Red Mandarin Dress (6 page)

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 hand, 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.

“Yes, that’s where she lived.” Uncle Fong remained standing on the floor, looking up. The climb was too difficult for him.

It was not even an attic. Just a “second floor,” added in a makeshift way over Tian’s bed, which occupied most of the first floor. A grown-up girl, she had to have some space for herself. Yu was unable to stand erect up there, his head touching the ceiling. Nor was there a single window. In the darkness, it took him a minute or two to find a lamp switch, which he turned on. No bed, only a mattress. Beside it squatted a plastic spittoon—possibly her chamber pot. There was also an unpainted wooden box. He opened the lid to see some clothes inside, most of them cheap and old-fashioned.

It seemed pointless to stay any longer. He climbed down to the side of the bed, raising no questions. How could Fong know anything about the case?

Yu said good-bye to Uncle Fong and left the lane, feeling depressed by the visit.

If a girl, in her flowering age, had chosen to live like that, she wouldn’t likely have been an easy target for a sex murderer or triggered a serial killing.

Instead of going back to the bureau, Yu went to the hotel where Jasmine had worked, which was located in the Old City area. The Seagull wasn’t a fancy hotel, but because of its convenient location and reasonable price, it had become a “hot choice for budget travelers.” In the crowded lobby, Yu saw a group of foreign students carrying huge knapsacks. The front desk manager appeared professional in his scarlet uniform, speaking fluent English to them. He stammered, however, at the police badge Yu produced. He led Yu into an office, closing the door after them.

“Whatever we talk about here, please don’t let any media people know about the hotel’s connection to the red mandarin dress murders. Or our business will go down the drain. People are superstitious and they won’t stay in a hotel where they think someone has met a violent death.”

“I understand,” Yu said. “Now tell me what you know about her.”

“A good girl, hard-working, easy to get along with. We’re all shocked by her death. If anything, perhaps she worked too hard.”

“I’ve talked to her neighborhood committee. They also told me she worked really hard, and she did not stay much at home. Do you know anything about a possible second job of hers?”

“That I don’t know. She worked overtime here, for which we paid her time and a half. She worked for housekeeping in the morning and helped at the hotel canteen. She worked extra nights too. She had to pay her father’s medical bills. Ours is a hotel capable of housing foreign tourists, so we would rather have trusted employees working here. Our general manager gave her as many hours as she pleased. People like a young pretty girl.”

“People like a young pretty girl—what do you mean?”

“Don’t get me wrong. We do not tolerate any improper service here. A girl of her age could have chosen to work somewhere else—say, a nightclub—for far more money, but she stayed here, working longer hours.”

“Do you know anything about her personal life? For instance, did she have a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know,” the manager said, stammering again. “That’s her private life. She worked hard, as I’ve said, and she did not talk much to her colleagues here.”

“Is it possible that there was anything between her and someone staying at the hotel?”

“Comrade Detective Yu, ours is not a high-end hotel. And the people staying here are no Big Bucks. They come for a convenient location at a reasonable price, not for . . .companionship.”

“We have to ask all sorts of questions, Comrade Manager,” Yu said. “Here is my card. If you can think of anything else, please contact me.”

The visit to the hotel yielded little new information. If anything, it only confirmed his impression that a girl like Jasmine probably wouldn’t have set off a lust killer who happened to cross her path, either by the grubby lane or at the shabby hotel.

SIX

PEIQIN
,
TOO
,
HAD BEEN
giving a lot of thought to the mandarin dress case.

Not just because there were so many puzzling things about it, but also because it was Yu’s first case as acting squad head.

As before, she drew a line for herself between what she could and could not do. She didn’t have the resources available to the cops, nor the time and energy. So she chose the red mandarin dress as an entrance point.

As an accountant, Peiqin didn’t have to work at her office in the restaurant from nine to five every day. So on the way to the restaurant, she stepped into a boutique tailor shop. It wasn’t known for its mandarin dresses, but she was acquainted with an old tailor there. She explained the purpose of her visit and showed him an enlarged picture of the dress.

“Judging from its long sleeves and low slits, it’s quite old-fashioned, possibly a style from the early sixties,” the white-haired-and-browed tailor said, adjusting the glasses along the ridge of his angular nose. “I doubt it’s mass-produced nowadays. Look at the craftsmanship. The double-fish-shaped cloth buttons. It probably takes a day to make them.”

“Do you think it was made in the sixties?”

“I cannot tell that from a picture. Altogether, I’ve only made about half a dozen of them. I am no expert, but if a customer gave me the material and the design, I think I could do the job.”

“One more question: do you know any other store that could have made it?”

“Quite a number of them. In addition, there are private tailors who work at the customer’s home. No stores for them, you know.”

So there was another problem. Many private tailors worked like that, moving from one customer family to another. The cops were incapable of investigating all the possibilities.

Leaving the store, Peiqin decided to go to the Shanghai Library. If she was going to help, she had to proceed in a way different than the cops.

In the library, she spent about an hour checking through the catalogue and requested a pile of books and magazines.

It was already past ten when she climbed up into her office at Four Seas Restaurant, carrying a plastic bag of books in her arms. Manager Hua Shan wasn’t there that morning. He had been out for two days, starting his own company, though he still kept his job at Four Seas.

In spite of its good location, the state-run restaurant was having a hard time. Between socialism and capitalism, as the new saying went, falls a shadow of difference—that between the people working for themselves and the people working for the state. The restaurant had suffered losses for months. Hence, there were talks about introducing management responsibility: the restaurant would remain state-run in name, but the new manager would be responsible for its profit or losses.

In the midst of a chorus of ladles clanking and clattering on the woks downstairs, she made an effort to focus on the books in the tiny office above the restaurant kitchen.

What she had told Yu was true. She knew little about the dress. In her school days, she had seen it only in movies. And then in a Cultural Revolution–era photograph of Wang Guangmei, the “ex-first lady” of China, who was forced to display herself in public wearing a torn scarlet mandarin dress and a chunk of white Ping-Pong balls in imitation of oversized pearls—both the dress and jewelry serving as evidence of her decadent bourgeois lifestyle.

Looking at the materials spread out on the desk, Peiqin was at a loss. She leafed through one book after another until a black and white picture caught her eye: a picture of Ailing, a Shanghai novelist rediscovered in the nineties, wearing a florid mandarin dress in the thirties. In a recent TV show, Peiqin recalled, a young girl strolled musingly along Huanghe Road, as if stepping about on the clouds of fashionable nostalgia, and pointed at a building behind her. “Perhaps it is here, from this quaint building, Ailing would walk out, blossoming in a mandarin dress she herself had designed. What a romantic city!”

A self-proclaimed fashion critic, Ailing had drawn a series of sketches of Shanghai-style clothing, which was reprinted at the end of the book. But Peiqin became more interested in the personal story of Ailing. Ailing started publishing early and became well-known for her stories about Shanghai. She endured a heartbreaking marriage with a talented womanizer, who later made a small fortune by writing about their ill-starred marriage. After 1949, she went to the United States, where she married an aged, impoverished American writer. As in a Tang dynasty poem, “Everything turns out sad for a poor couple.” The biographer diagnosed her marriage as self-deconstructive. After the death of her second husband, she shut herself up in her apartment in San Francisco, where she died alone. No one was aware of it until several days later.