Red Mandarin Dress (14 page)

Cousin Peishan did not come back. In the far, far away countryside, he suffered a nervous breakdown and jumped into a dry well. He might have starved to death there.

Chen chose not to tell White Cloud of this episode from the Cultural Revolution, which was not fashionably nostalgic. A young girl of another generation, she probably wouldn’t understand.

But the soup buns appeared and tasted the same, fresh, steaming hot in the golden bamboo steamers, rich in the combined flavor of the land and river, with the scarlet crab oval so tantalizing in the afternoon light. The soup inside the bun came bursting out at the touch of his lips, the taste so familiarly delicious.

“According to a gourmet book, the soup in the bun comes from the pork skin jelly mixing with the stuffing. In a steamer over the stove, the jelly turns into hot liquid. You have to bite carefully, or the soup will splash out, scalding your tongue.”

“You have told me about it,” she said, smiling, nipping gingerly before she sucked the soup.

“Oh, you brought a bag of them to me during the New World project.”

“It was a pleasure to serve as your little secretary.”

“I have to ask you another favor today,” he said. “You are a computer pro, I know. Can you do an Internet search for me?”

“Of course. If you want, I can also bring Mrs. Gu’s laptop back to you.”

“No, I don’t think I have the time,” he said. “You must have heard of the red mandarin dress case. Can you do a search on the dress—a comprehensive search, about the history, the evolution, and the style during different periods? Anything directly or indirectly related to such a dress—not just currently, but also in the sixties or fifties.”

“No problem,” she said, “but what do you mean by anything directly or indirectly related?”

“I wish I could tell you more specifically, but let’s say any movie or book that has a mandarin dress as an important part of it, or somebody known for it, either wearing or making it, any relevant comments or criticism about it, and of course any mandarin dress bearing a resemblance to the one in question. And I may need you to run a couple of errands for me too.”

“Whatever you want, Chief.”

“Don’t worry about the expense. A portion of the chief inspector fund hasn’t been spent this year. If I don’t use it up soon, the bureau will cut the fund next year.”

“So you are not going to quit, Chief Inspector Chen.”

“Well—” He cut himself short, the soup spurting out of the thin-skinned bun despite his caution. She was perceptive, handing over a pink paper napkin to him. It was not too bad to be a chief inspector, after all, to have a “little secretary” sitting beside, like an understanding flower.

At the end of the meal, she asked the waiter for a receipt as Chen was producing his wallet.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Let me buy this meal for you. No need to ask for government reimbursement.”

“I know, but it’s for the government’s benefit.”

The waiter gave her something like two receipts, one for fifty Yuan, and another for a hundred.

“The city’s tax income has increased more than two hundred percent last month, because of the newly invented official receipt with a lottery number on it,” she said, scratching the receipt with a coin. “Look! You bring me luck.”

“What?”

“Ten Yuan. Look at the lottery number printed on each receipt.”

“That’s a novel idea.”

“Capitalism in China is like nowhere else in the world. Nothing but money matters here. In restaurants, people didn’t ask for the receipt except for ‘socialist expense,’ so most restaurants reported losses. With the lottery practice, everybody is asking for receipts. It’s said that one family won twenty thousand.”

Chen also scratched a receipt. No luck, but no disappointment, with her hair touching his face over the number on the receipt.

They then walked out to the oriental clothing boutiques scattered in the back area of the market. A sort of niche business created for foreign tourists, the small stores displayed an impressive array of mandarin dresses in their windows. Taking his arm, she led him into one of them.

“The dress you are investigating is old-fashioned, not like any of these you may see here,” she said, examining around. “He is perverse, humiliating the victim in such a dress.”

“Oh, you mean the murderer? Elaborate for me.”

“He wants to display her as an object of his sexual fantasy. The graceful mandarin dress, elegant yet erotic with the torn slits and loose buttons. I have seen several pictures in newspapers.”

“You’re talking like a cop,” he said. At this moment, everybody in the city seemed eager to be a cop, but she had a point. “Surely you know a lot about the fashion.”

“I have two or three mandarin dresses. Occasionally, I have to put one on in haste, but I have never ripped the slits.”

“He might have put the dress on her after her death—her body rigid, and her limbs uncooperative.”

“Even in that scenario, the ragged, torn slits don’t make sense. Whatever way you put it on, you won’t damage it like that,” she said, turning to him. “Would you like to do an experiment—on me?”

“An experiment, how?”

“That’s easy,” she said, scooping a scarlet mandarin dress from the hanger and dragging him into the fitting room. Closing the door, she handed the dress to him. “Put it on me as roughly as possible.”

Kicking off her shoes, she was peeling off her dress, and in less than a minute, she was standing in her white panties, wearing a lace bra.

It was only for his work, he told himself. Drawing in a breath, he found himself in a clumsy attempt to put the dress on her.

She held herself still and rigid—like a lifeless victim—against his rough hands. No expression on her face, hardly any flex in her muscle, her limbs unresponsive, yet her nipples visibly hardened. She blushed as he yanked the dress down on her.

No matter how hard or violently he tried to pull the dress down, the slits were not damaged.

And he noticed her lips trembling, losing color. There was no heat in the fitting room. It was hard for her to play a half-naked, lifeless model for long.

But she had already confirmed her point. The slits must have been deliberately torn. And that was an important fact.

He insisted on paying for the dress. “Don’t take it off, White Cloud. It looks wonderful on you.”

“You don’t have to do that. It’s for your work,” she said, producing a small camera. “Take a picture of me in it.”

He did, having her stand in front of the boutique store. And then he put her coat over the dress.

“Thank you,” she said wistfully. “I have to go to school now.”

Afterward he decided to walk back, alone, at least for a while.

It required strenuous effort to expel the image of her body struggling in and out of the mandarin dress. The image got juxtaposed with another, of her standing naked in a private room of the Dynasty karaoke club, in the company of other men.

He was disappointed with himself. She had done that for his police work, but he kept thinking of her as a K girl, imagining things about her, in a mandarin dress or not.

And that excited him.

He thought about the stories of women being trouble and monsters.
Subjectivity exists only to the extent of its being subject to the discourses
—an idea from a book of postmodernist criticism he had picked up in his effort to deconstruct those classical love stories.

Perhaps the stories had read him.

THIRTEEN

ANOTHER BODY IN A
red mandarin dress was discovered early Friday morning.

The body was found at another public location—by a shrub grove on the Bund, close to the intersection of Jiujiang and Zhongshan Roads.

Around five that morning, Nanhua, a retired teacher, was heading to a small square called Tai Chi Corner on the upraised bank near the intersection. As he was about to climb up the stone steps, he saw the body lying underneath the bank, partially concealed by the grove. He started shouting for help and people gathered around. Reporters hurried over from their offices nearby. It was only after they had all taken pictures, from various angles, that one of them thought to report the body to the police bureau.

When Yu and his colleagues arrived, the scene looked much like a farmer’s market in the morning, noisy and chaotic, full of people making comments and comparisons, as if bargaining with peddlers.

It wasn’t just an area with people and traffic moving through it all night long, but it was one of those “most sensitive areas” with heightened patrol activities by the police as well as the neighborhood committees. That the murderer had left the body there spoke for itself. It was a more defiant message than before.

The murderer must have thrown the body out of a moving car. It was out of the question for him to pose the body like before. That accounted for the different posture of the third girl.

She was lying on her back with one arm thrown over her head, wearing an identical mandarin dress with torn slits and loose buttons. The left leg was bent and the knee drawn up high, revealing her pubic hair, black against her pale thighs. She looked to be in her early twenties, though with plenty of makeup on her face.

“That bastard,” Yu cursed through his clenched teeth as he squatted down by the body, pulling on his gloves.

Like the first two victims, death appeared to be the result of asphyxia. For the time of death, he roughly estimated it at three or four hours earlier, judging by the loss of the pinkish color in her fingernails and toenails. Aside from the fact that she had nothing under the dress, there were no outward signs of sexual abuse. No semen visible around the genitals, thighs, or in the pubic hair; no blood, dirt, or skin under her nails. Her legs and arms were unbruised, without lacerations or bite marks.

The police were busy gathering up whatever was discoverable at the crime scene, cigarette butts, stray buttons, scrap paper. With the scene already so damaged, Yu didn’t think their efforts would yield anything useful.

But he saw a light-colored fiber on the sole of her left foot. Possibly from her socks, or she could have picked it up while walking barefoot somewhere. He removed it and put it in a plastic envelope.

He stood up. A chilly wind was blowing from the river in a squealing gust. The big clock atop the Custom House started striking. The same melody, never lost in the change of times, reverberated against the gray sky, oblivious of the irreversible loss of a young girl in the morning.

He knew he had to go back to the bureau, leaving his colleagues to work the scene.

The Shanghai Police Bureau, too, seemed to be shuddering in the cold morning wind. Even the retired-and-rehired doorman, Comrade Old Liang, stood there shaking his head at Yu, like a helpless plant frostbitten overnight.

Phone calls started pouring in from the city government, from the media, from the public. Everyone was talking about a serial killer at large, a murderer brazenly defiant of the city police.

The knowledge that all this had happened twice before and that it was likely to happen again was a staggering blow to the police force. Three victims in three weeks and, given that they had made no progress in their investigation, quite possibly another one at the end of another week.

Yu’s colleagues were going all out, extending the search into every possible corner. The technical division was reexamining the scene of the crime, a temporary hotline was receiving tips from the public, every radio patrol car was on the watch.

A picture of the victim was faxed and posted everywhere. There was no point covering it up, and no attempt was made. Far more graphic pictures were being printed in the newspapers along with lurid descriptions. The news was spreading like wildfire, threatening to consume the city.

Grinding out his fourth cigarette in the morning, Yu looked up to see Liao striding into his office with the initial medical report. It confirmed strangulation as the cause of death. Lividity and rigor were also consistent with Yu’s estimated time of death. Like the second victim, there were no indications that the girl had sex before her death.

Since the second victim was a three-accompanying girl, Liao suggested that they try to identify the new victim by focusing on the entertainment business. It was consistent with his new focus, and Yu agreed.

Sure enough, around eleven o’clock, her identity was established. She was Tang Xiumei, a singing girl, more commonly known as a K girl, at the Music Box Karaoke Center. The manager, alert after the earlier cases, recognized her from the faxed picture.

“What did I tell you?” Liao said, waving a fax page in his hand.

What a K girl did in a private K room was open knowledge in the city. If a Big Buck took a fancy to her, he could demand services other than singing, and outside of the karaoke room, too, by paying for the so-called “company hour.” No club would say no. Tang’s coworkers said that she hadn’t shown up at the club that evening. But that wasn’t uncommon for her.

According to the manager, Tang didn’t come to work last night or the night before. What a girl chose to do on her own time was beyond the club’s control or knowledge. The manager’s statement, along with the testimony of several other girls, ruled out the possibility that the murderer picked her up in the club Thursday night.

Inquiries about the customers she’d met for the previous few nights led nowhere; the regular customers had solid alibis for that night, and none of the new ones had left their name or address.

Yu contacted Tang’s neighborhood committee. Liu Yunfei, the head of the committee as well as a neighbor of Tang’s in the same building, answered the phone.

“What can I say about those girls? Materialistic from head to foot. Tang had a favorite saying: to work well is not so important as to marry well. So she went to work in a K club, hoping that she could meet and marry a Big Buck.”