Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  She hurried in, treading barefoot on the wooden floor. Lifting the quilt, she slid in beside him, her feet touching his, still cold.

  “Would you like a hot water bottle, Peiqin?”

  “No, I have you.” She clung closer against him. “When Qinqin goes to college, there’ll be only two of us here, an empty old nest.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said, noticing a single white hair at her temple. He took the opportunity to lead the talk in the direction planned. “You still look so young and handsome.”

  “You don’t have to flatter me like that.”

  “I saw a mandarin dress in a store window today. It would become you nicely, I believe. Have you worn one before?”

  “Come on, Yu. Have you ever seen me wearing a mandarin dress? In our middle school days, such a garment was out of the question, decadent and bourgeois and whatnot. Then we both went to the godforsaken army farm in Yunnan, wearing the same imitation army uniform for ten years. When we came back, we didn’t even have a proper wardrobe for ourselves under your father’s roof. You have never paid any proper attention to me, husband.”

  “Now with a room for ourselves, I can try to do better in the future.”

  “But why are you suddenly paying attention to a mandarin dress? Oh, I know. Another case of yours. The red mandarin dress case, I’ve heard of it.”

  “Surely you know something about the dress. Maybe you examined one in a store.”

  “Once or twice, perhaps, but I never go into any of those fancy stores. Do you think a mandarin dress would fit me—a middle-aged woman working in a shabby restaurant?”

  “Why not?” Yu said, his hand tracing the familiar curves on her body.

  “No, don’t sweet-talk like your chief inspector. It’s not a dress for a working woman. Not for me, in that tingsijian office smeared all over with wok fumes and coal soot. I saw a long article about mandarin dresses in a fashion magazine. Why the style has suddenly become so popular again, I can’t figure out. But tell me about your case.”

  So he summed up what he and his colleagues had done, focusing more or less on the failure of routine police procedure.

  At the end of his summary, she said quietly, “Have you discussed it with Chen?”

  “We talked on the phone yesterday. He’s on vacation, working on a literature paper with a so-called deconstructive approach. About the case, he just mumbled several psychological terms, probably from his mystery translations.”

  “Chen can be like that,” she said. “If the murderer is a nut, it can be really difficult, since he acts out of a logic comprehensible only to himself.”

  He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t seem to be concentrating on the discussion.

  “What about your chief inspector’s literature program?” she asked, changing the subject unexpectedly. “Do you think he’s going for a career change?”

  “He’s unpredictable,” Yu said. “I don’t know.”

  “He may be facing a midlife crisis—too much work and stress, and no one there for him back at home. Is he still seeing that young girl, White Cloud?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He’s never talked to me about her.”

  “But the girl had a crush on him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The way she helped take care of his mother during his delegation trip.”

  “Well, that Big Buck could have paid her.”

  “No, she did a lot of things she didn’t have to just for the sake of money,” she said. “The old woman likes her a lot too. A college student, clever and presentable. In the old woman’s eyes, she must be a good choice. And he is a very dutiful son.”

  “That he is. He keeps talking to me about his not having provided better care for his mother, about his having let her down by not following in the academic footsteps of his father and by not having had a family of his own.”

  “When he called in yesterday, we talked a little. He explained that his decision to enroll in the special program was partially made for her. In spite of her deteriorating health, she’s still worried about him. He thought that, if he could do little to change his bachelor status, then at least an MA degree might comfort the old woman a bit.”

  “According to a fortune-teller, he has no peach-blossom luck,” Yu said, sighing. “Like in a Chinese proverb, one with good luck in their career may have none in love.”

  “Come on. He’s had his share of peach-blossom luck. Like his HCC girlfriend in Beijing. Things just didn’t work out. Still, White Cloud could be the one.”

  “I’m not surprised about her crush, but I don’t think it will happen. There are so many rivals watching over him. What happens when they find out about her K girl background?”

  “She might have worked as a karaoke girl, but a number of college students work at jobs like that today. It shouldn’t matter much, as long as she didn’t go all the way, and I don’t think she did,” Peiqin said. “What matters is whether she will make him a good wife. Clever, young, and practical, she may be a good match for your bookish boss. It’s not just his rivals that matter, though. I don’t know if he himself is capable of disassociating her from her K girl experience.”

  “You are so perceptive, my wife.”

  “It’s time for him to settle down with a family. He cannot remain single forever. It’s not good for his health either. And I don’t just mean somebody taking care of him at home.”

  “Now you are talking like his mother, Peiqin.”

  “As his partner, you have to help him.”

  “You are right, but at the moment, I wish he could help me.”

  “Oh, the red mandarin dress case. Sorry about the digression,” she said. “That case is urgent. You have to stop the perpetrator before he kills again. So what’s your direction?”

  “We don’t have a workable direction,” he said. “And it’s the first case for me as acting head of the squad. I don’t think Liao is going to get anywhere with his routine focus. So I think I have to try something different.”

  “You saw a mandarin dress in a store—not for me, for your case,” she said with a smile. “Perhaps more than one store. What did the clerks tell you?”

  “Liao and I both visited boutiques specializing in the dress, as well as high-end department stores which carry them, but none of them carried such an old-fashioned mandarin dress. According to the store clerks, no store in the city would stock anything close to it. The specific style is too old. At least ten years old. In the mid-nineties, a mandarin dress usually comes with higher thigh-revealing slits and more sensual curves. It’s sleeveless and sometimes backless too, not at all like the ones on the victims.”

  “Do you have a picture of the mandarin dress with you?”

  “Yes,” Yu said, taking several photographs out of the folder on the nightstand.

  “The dress may be worth further study,” she said thoughtfully, examining the pictures closely. “Also, there might have been something about the first victim which sent the murderer over the edge.”

  “I’ve thought about that too,” Yu said. “Before his first psychopathic action, before he turned into a nut, his initial attack—the one on Jasmine—could have been triggered by something in her, something still comprehensible to us.”

  As always, the discussion with Peiqin helped. Especially with regard to Jasmine. Yu had talked to Liao about it, but Liao insisted that his squad had already done a thorough job checking on her background and that there would be no point in repeating the effort. Lying beside Peiqin, however, Yu decided he would reexamine her file the next day.

  Stretching himself under the quilt, his feet touched hers again. Slightly sweaty, he reached to caress her hair, his hand gradually moving down.

  “Qinqin may come back soon,” she said, sitting up. “I’ll warm the cake in the microwave for you. You have not had your dinner yet, and we both have to get up early tomorrow.”

  He was disappointed. But he would have to go into the bureau for an ea
rly morning teleconference tomorrow, and he was tired.

  FIVE

  DETECTIVE YU WAS AT his office early the next morning.

  Sitting behind his desk, he steadily drummed his middle finger knuckle on the desktop, as if counting the efforts made by the cops. Dozens of political lectures delivered by Party Secretary Li; the crime scenes photographed and studied hundreds of times; thousands of tips from the public registered and followed up on; the meager material from the victims examined time and time again by the forensic laboratory; two more computers installed for their group; numerous known sexual deviants checked and double-checked; several detained and questioned about their activities during the time of the first and second murders. . . .

  For all their work, there was little progress made in the investigation, but a considerable number of theories and speculations kept popping up both in and outside of the bureau.

  Little Zhou, the bureau driver who had just started taking an evening police course, barged into Yu’s office.

  “What do we find in common between the two cases, Detective Yu?” Little Zhou started dramatically. “The red mandarin dress. A dress known for its Manchurian origin in the Qing dynasty. What else? Bare feet. Both victims had no stockings or shoes on. Now, a woman may appear sexy walking barefoot in a bathrobe, but in a mandarin dress she has to wear pantyhose and high heels. It’s the basic dress code. Otherwise she simply makes a laughingstock of herself.”

  “That’s true,” Yu said, nodding. “Go on.”

  “The murderer was able to afford the expensive mandarin dress and had the time to put her body into the dress. Why would he have left off her stockings and shoes?”

  “So what do you think?” Yu asked, beginning to be intrigued by the would-be detective’s argument.

  “I was watching a TV series last night, Emperor Qianlong Visiting South of the Yangtze River. One of the gifted and romantic emperors in the Qing dynasty. There are different versions about his real parentage, possibly Han instead of Manchurian, you know—”

  “Come on,” Yu said, cutting him short. “Don’t try to talk like a Suzhou opera singer.”

  “Now, what set the Manchurian apart from the Han ethnic group? The Manchurian women did not bind their feet, and were able to walk barefoot. But the Han women in the Qing dynasty, though their bound feet received erotic comparison to three-inch-long golden lotuses, could hardly walk at all, let alone go barefoot. And the mandarin dress, of course, was only for a Manchurian woman—at least at the time.”

  “Do you mean that the combination of the mandarin dress and bare feet delivers a message?”

  “Yes. We have to take into consideration the obscene pose too. So it’s a message against Manchurian culture.”

  “Little Zhou, you have watched too many of those shows about conspiracies of Han against Manchurian, or the schemes of Manchurian against Han. Before the Revolution of 1911, such a message might have made sense, since a large number of the Han people were against the Manchurian emperor. But nowadays it’s a myth found only on TV.”

  “There’re so many TV shows nowadays about great Manchurian emperors and their beautiful and clever concubines. Some people might think it necessary to send the message again.”

  “Let me tell you something, Little Zhou. Manchurians have disappeared—assimilated into the Hans. Last month a friend of mine for many years turned out to be a Manchurian. Why? Only because a good position requesting a minority ethnic background came along, did he reveal his Manchurian heritage. Sure enough, he got the job. But for all those years, he was never aware of any ethnic difference in himself. His family had changed their Manchurian surname to a Han surname.”

  “But how do you explain the exquisite dress and bare feet—of both victims?”

  “One possible scenario is that the criminal was victimized by a woman dressed just like that.”

  “In such a dress,” Little Zhou said, “with the torn slits and loose buttons. How could a victimizer—not a victim—have appeared like that?”

  Little Zhou was not alone in putting forth wild theories.

  In the routine meeting in Party Secretary Li’s office that morning, Inspector Liao tried to modify his focus and his approach.

  “Apart from what we have already discussed, the criminal must have a garage. In Shanghai, only about a hundred or so families have their own private garages,” Liao declared. “We could start checking them one by one.”

  But Li was against it. “What are you going to do—knock on one door after another without a warrant? No. Such an approach would cause more panic.”

  The private-garage owners were going to be either well-connected Big Bucks or high-ranking Party cadres, Yu observed. Liao’s suggestion amounted to swatting a fly on the forehead of a tiger, and it was a matter of course that Li opposed.

  After the meeting, Yu decided to take a trip to Jasmine’s neighborhood without mentioning it to Liao. There was something about her that made the effort worthwhile, Yu convinced himself, as he walked out of the bureau. Also, there were some differences between her and the second victim that couldn’t be dismissed. The fact that she showed bruises on her body, which was subsequently washed, suggested a possible sexual assault and then an effort to cover it up. In contrast, the second victim, a more easily picked-up target for a sex murderer, showed no traces of sex before her death. Nor was her body washed afterward.

  Shortly before noon, he arrived at the street Jasmine had lived in: a long and shabby lane on Shantou Road, seemingly forgotten by the reform. It was close to the Old City area.

  It turned out to be almost like a visit back to his old neighborhood. At the lane entrance, he saw several wooden chamber pots airing with contented grins in the midst of the chorus of two women’s sweeping with their bamboo brooms, a scene still fresh in his memory.

  The neighborhood committee was located at the end of the lane. Uncle Fong, the head of the committee, received Yu in a tiny office and poured a cup of tea for him.

  “She was a good girl,” Uncle Fong started, shaking his head, “in spite of all the problems at home.”

  “Tell me about her problems at home,” Yu said, having heard of some of them, but Liao’s version was not detailed.

  “Retribution. Nothing but retribution. Her old man deserves it, but it’s not fair for her.”

  “Can you be more specific here, Uncle Fong?”

  “Well, her father, Tian, was somebody during the Cultural Revolution, and he had his fall afterward. Fired, jailed, and paralyzed. So he became a terrible burden for her.”

  “What did he do during the Cultural Revolution?”

  “He was one of the Worker Rebels, wearing an armband, bullying and beating people. Then he became a member of a Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Team sent to a school. Really powerful and swashbuckling at the time, you know.”

  Yu knew. The Mao Zedong Thought Worker Propaganda Teams—sometimes shortened as “Mao Teams”—were a product of the Cultural Revolution. At the beginning of the movement, Mao had rallied young students in the name of the Red Guards to take back power from his rivals in the Party, but the Red Guards soon went out of control, posing a threat to Mao’s own power base. So he declared that the workers themselves should play the leading role in the Cultural Revolution, and he sent Mao Teams to schools as unchallengeable forces, crushing the students and teachers. A teacher at Yu’s middle school had been beaten into a cripple by a Mao Team member.

  “So he was punished,” Uncle Fong said. “But there were millions of rebels like him in those years. It’s just his luck to be chosen as an example. Sentenced to two or three years in prison. What karma!”

  “Jasmine was still quite young?”

  “Yes, she was only four or five then. She lived with her mother for a couple of years and then, after her mother’s death, she moved back. Tian never took good care of her, and five or six years ago, he became paralyzed,” Uncle Fong said, taking a long thoughtful drink of his tea. “She, on the other han
d, took good care of him. It wasn’t easy, and she had to save every penny. He didn’t have a pension or medical insurance. She never had a boyfriend because of him.”

  “Because of the old man? How come?”

  “She did not want to leave him alone. Any prospective suitor would have had to take over the burden. And few were interested in doing that.”

  “Very few indeed,” Yu said, nodding. “Didn’t she have any friends in the lane?”

  “No, not really. She did not mix with girls of her own age. Too busy working and taking care of things at home. She had to work at other odd jobs, I believe.” Uncle Fong added, putting down the teacup, “Let me take you there, so you may see for yourself.”

  Uncle Fong led Yu to an old shikumen house in the midsection of the lane, pushing open a door directly into a room that looked to have been partitioned out of the original courtyard. It was an all-purpose room with a disorderly bed in the center, a ladder to an attic of later construction, an unlit coal briquette stove close to the bed, an ancient chamber pot practically uncovered, and hardly any other furniture. For the last few years, this small room must have been the world for Tian, who now sprawled face-up on the bed.

  Jasmine might have had reasons not to stay at home much, Yu realized, nodding at her father.

  “This is Tian,” Uncle Fong said, pointing. The man looked as emaciated as a skeleton, except for his eyes, which followed the visitors around the room. “Tian, this is Comrade Detective Yu of the Shanghai Police Bureau.”

  Tian hissed something indistinct in response.

  “She alone understood his words,” Uncle Fong commented. “I don’t know who will come to help now. It’s no longer the age of Comrade Lei Feng and no one wants to follow the selfless communist model.”

  Yu wondered if Tian’s mind was clear enough to grasp what they were talking about. Perhaps better if not. Better a total blank page than to mourn the death of his daughter and face his own inevitable end. Whatever he had done during the Cultural Revolution, the retribution was enough.

  Yu pulled the ladder over and climbed up cautiously.