Shanghai Redemption (27 page)

He had suspected something had gone terribly wrong when he had tried to call her from the phone booth and a strange man answered. He was shocked speechless for a minute or two.

A robbery gone wrong? He ruled it out instinctively—it was just too convenient. And the robbery-murder theory certainly didn't explain the man waiting in her apartment, answering her cell phone. But he wasn't in any position to contact the Suzhou police bureau about it.

“You look pale,” Nan said. “It's a shock to all of us. Were you close?”

“I didn't know her well, but she helped me,” he murmured. “Please tell me more about what happened.”

“No one here knows any details yet. Yesterday afternoon, she came here to the club and paid her monthly membership fee, as always. After she left, some visitors came to the club. They bought her CD, and one of them even bought a copy of her poster, which cost two hundred yuan. After they left, I called her. She was pleased, saying that the money the visitors spent would be her donation to the club.”

“I don't understand how thieves could have broken into her apartment,” Chen said. “Her apartment is close to the Temple Market, near the center of the city.”

“I don't know. All I know is that early this morning, while I was still asleep, the cops came to my place. They found me because my number was in her phone's call log as the last person that contacted her yesterday. The cops asked me a bunch of questions before telling me that she'd been murdered.”

“That must have been awful for you.”

“We're having a memorial performance for her tonight. We're performing all the Tang and Song poems that she set to Suzhou opera tunes. It's our way to remember her. You should come.”

Nan then walked over to a pipa leaning against the wall.

“That's hers.”

He followed her, reached out to the instrument, and noticed that one of the strings was broken. In ancient China, a broken string was a sinister omen. Touching it, he imagined her playing pipa here, one string, one peg, each reminiscent of the lost years of her youth.

“I'm so sorry I can't come to the performance tonight,” he said. He thought it was likely that some plainclothes policeman would also be at the evening performance. “I have an important business meeting tonight. But I would like to buy a CD of hers and order a short piece called ‘Zijuan Lamenting at Night' for tonight's memorial performance. I'll pay the fee for the song in accordance to the menu.”

Zijuan was a maid to Daiyu, the heroine of
Dream of the Red Chamber
. After Daiyu's death, Zijuan laments the heroine's tragic fate on the night when Baoyu, the hero, marries another girl.

“That is a very thoughtful choice. It's the song I'm planning to sing for her tonight. Don't worry about the fee.”

“No, I want to pay for it,” he insisted. “I only met her twice, and I know so little about her. Can I also ask a favor of you? Can you start recording tonight's performance as soon as people begin to arrive? I'd like you to record the evening all the way to the end. Not just what the performers sing, but what they say too. Don't bother burning it to a CD. A cassette tape will do. Here is a thousand yuan. Will that be enough?”

“You're generous, sir. It's far more than enough.”

“I'll come back and pick up the tape in a day or two.”

“Whenever it's convenient. I'm here most of the time, and if I have to step out, I'll leave a note about the tape.”

He supposed that was about all Nan could tell him about Qian. He stood up, holding the CD, which also bore the address and contact information of the club, and said his good-byes.

He almost stumbled walking down the stairs. The narrow corridor led him to an overwhelming question.

Did she die because of him?

He might be jumping to conclusions, but if it had been just a random home invasion robbery, why was there a man at her home answering her phone? At the time Chen called, the man must have known that Qian was dead, but he pretended that he would give her his message.

What's more, the man didn't know Chen's identity, but he did have some knowledge about him, such as the name he'd given her, Cao; that he was from Shanghai; and that he was fond of noodles.

The specificity of his knowledge suggested that the man had been stationed in her apartment to ambush Chen.

That confirmed Chen's earlier suspicion that the phone call she made to him was tapped. It was very likely that that call had led to this tragedy.

While he hadn't said much during that phone conversation, it was only a matter of time before whoever was behind the murder figured out who “Cao” really was.

 

NINETEEN

AT SIX FIFTY IN
the morning, Chen stepped out of the Suzhou-Shanghai train, looked around, almost casually, before he walked into the subway.

At this hour, the subway was already crowded with sleepy-eyed commuters. The subway was a necessity for many, given the perpetual traffic jam in the ever-expanding city. Standing next him, a slip of a girl started dozing off, her head bobbing against his shoulder. He stood still to avoid disturbing her.

He left the station via the number 3 exit, the exit Peiqin had mentioned the other day. It was the one closest to her new restaurant. But it was still too early. He decided to stroll around the neighborhood while he waited. Clustered nearby were a number of convenience stores. A block further east, he glanced down a side street as he walked past, and he came to a stop.

There was a neon sign shining pale, listless in the morning light.

He traced his steps back to the subway, buying a copy of
Wenhui Daily
on the way. Standing under the subway sign, leaning against a strangely barren tree, and unfolding the newspaper in his hand, he looked like all the others waiting there. Opposite him, a young man planted himself next to a green-painted lamppost, clutching a smartphone.

If this was indeed the exit Peiqin used, he couldn't miss her. The train she usually took arrived at eight fifteen, she'd said, and the subway was fairly reliable. He glanced at his watch again. He was still fifteen minutes early. He might as well stay put jotting down something on his notebook.

It was almost nine fifteen, however, when Peiqin emerged from the station, walking up the stairs, biting into a rice ball that she might have just bought from one of booths down in the subway station.

She was surprised at the sight of him, “Oh—” she said, one hand instinctively going up to her mouth. Her other hand was still clutching the rice ball, a tiny grain of rice stuck to her upper lip. Instead of saying anything more, she looked around, nodded at him, swung around, and walked back down the subway steps.

He followed her in silence, the crowd swirling around them like waves. No one seemed to be paying them any attention.

A couple of minutes later, she led him out through another exit. She led him away from the station for more than two blocks before she stopped, turned around, and spoke to him.

“Morning, Chief,” she said. “Sorry, but if we'd stayed near that exit some of my coworkers might have seen us.”

“I know. Let's find a place where we can talk.”

This time he took the lead. He rounded the corner, circling back to the storefront he'd spotted earlier. It was a neighborhood karaoke club. It looked deserted, even though the neon sign out front was still blinking “Open for Business.”

With more fancy and not-so-fancy hotels having opened in the city for customers looking to rent a room at an hourly rate, a KTV private room didn't seem to be a popular choice among the young and the well-to-do anymore. The rooms weren't exactly private, either, since the KTV attendants came in frequently to serve food and drink.

“The morning hours are the cheapest time at a KTV,” he said, speaking like a regular customer.

For a karaoke club, the golden period was from seven p.m. to midnight. During that time, a room could cost as much as five or six hundred yuan, not including the fee for the K girls. After midnight, the price went steadily down.

Chen and Peiqin went in, and Peiqin waited while Chen made arrangements at the front counter. They then followed a sleepy waitress to a private room, where she left the song menu on a coffee table in the room.

“Let's pick some songs,” he said wryly. “Or people might think we're odd customers—even suspicious.”

“Choose whatever you want, it'll just be background music. It's common for people to come here without ever singing or even being particularly interested in karaoke. It's simply a convenient excuse to get some time alone. The attendants never worry about these things.”

The first few pages of the menu were full of red songs, and Chen kept flipping pages in frustration. “Just the other day, in the cemetery bus, the driver said he had to play red songs. It was a city government regulation, and it's probably the same here,” Chen said.

“As background noise, those red songs might be just as good as any others. You don't have to listen to them,” Peiqin said, inputting the number for a song on the remote control. “For some, those songs bring back memories of their lost youth. But I get the chills every time I hear that one.” She pointed her finger at a title. “‘The Cultural Revolution Is Great. Is Great. Is Great…' The first time I heard that song was during a mass criticism session, where my father was shaking uncontrollably as he was being beaten, struck by the ‘revolutionary blows' of Red Guards. It was totally crazy.”

“The same thing happened to my father, Peiqin. But it's not politically correct to talk about what happened during those years. For the younger generation, the Cultural Revolution is totally forgotten, almost like a myth. In school textbooks there's no mention whatsoever of the atrocities committed under Mao.”

“As a result, red songs are coming back with a vengeance under Party Secretary Lai. It serves his political goals for him to have a chorus of Maoists,” Peiqin said, frowning. “Ironically, Lai's own father was denounced as a ‘capitalist-roader' at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution. As a young passionate Red Guard, Lai beat his own father as part of a ‘mass criticism,' breaking several of the old man's ribs. Guess what the father said afterward? ‘A communist successor should be like this!'”

“Where did you learn all this, Peiqin?”

“On the Internet. Usually, this sort of information about top Party leaders is instantly blocked, frequently in less than two or three minutes, but that piece was up for a couple of days.”

It sounds like both the father and the son made enough political enemies that this piece must have been left unblocked on purpose
. Chen chose not to say it out loud.

As Peiqin pressed the number for another red song, he tried to change the subject.

“Neither of us likes these songs, so why waste time talking about them?”

“Sorry, I got carried away,” she said. “How are things with you?”

Chen began to recount what had happened in the last few days, focusing on Qian's death, while avoiding personal details. He summed everything up by going through what continued to mystify him.

“As a cop, I've ruffled plenty of feathers, and some of them have tried to retaliate. So the attempted raid at the Heavenly World makes sense. But why would they drag an old, helpless woman like my mother into this horrible mess? Why go after a young powerless woman like Qian? I don't think I'm worth all this trouble.”

“The burglary might have been a coincidence. An old woman living alone makes for an easy target.”

“What about the murder in Suzhou?”

“That, possibly, was a robbery that went wrong.”

“But what about the man who was in her apartment afterward?”

“What about him?”

“It couldn't have been her father. I'm positive of that. What's more, anyone who was in her apartment when I called would have already known about her death, yet he kept asking me to leave a message for her. He was trying to set a trap for me.”

“You have a point,” Peiqin said slowly. “But how could he have known about you? Did he find out from Qian?”

“She wouldn't have discussed what she wanted from a private investigator with anyone. I made a point of calling her from a public pay phone, but she did call my cell phone once. So it's possible that her phone was tapped.”

“But why would they do that? They didn't know she'd gone to a private detective. They didn't even know your identity.”

“They might have suspected somehow. Or her phone was being tapped for some other reason. For a man in Sima's position, it wouldn't be difficult to arrange. Then perhaps something in her conversation with me triggered her killing.”

“The conversation was just about her, wasn't it?”

“No, she had made inquiries for me as well, and she mentioned things that she'd learned about the nightclub.”

“Sorry, I didn't know anything about that. Yu and I assumed it was just another of your budding affairs.”

“Come on, Peiqin. An affair now? With everything that's going on? But if it was just about her, then after she was dead, why was the man still in her place, waiting by her cell phone, trying to get information about me?”

“No, you're right, that doesn't make sense.”

“Perhaps the stakes for them were much higher, for reasons still unknown to me.”

“But how can you find out what those stakes are?” She added deliberately, “If they are using whatever dirty means possible, I don't think you have to play by the rules, either. You're no longer a cop—”

There was a knock on the door.

“Free buffet time,” an attendant said from outside, her head partially visible through the glass panel in the door.

“Thank you,” Peiqin said. “We'll be there in a minute.”

“A free buffet. That's not bad,” Chen said.