn't walk up the flight of stone steps nearby could easily use the elevator inside the building next to it.

He turned away and walked to the clinic attached to the center instead. According to the brochure, the clinic provided convenient medical checkups for high-ranking cadres. Chen didn't think there was anything wrong with him, but since he was there, he decided to see a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.

Chen's experience at the clinic proved to be quite different from that at a Shanghai hospital, where he usually had to wait a long time, standing in line, going through a lot of paperwork. Here, the nurses were practically waiting on him, not to mention that there was so much advanced equipment—all imported here for those high-ranking cadres.

The doctor felt Chen's pulse, examined his tongue, took his blood pressure, and gave his diagnosis in a jumble of professional jargon spoken in a strong Anhui accent:

“You have worked too hard, burning up the yin in your system. Consequently both the qi and blood are at a low ebb, and the yang is insubstantially high. Quite a lot is out of balance, but nothing is precisely wrong, just a little of everything.” He dashed off a prescription and added thoughtfully, “You're still single, aren't you?”