The Mystery of Revenge (11 page)

The news pleased Yi-yun tremendously, so much so that she kept the letter in her drawer so she could read it
repeatedly.

She had been very busy since the divorce, working during the day, going to the concert at night, and taking care of talented Tom, so she had been barely keeping up with her friends. Ann worked with her at China Dragon, so she would get updates from Ann. She had lost contact with June and her friends because they were Fang Chen’s friends first and foremost. This was quite unfortunate because Yi-yun liked June very
much.

In fact, life would be flawless if Tom could pay a little more attention to her from time to time. It was annoying when he hardly noticed her no matter how hard she would try to draw his attention by loudly closing the front door or kissing him before heading to the kitchen. While at the piano, Tom was like a robot who only tuned in to the
music.

It was only when he stopped playing, he became the most attentive and passionate lover. He would run to her, bursting out happily that his precious had come
home.

They kissed. Then one thing led to another; pretty soon he would be all over her. They had sex in the kitchen, in the living room, on the couch, everywhere but on the piano. She had suggested that once when he pushed her against it, but he refused. Instead, he laid her on the
bench.

More than once he told her that her love was the major motivational force behind his creativity and music. He was able to go back to piano after being recharged, as he put it. It was very flattering indeed. How many women in the world could say they were the force behind anything, let alone the beautiful music? Not many, that’s for
sure.

So she adjusted herself to fit into his lifestyle. She never complained when he only wanted quickies even though she loved to cuddle. She told herself she would get what she wanted eventually when the time came. She didn’t expect she would be pregnant so
soon.

They had always used condom. Tom refused to use it only when it was safe for her. He was good at calculating the dates, before and after her period. For almost a year being together, they never had an accident, so she didn’t think she was in any danger until she developed morning sickness. Instead of seeing a doctor, which she would have to pay for, she took some over-the-counter medicine because she thought she had stomach flu. When it didn’t go away after several weeks, she suspected what it was and bought a test
kit.

The result, of course, confirmed her
suspicion.

She literally froze, looking down at the positive result. What would Tom say if he found out? Her mind was racing, full of anticipation. “He’ll marry me, of course, now that I have his child,” she assumed. Who wouldn’t when he made his girl
pregnant?

“But I can’t be fat and heavy now!” She gasped when she glanced at the evening dress hanging behind the bathroom door. “What happens if I can’t fit into my evening gowns anymore? I have to attend his
concerts!”

Yes, the concerts! “I can’t tell him at the moment,” she said to herself because Tom couldn’t be distracted right now. “I probably should wait until the season ends. Plus, what if I miscarry? Lots women lost their babies in the first few months of pregnancy. I’ll tell him when I’m at least four months
along.”

She wrapped up the test kit with toilet paper when she heard Tom had stopped playing in the living
room.

“What are you doing?” Tom was behind her back, eyed her suspiciously. Her hands were buried in one of the drawers in their
bedroom.

“Tidying up the drawers,” she said, pulling out a pair of loose socks. “By the way, I don’t know why you have to keep the gun. It always makes me nervous when I touch it.” She found his revolver when she first moved in, trying to rearrange his drawers so she could have a few to use. It was a small handgun, and she was quite curious as how it could kill. It looked harmless in her
palm.

“I told you it’s from my father. What am I going to do with it? I can’t give it back to him, and I can’t drop it in the Charles River either,” he said impatiently and took the socks away from her
hand.

To cover her nervousness, she started kissing him passionately, which surprised him somewhat because he was usually the aggressor. He responded the way exactly as she had expected, and pretty soon, he was on the top of
her.

She didn’t say anything until more than a month later when they were making out on the living room floor. He had the day off, and they planned to go out to eat. Before going out, he told her they should make love
first.

For the first time, his passionate lovemaking made her uncomfortable. It was in fact painful when he went for it. “Oh, Tom, please, you’re hurting the baby!” she cried, trying hard to prevent him to go too
deep.

He stopped dead and stared at her. “What did you say?” he
asked.

She smiled nervously and took one of his hands into her own, guiding it toward her tummy. It was soft with a tiny bump, which was more like belly fat than a
baby.

“No!” he cried, pulling his hand back as of being burned on the stove, and sat up on the floor in
horror.

Yi-yun was very taken aback by the anger in his voice before noticing his eyes, which looked like a wounded animal. “It cannot be!” he shouted at her, red in the
face.

“But I am!” she burst into tears. “I am pregnant with your child,” she
said.

“No!” his voice trembled with panic. “You can’t.”

“Why,” she cried
pitifully.

“Don’t you understand?” He raised his voice a pitch higher. “I can’t have a baby in my life right
now!”

“Why?” She started sobbing. It was definitely not what she had
expected.

“I just started my career! I can’t have a crying baby while practicing. Look, if you want, we can have it when we are more settled, like a few years later,” Tom pleaded with her, “or at least when we can afford a house so you can keep it in the basement when I
practice.”

He held her tightly in his arms, and his warmth melted her heart.
He did love me
, she thought and stopped sobbing; he didn’t want a baby only because the apartment had one bedroom. Really, how could he practice in the living room when a baby was crying in the bedroom? She inhaled heavily and sighed, and he intercepted the sigh with a wet
kiss.

“My love, I know you will understand. You can have anything you want if you just give me a few more years,” he said and went back to their
lovemaking.

The next day, Yi-yun got a letter when she came home from work. It was from INS, which informed her that she needed to go in for some inquiry regarding her immigration
status.

For more than ten minutes, she just stood there, too shocked to think
straight.

Why did they want to inquire into her immigration status? She already had a green card, or not? She suddenly remembered in panic. The green card she got was a temporary one. When she received it, Fang Chen had joked that he would have to sign off after two years before she could get the permanent one. Did she lose her residency because she was divorced? What was she going to
do?

She looked into the living room where Tom had been practicing. As usual, he was totally absorbed in his music that he didn’t even hear the door
open.

I have to find a lawyer
, she thought while looking at him,
if my legal status is in limbo, he has to marry me.
This time, it would be serious because her livelihood was depending on
it.

Chapter 12

Paul Winderman was nursing a beer while watching a hockey game on TV, too restless to sleep. The DA’s office had decided to try Tom Meyers who had been formally charged as the suspect in a second-degree murder
case.

This new development troubled him quite a bit because as far as Paul was concerned, most of the evidence against Tom Meyers was circumstantial. Sure, the bullet that killed the victim was from a .22 handgun, which old Meyers admitted to have given to his son, the pillow that muffled the gunshot was Tom Meyers’s own, and the suspect admitted he caused the bruises on the victim’s arms when they had an
argument.

Tom Meyers’s colleagues had said he wasn’t himself when he arrived at the airport; he was nervous and anxious. The conductor noticed the tempo of Tom’s playing was slightly off when he practiced with the orchestra. In addition, Ms. White was quite sure now that she had heard the fight and the victim screaming in pain before everything went quiet the night before. Even though there was no eyewitness, the DA’s office considered the evidence strong enough to warrant a
trial.

It made Paul Winderman uneasy because he preferred to have an airtight case before putting a suspect on trial. He didn’t want a killer to walk free if there was no chance to get him convicted. So far, they still hadn’t found the murder weapon, and the location of the pillow was the sticky point in Paul’s mind. If the boyfriend threw away the gun, why should he have left the pillow in the neighborhood for the police to find? He would have gotten rid of the pillow as well. Some of Paul’s colleagues pointed out that the killer was running out of time, and he didn’t know the police would have found the pillow so quickly. They went door-to-door, opening trashcans and using K-9 sniffing dogs. If they had waited for one more day, the trash in that neighborhood would have been dumped in the
landfill.

They also pointed out that there was no sign of forced entry in the apartment. The lack of a forced entry indicated nothing but the possibility that the killer or killers were someone the victim knew. It could have been the boyfriend, or one of her friends, or her ex-husband.

He thought about her ex-husband.

“What, Fang Chen?” Shao Mei cried incredulously when he interviewed her and dropped his name purposefully. “No possible way. He loves her, still loves her, if you know him at
all.”

He admitted it was true. When he mentioned her badly decomposed body, he watched Fang Chen’s eyes welled up with tears. His pain was
obvious.

But the ex-husband did send a letter to the immigration office trying to deport her back to China. If he loved her as much as everyone said, the love could easily have turned into hatred. If so, had it been strong enough to prompt him to
kill?

Paul Winderman shook his head. He doubted that the Chinese scholar with thick glasses would plan such a deliberate killing and then calmly walk back to school. They had checked with the university and everyone around him. One of his colleagues saw him leave his office around 12:20 pm but it was the time he usually had his lunch. Paul Winderman went to several restaurants near the campus with a photo. The noodle shop manager looked at the photo and said Fang Chen was a regular but couldn’t be sure if he was there that day because he normally paid cash. “Most likely he was here,” the manager had said. “He’s a good customer, eating at our place a couple times a
week.”

The school said since he started working, Fang Chen hadn’t taken a sick day or a vacation day. He was a devoted teacher and researcher; he was always on campus, and his students loved him. Plus, it took too long for him to avenge if he ever intended to. Shao Mei thought he was a saint. Paul smiled when he thought of Shao Mei who was so opinionated that he doubted if she would accept any opposite
view.

“He basically let her do whatever she wanted,” Shao Mei had said. “If he would just have stood up to her, she might not have walked out on him, if you ask
me.”

Ann told him that Fang Chen had spent several thousand dollars and bought a resting spot for his ex-wife. The girl was extremely moved. “So kind,” she said. “I don’t know what we would do without his help.” She said the victim’s parents had refused to collect their daughter’s
ashes.

If the killer weren’t the ex-husband, it would most likely be the boyfriend. Paul wished they could locate the gun. He and his men had searched all the ponds and rivers near the apartment building, but nothing came up. He didn’t think they would find any fingerprints even if they did find the gun; it would have been submerged in the water for too long. This was assuming the killer dropped the gun in one of the rivers near or around the city. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the manpower to search them all. No, nothing on the gun would pinpoint the killer, but having a murder weapon was much better than not having one. Paul just wanted to know if the suspect’s gun was the gun that fired the bullet. It would at least tie up the case
better.

Paul Winderman shook his head disgustedly when he thought of the suspect. He basically collapsed when they formally charged him, wetting his pants, screaming and crying, telling anyone who wanted to listen that he never, ever killed his
girlfriend.

From what he gathered, the suspect was a talented pianist who loved his piano more than anything in the world. Paul Winderman interviewed two of his ex-girlfriends, and both of them said they left him because they didn’t think they could have a meaningful relationship with him. “He was a passionate lover, mind you,” one of them said. “He could be extremely sweet if you were willing to baby him. But he could turn into a cold fish when he was in one of his moods. I was always a second class citizen in his eyes, and I was sick of him after a semester, but we didn’t separate until we graduated from
college.”

“He’s just selfish,” another girlfriend told him. “Never shy to take a handout from anyone he knows. Sure, he’s talented, but I can’t live with a spoiled brat and babysit him all my
life.”

A selfish, passionate musician who could care less about anyone but himself and his music, Paul Winderman thought. If his girlfriend wanted to force his hand and get between him and his career goal, would he get mad enough to kill? Or if he turned her down, would she be mad enough to kill
him?

He closed his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Obviously, the girlfriend was the one killed, not the other way around. Paul Winderman remembered the spine-tingling laugh Tom Meyers’s college girlfriend made when he asked if the suspect ever thought of marriage. “Never,” she laughed out loud. “Not even in his dreams,” she said. “We were basically in a mutual agreement that he would never marry me although I thought he really loved me.” She shook her head
sadly.