Don't Cry, Tai Lake

THIRTEEN

It was one of the few mornings that Detective Yu, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, didn’t have to get up early. Nor did he want to. It was Saturday morning, and the clock on the wall read eight thirty, but he was still in bed with Peiqin. Qinqin, their only son, had left around six for an intensive review session in Pudong to prepare for the coming college entrance exam.

There was only a plasterboard partition wall between their room and Qinqin’s, so they couldn’t enjoy any real privacy. But this morning, it was different.

Peiqin was sitting up, reclining against a couple of pillows and watching TV with the volume turned up fairly loud. She didn’t want to go out to the food market early, either. With Qinqin away for the day, she had no motivation to prepare a special meal.

Yu understood. He lay beside her, contented. The moment would be perfect if he could smoke a cigarette in bed, but he knew better. He thought about talking to Peiqin about the recent work at the bureau but then thought better of it. It was a quiet moment, which he cherished. There were several none-too-special “special cases,” for which he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. Chief Inspector Chen would come back in a week.

“Any special cases of late?” she said, turning off the TV. It was as if she was synchronized with his thoughts.

“No, not really,” he said. “There’s one involving an official in the city government, but he’s already a dead tiger, so to speak. It’s just a matter of process-first a list of his wrongdoings will be released to the public, and then an editorial will appear in Liberation Daily hailing the Party’s determination to fight corruption. Another case involves some dissidents planning to release a petition calling for improved human rights. The authorities in Beijing put them on a blacklist long ago, so the results are a foregone conclusion. I don’t think there is anything our squad can do. Even Chen couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“So why the sudden vacation for your chief inspector?”

He had sort of anticipated the question. The inscrutableness of the inspector had become one of her favorite topics. “I don’t know of anything happening here that Chen had to get out of the way of. Not recently.”

“Did he give you any explanation for his sudden vacation?”

“No, not at all.”

“But you never know what your boss is really up to. Remember his trip to Beijing not too long ago?” she said, then added, “Not that I have anything against him, you know.”

“Some people are saying that he will soon be removed from his position because he has ruffled too many high feathers and that the vacation is just a face-saving maneuver. But I don’t think so. His vacation was arranged by Comrade Secretary Zhao. If anything, that should indicate that Chen remains in favor in Beijing. So it might be nothing more than a vacation. It’s not unimaginable for him.”

“He needs a break, what with his nervous breakdown not too long ago, and his ex-girlfriend having married somebody else. A vacation will do him good. But still, I wonder what he’s doing in Wuxi. I can’t picture him relaxing, drinking tea, and sightseeing like a tourist. Your boss seems to bring trouble with him wherever he goes.”

“Well, I’ve heard from Sergeant Huang, a local cop in Wuxi. According to him, Chen might be having a vacation fling with a young pretty woman-much younger than Chen.”

“Really!” Peiqin said, sitting up straighter. “He has a way with women.”

“But this time he might not be in luck. According to Huang, there’s a snag. She’s connected to a man in trouble. Big trouble-”

Before Yu could continue, the phone rang.

“Oh, Chief Inspector Chen,” Yu said after picking up the phone. “We were just talking about you.”

“Yu, I need a favor.”

“Yes, Chief?”

“I need you to do a background check on someone. She lives in Wuxi, but was originally from Shanghai and comes back regularly.”

“A young girl?”

“She’s middle-aged, one Mrs. Liu. Her husband, head of a large chemical company, was murdered a few days ago.”

“I see. So you’re in Wuxi to investigate the murder?”

“No. I’m on vacation in Wuxi. It’s not my case. It’s up to the Wuxi police, but I do need your help,” Chen said. “Last Tuesday, Mrs. Liu was in Shanghai, playing mahjong with three others. I’ll text you her Shanghai address, along with the name and number of one of the three with her that evening.”

“So you want me to check her alibi.”

“Yes, but not officially, if you can avoid it. The Wuxi police have already made some enquiries, but she’s not a suspect. Not exactly.” Chen then added quickly, as if in afterthought, “Also, see if you can find any background information about a man named Fu. He also works in Wuxi, but was originally from Shanghai. And he too was back in Shanghai this weekend.”

“Why? Is there some connection between the two?”

“There might be-something that I’m still failing to grasp. The Wuxi police haven’t made any enquiries about him. He’s not a suspect, and I’m just curious, you know. It’s probably nothing more than a hunch.”

It was strange. Despite what he was saying, Chen sounded more than casually curious to Yu.

“Oh, Fu lives in the Old City area, quite close to the intersection of Renmin and Henan Road. I’ll also text you his Shanghai address,” Chen went on. “Unless I’m remembering wrong, it shouldn’t be too far from Peiqin’s old home.”

“I’ll get on it, Chief. Is there anything specific you’re looking for?”

“Anything you can find out. I know it’s a Saturday, so I owe you one, Yu. Give my regards to Peiqin.”

“What’s up?” Peiqin said the moment Yu put down the phone.

Yu repeated Chen’s requests, which had come out of nowhere, especially if Chen was truly in Wuxi on vacation. He wished that Chen had explained further, but as always, the chief inspector must have his reasons.

“I see,” Peiqin said. “Sure, we’ll do our best to help.”

Yu got up, smiling at the pronoun in her quick and crisp response. As in the past, she was eager to join in.

In years past, Peiqin had been reluctant to get involved in his duties as a policeman. But since he started working for the chief inspector, she had completely changed. In fact, she had helped-in her way-with the investigation in several difficult cases.

After getting Chen’s text message, Yu dialed the phone number of the woman who had been with Mrs. Liu the evening of the murder. Bai was her surname. She was not at home, so Yu left a message asking her to call back at her earliest convenience.

“We might try to talk to her neighbors,” Peiquin said.

“Good idea.”

The lazy Saturday that Yu had envisioned was suddenly no more. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that Yu would complain about.

They set out to Mrs. Liu’s old neighborhood in Zhabei. It was a part of Shanghai not familiar to either of them. Zhabei had been something of a slum-full of old, shabby, ramshackle houses and dirty, ugly factories. The construction of plain-looking concrete “workers’ homes” there in the sixties and seventies had hardly helped. There weren’t any well-known stores or attractions there, and with the terrible traffic congestion in the city, they had previously no reason to spend a couple of hours going there.

But Zhabei had changed a lot in recent years. As Yu and Peiqin stepped out of the subway, recently extended to this part of the city, they saw a number of new high-rises.

The overall impression was, however, singularly mixed. Just two or three blocks from an ultramodern skyscraper, they saw shabby side streets with dilapidated buildings, tiny lanes with sordid entrances, and scenes that they imagined were typical of the old neighborhood.

They approached a small family grocery store near the entrance of the lane in which Mrs. Liu had lived. To their surprise, Xiong, the owner of the store, a garrulous woman in her early fifties, claimed to know Mrs. Liu well, having been her childhood neighbor and friend. According to Xiong, Mrs. Liu came back quite regularly, though her parents had passed away. Her old home was unoccupied most of the time, with only occasional visitors staying there. Among her old neighbors, Mrs. Liu had plenty of face, having once invited a large group of them to a fancy restaurant. She also owned a high-end apartment in Xujiahui, one of the top areas in Shanghai, but she didn’t seem to go to that apartment often, and none of her old neighbors here had ever visited. Still, the very location of it spoke volumes about her wealth.

“You should see the way she plays mahjong-a hundred yuan a game, not including tips. It’s as if she was printing money at home,” Xiong said, in proud excitement.

“She comes all the way back here to play mahjong? Does she lose a lot too?”

“She won’t bankrupt herself on a mahjong table. You don’t have to worry about that. For a woman, having a good husband is far more important than having a good job,” Xiong concluded. “She always has an eye for men. In the early years, Liu was still a nobody from the countryside, yet she followed him all the way to Wuxi. No one else had that kind of far-sighted vision. No wonder he provides her whatever she wants.”

But all of this information was neither here nor there, and despite her claims of profound friendship with Mrs. Liu, Xiong hadn’t even heard about the death of Mrs. Liu’s husband.

After taking their leave of Xiong, Yu and Peiqin then approached some of the other neighbors. They didn’t learn much, and some of the neighbors were suspicious of them and refused to answer their questions. Yu and Peiqin managed to get into the stunted two-story building and up to the room Mrs. Liu kept there. The door was locked, of course, but from the outside it looked no different from her neighbors’.

Mrs. Liu appeared to be a success story, all the more so when compared to her neighbors, Yu thought. He went fishing for a cigarette in his pocket, but he decided not to take one out around Peiqin. Why Mrs. Liu kept coming back to the impoverished old neighborhood remained a mystery. Her family hadn’t been that well off, though in the context of the neighborhood, they might have done okay. The only possible explanation Yu could think of was that she wanted to show off, but what would be the point of showing off repeatedly, continuously, for years?

“If she was happily married,” Peiqin said, as if reading his mind, “why would she come back so often?”

“I don’t know,” Yu said, shaking his head. He had no idea what Chen wanted him to find out. But then Chen himself might not have a clear idea.

It was then that his cell phone rang. It was Chen again.

“I have to ask you another favor, Yu.”

“Go ahead, Chief,” he said, then added, “I’m in Mrs. Liu’s old neighborhood right now.”

“Thanks, Yu. The Wuxi Number One Chemical Company here is about to go public. The head of the company, Liu, was the one who was murdered. I have only a little information about its IPO plan. It could help if I knew more about how such a plan works. Now, as I recall, Peiqin said that her restaurant belongs to Plum Blossom Pavilion Group, which is also going public soon. I’m wondering whether Peiqin could, as an accountant, find out something about the IPO for the Wuxi company. Perhaps she knows a thing or two about it.”

“I’ll tell her. In fact, she’s right beside me. Do you want to talk to her?”

“No, that’s about all I could tell her. Please let her know that I appreciate her help. I owe you both.”

Chen said his good-bye, and Yu returned the phone to his pocket. He looked over at Peiqin.

“Something for me to do again?” Peiqin inquired with a smile.

Yu explained Chen’s request.

“Ours is just one of the numerous small restaurants owned by the Group,” Peiqin said, shaking her head. “These things are determined by the bosses of the Group and have nothing to do with me.”

“But do you know something about the way an IPO works?” He knew she had been dabbling a little in the stock market.

“Different companies have different ways. It’s something new and unprecedented in China, at least since 1949,” she said. “I’ve heard a little about the so-called large noncirculating shares and the small noncirculating shares. The bosses who initiate an IPO each get a number of shares, an amount in accordance with his position, at a symbolic price which is practically for free. Once a state-run company goes public, the Party member CEO can become a millionaire or even a billionaire. No one can tell the difference between socialism and capitalism anymore.”

“That’s totally against the Party tradition. Cadres are supposed to serve people wholeheartedly, selflessly.”

“That’s why people want to be Party cadres nowadays,” she said with an ironic smile. “But as for an IPO, that’s about all I know. How could I know anything about a company that’s far away in Wuxi? Your boss must be desperate. As the proverb says, When one’s seriously sick, he will go to any doctor.”

“You mean you think that Chen’s in trouble?”

“He’s desperate for something. Perhaps it’s because of the affair with the young woman. Anyway, the stock market is closed on Saturday, so it would be useless for us to go there. Besides, I don’t know anyone who works there.”

“And I can’t approach anyone there. Chen made a point of saying he didn’t want me investigating officially. Even if I did try to ask a few questions, they wouldn’t have to cooperate with me. I have no authority whatsoever in these matters.”

“No, it would be of no use,” Peiqin said. “Unless we could find someone who has inside connection and information.”

“So, what are we going to do now?”

“Let’s go to visit the other one’s neighborhood. Fu’s.”

That area happened to be Peiqin’s childhood neighborhood, where she had lived until the start of the Cultural Revolution. Her family, being a “black” one, had never mixed much with their neighbors and then during the Cultural Revolution had been driven out of the neighborhood. The memory of being a “black puppy,” with its head hung low and its tail tucked in, still stung. Peiqin hardly ever went back there.

“After so many years,” she said pensively, “I may not find anyone who still knows me, let alone someone who will tell us anything about Fu. The address you have is in a side lane, if I’m not remembering wrong, and in those years I didn’t go there often.”

However, after having made several calls on the way, Yu had better luck. One of his colleagues was acquainted with the neighborhood cop there, Wei Guoqiang, who promised to help.

Wei was waiting for them at the neighborhood committee office. Though no longer as powerful as it had been in the years of “class struggle” under Mao, it was still something of a grass-roots organization responsible for neighborhood security. Wei had no problem obtaining information for a general background check on a local resident.

According to Wei, Fu had been born to and raised by a poor family here in this mainly lower- and middle-class neighborhood. Three generations of Fu’s family had been squeezed into a single room of fifteen square meters in a shikumen house: his grandfather, his parents, and Fu and his younger brother. Even though Fu worked in Wuxi now, he still came back quite regularly. When there, he shared a retrofitted attic with his brother.

“Hold on,” Yu cut in. “Fu serves as the head of a large state-run company in Wuxi. He should have been able to buy an apartment for himself, if not for the family.”

“Is he already the head?” Wei asked, then went on without waiting for an answer. “But there’s a reason he hasn’t bought an apartment here, that I can tell you. This neighborhood is included in the city reconstruction plan. The old houses may soon be pulled down and replaced by new construction. When that happens, the Fu family will be given at least two apartments as compensation, and Fu could have one of them when he gets married. If instead he bought one now and moved out, it would be a different story. Housing compensation is based on the number of people in the family.”

“I see. But he works in Wuxi. Does he have to come back to Shanghai regularly as part of the housing plan?”

“Well, it is said that he has a girlfriend in Shanghai, someone who used to live in this same neighborhood. She would come to see him here whenever he was back, but I’ve not seen her for a while. Perhaps a lovers’ fight or something like that. Between two young people, you can never tell.”

This was something Chen hadn’t mentioned-a girlfriend in Shanghai, Yu noted to himself. It could be totally irrelevant, however.

“Is there anything strange or suspicious about him, Wei?”

“What do you mean? Is there anything strange or suspicious? No, I don’t think so. He passed the entrance exam and was accepted to Fudan University. As his parents are both barely educated, it wasn’t easy. He studied hard. He became a representative at a national Youth League conference and then joined the Party. And he must have worked really hard at his job, too, if he’s already the head of a large state-run factory.”

“How long have you worked here?” Peiqin cut in.

“Three-almost four years.”

“I used to live here,” she said with a wistful look on her face, “but it was almost thirty years ago.”

“Really!”

“I’d like to take a walk around, Yu. It’s such a fine day today.”

“Good idea,” Yu said.

“Come back if you have any other questions,” Wei said, smiling.

They took leave and walked out of the neighborhood committee office.

As Peiqin had supposed, a lot of old neighbors had moved away. After half a block, she hadn’t recognized anyone. It was almost lunchtime, and there was a group of people standing around. Some were cooking on a coal stove, some were using a common sink, and some were enjoying early lunch. Only one or two looked up in curiosity at the two strangers passing by.

Finally, she noticed a makeshift scallion and ginger booth on a street corner facing a side lane. The old woman sitting at the booth used to live in the building next door to her family. Back then, Peiqin called her Auntie Hui. Now, white-haired, toothless, sitting on a small stool with a pronounced stoop, she must have been in her seventies. The booth looked the same as always, though, with the green onion still succulent, and the ginger still golden, spread out on the same narrow wooden board. The one difference after all these years was that the small bunch of green onion that had cost only one cent at that time now cost fifty cents. Peiqin stepped up to the booth and introduced herself.

“I was a slip of a girl then, Auntie Hui. Once you gave me a bunch of green onion for one cent and a large piece of ginger for free. After that, my mother called me a capable girl for days.”

“You still remember that after all this time,” Auntie Hui said, her face wreathed in smiles like a dried-up winter melon. “And this is…?”

“Oh, this is my husband, Yu.”

Auntie Hui was pleased by the unexpected reunion, and the two spoke of little other than memories of the bygone days. The continued existence of the tiny booth spoke for how little the old woman’s life had improved since then. Peiqin finally brought the conversation around to the question she had in mind.

“The Fu family lives just opposite here, right?”

“Yes, three generations of them now.”

“I’ve just heard that Fu Hao, the eldest grandson, is now the managing director of a large state company in Wuxi.”

“Yes, I heard about that too,” the old woman said, eyeing Peiqin somewhat warily.

“Our old neighborhood has produced some successful people,” Peiqin said with a smile.

The door of the shikumen house opposite opened with a grinding sound, as if echoing from twenty years ago, and a tall, angular man wearing a light gray wool suit and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses walked out.

Auntie Hui looked up at Peiqin and whispered, “It’s none other than Fu Hao. Do you know him?”

“No, I moved away many years ago, you know.”

“We have to get going, Peiqin,” Yu said. “We’ve spent too long here as it is.”

Peiqin picked up Yu’s cue as he spoke.

“Yes, let’s go. It’s Saturday. We have to do some shopping,” she said, like an understanding wife. “We’ll come again, Auntie Hui.”

They sauntered away, hand in hand like a loving couple, which they were. It was as in a popular song, “It’s the most romantic thing to live, love, and grow old with you, side by side.”

They followed Fu at a discreet distance, even though Yu didn’t have a plan in mind. It wasn’t something Chen had asked him to do, but he had nothing else planned for that afternoon. Yu redialed Bai, who wasn’t home yet. So it might not be a bad idea, he thought, to continue following Fu for a while.

They cut across Yanan Road, and then on to Fuzhou Road. Fu walked steadily, heading north, without looking at the bus stop or for a taxi, seemingly unaware of being shadowed. Fu then turned left on Nanjing Road, which, at the intersection with Henan Road, became a pedestrian street thronged with shoppers and tourists.

No one could move quickly along Nanjing Road. The street was lined along both sides with stores, some of which were very crowded; it would be easy to lose sight of someone. With the two of them following Fu, however, Yu thought they could still manage.

“We haven’t been to Nanjing Road in months,” Peiqin said.

“We’re here today, so we might do some shopping,” he said, “if we lose sight of Fu. We shouldn’t worry about it. Chen didn’t say he was a suspect, and sending us out to look into him was probably nothing more than a whimsical hunch of our eccentric chief inspector.”

But Fu slowed down near the corner of Zhejiang Road and started looking around, as if anxiously awaiting someone. Sure enough, he spotted a slender girl standing near Sheng’s Restaurant and walked over to her. She was smiling and waving her hand at him. However, instead of walking into the restaurant, they went into an old building next to it.

Yu and Peiqin hurried across the street. To their surprise, the old building was a hotel. They peered inside, but there was no sign of Fu or his companion at the front desk or along the dimly lit corridor. They must have already checked in.

In front of the hotel, there was a large sign that declared in bold characters: “Serve the people, hourly rate available, both day time and nighttime, full of leisure, convenience.” The first part sounded like an echo of a saying from Mao, but the part about their business hours was puzzling.

Yu couldn’t help walking up to take a closer look, leaving Peiqin behind.

“It’s really convenient,” a young hotel attendant with a sweet dimple in her cheek came out and said to him. “And very clean too. We change the sheets after every customer. If you don’t have a companion, we can recommend one to you. ”

The full meaning of the hourly rate advertised in the sign finally dawned on him. The hotel was charging for a couple of hours in bed and then a quick shower. That’s all that their operation was about. “Oh, no, thank you,” said Yu, retracing his steps in a hurry.

For a hotel like that, Yu doubted that Fu and his companion had registered under their real names. It would be pointless to ask at the front desk, and he didn’t want to raise unnecessary alarm. In the city, such places were sometimes closely connected to the police, and he thought there was a good chance that this hourly hotel was one of them.

But why would Fu have gone there if that was his girlfriend that he picked up? Was she possibly one of the girls “working” for the hotel? Would Fu come back to Shanghai just for that?

“You know what kind of a hotel it is?” Peiqin said, as Yu walked up.

“I think so,” Yu said, a bit sheepish. “Let’s sit down somewhere and wait for a while.”

He decided to wait and watch for them to come out. Fu’s behavior was strange-even suspicious.

Across the street, there was a small square. It sported a huge LCD screen mounted high and in the background. Next to it stood the celebrated Seventh Heaven, a notorious dance hall back in the pre-1949 era. After 1949, it was turned into the Shanghai Number One Pharmacy Store, but nowadays, it had reverted back to its original function as a nightclub attached to a hotel, though it was no longer that notorious. Nor as classy as its original name suggested. The seven-story building was now dwarfed by all the new surrounding high-rises.

At the edge of the square, there was a somewhat fashionable teahouse, so they went over and took a table outside. No one would pay much attention to a middle-aged couple sitting at a teahouse.

Yu ordered a cup of Lion Hill tea and Peiqin, a bowl of white almond tofu.

“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting with you here if it weren’t for your boss’s request,” she said in mock peevishness.

“After Chen comes back, I will also request vacation time-a whole week. And I’ll sit here with you just like today, every day, all day, if that’s what you really want, Peiqin.”

“No, I’m not complaining. You don’t have to envy your boss’s vacation. True, his may be an all-expenses-paid vacation with all the privileges of a high-ranking cadre, but does he have someone sitting beside him there, looking over that beautiful lake?”

“One can never tell what Chen is up to,” Yu said. “What he has asked us to look into today, I suppose, may have something to do with that girl, the one who is connected to the man in trouble. It might possibly even be a murder case.”

“That’s true,” she said with a low sigh.

“Do you like the area?” Yu asked, changing the subject.

“Yes, but for me, it might be more because of nostalgia. When I was still a small girl, back in the neighborhood we just visited, I sometimes passed by the Seventh Heaven, which then loomed up so high, seemed so unreachable, to me.”

Sipping at the Lion Hill tea, Yu glanced back at the pedestrian street, which seemed to not have changed as dramatically as much of the rest of the city. Several of the old-brand stores remained standing there, though even those had been refurbished.

In the square, a group of people began dancing to music that blared from a cassette player on the ground. A middle-aged, bald man, apparently the leader, dressed in an old sweat-drenched T-shirt with the character Dance printed on the front and in white silk pants with flared legs, danced intently, earnestly. For him, his green belt streaming in the breeze, the movement of the moment seemed to carry the meaning of the world. Across the square, another group was practicing tai chi, striking one pose after another, like floating clouds or flowing water. Continuing to look around the square, Yu then noticed something else going on across the street.

Two young girls, probably only seventeen or eighteen, were approaching a stoutly built Westerner, pointing at the hotel sign. China had been changing so rapidly and radically, it was like the proverb his father, Old Hunter, liked to quote: changing as if from the azure ocean into a mulberry field.

“I can hardly remember what the store was that used to be where the hotel is now,” Peiqin said, following his gaze.

“It was just a stationery store, as I remember,” Yu said.

Apart from the scene unfolding in front of the hotel, sitting there, drinking, relaxing, and looking around was pleasant.

“The only place that looks unchanged is Sheng’s Restaurant. At least the name is the same. And the outside as well.”

“Nanjing Road is no longer the busiest, most important street in the city, but then the city itself has always seemed young and vital, always with young people moving in and out,” Peiqin said, sipping at her drink, “and around here new stores, hotels, and restaurants are springing up.”

It was Yu’s turn to follow her glance to another new hotel, this one near Fujian Road. It was a high-end one built in the European style. He must have walked by it a number of times, but he never thought about going in. As Yu watched, a Big Buck emerged from the revolving door of the hotel, turned and blew a kiss to someone inside, a large diamond ring shining like a dream on his finger.

“Oh, the stock market,” Peiqin exclaimed, as if suddenly inspired, “We don’t know any businesspeople, but Chen does. Remember, he knows a Big Buck called Mr. Gu whose company, New World Group, is in the market.”

“That’s right. I met him once during an investigation. He helped us, claiming to be an admirer of Chen’s. He’ll help out again, I think, if I let him know that the information is for Chen.”

Yu was taking out his cell phone when Peiqin touched his elbow.

“Hold on. He’s coming-they are coming out.”

Fu was walking out with the girl. Instead of parting outside the hotel, they started strolling around, her arm locked in his. They walked across the street to the Yongan Department Store, another old building from the pre-1949 days, newly redecorated from the inside out.

An elderly African man in a white suit had stepped out onto a white balcony on the third floor of Yongan and was playing the trumpet like in an old movie. His performance soon drew a crowd of people, including Fu and his girl.

His cell phone still in his hand, Yu seized the opportunity to quietly take pictures of the two without their knowledge. Even if they had noticed, it was common for people to take photos in the area around Nangjing Road.

It wasn’t what Chen had asked him to do, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, it wasn’t a bad idea to have a few photos of the street. Nanjing Road was changing at such a rapid pace that in a couple of years, he and Peiqin wouldn’t be able to recognize it.

As Yu watched, the couple under the balcony were parting. They hugged passionately several times.

“We should be parting too,” Peiqin said, looking up at him, “if you want me to follow the woman.”

“No, I don’t see the point,” Yu said.

However odd the hotel episode might have appeared, he couldn’t think how it could be relevant to Chen’s investigation. Later, he might check in with Wei, the neighborhood cop. That should be more than enough.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. It’s Saturday. Let’s do some shopping now, Peiqin. And then I’ll call that woman, Bai, one more time.”