When Red is Black

Chapter 14

Yu arrived at the neighborhood committee office quite early in the morning. It was not difficult for him to make a detailed list of Yin’s and Yang’s relatives, based on the information already gathered by Old Liang, even though Old Liang did not himself see any point in contacting them.

Yin’s parents had both passed away. She was their only daughter. She had two aunts on her mother’s side, much younger than her mother, but they had been out of contact since the early sixties. The Cultural Revolution had complicated a lot of things, including relationships among relatives. In her personal dossier, these relatives were not mentioned at all. According to several phone calls Old Liang had made, they had neither written nor spoken to her after the Cultural Revolution.

As for people close to Yang, in addition to a distant aunt in her nineties, there was only one sister, Jie, who had passed away three or four years ago. Even in the years before the Cultural Revolution, a Rightist was to be avoided like the plague. Jie had had her own family to worry about. Partially because of him, she also had been put on the “control and use” list. Jie had given birth to a daughter, Hong, in the late fifties, shortly after the commencement of the Anti-Rightist movement. When Hong was born, Yang had mailed a money order of fifty Yuan to Hong, but the money was returned to him. And that was that. Jie also got into trouble during the Cultural Revolution, and Hong went to the countryside as an educated youth, married a local peasant, had a son, and seemed to have settled down there.

When Yu had finished making the list, Old Liang, who lived only about five minutes away from the lane and spent more time in the office than at home, had still not shown up. Zhong, the security director of the neighborhood committee, was devouring a hot, oily green-onion cake. He poured a cup of wulong tea for Yu.

“Comrade Old Liang is investigating somewhere else this morning,” Zhong said, taking a seat opposite Yu at the desk. “Do you need any help from us, Comrade Detective Yu?”

“Are you familiar with the background of the shrimp woman? Her surname is Peng.”

“Oh, the shrimp woman! You have come to the right man,” Zhong said. “She’s been my next-door neighbor for years. A good, honest, timid woman, without even the nerve to kill a fly. She worked in a silk factory for more than twenty years, never having the guts to say no to her boss, never once. And then what? She was among the first laid off, and she ended up peeling shrimp in the lane early every morning.”

“She has an arrangement with the food market, I’ve heard.”

“Yes, it’s part of a government effort to help those sinking beneath the poverty line. Some of the shrimp in the market do not look fresh. In order to sell them for a better price, the market has the shrimp peeled early in the morning. A lot of Shanghai wives shop there before they go to work. So the market makes a point of having the peeled shrimp on sale before seven thirty.”

“So she has to start working at around six every morning?”

“She has no choice. Her family depends on what she earns from the food market,” Zhong said. “Is she in any trouble?”

“No. I just have a few questions for her.”

“I’ll send for her.”

“No, thanks. I am going to the shikumen house. She is probably sitting in the lane.”

Sure enough, the shrimp woman was there, sitting on her bamboo stool, opposite the back door of the shikumen house, busy working, with a basket of frozen shrimp at her feet. She was in her late forties or early fifties, her face as thin as one of the brown sugar cakes of his childhood. She wore a pair of old-fashioned glasses smeared with broken pieces of shrimp shells.

Peng smiled nervously as Yu stopped beside her. He squatted down and lit a cigarette without speaking. It was cold; he kept one of his hands in his pants pocket.

“Comrade-Comrade Detective,” she stuttered.

“You surely know why I’ve come to you today, don’t you?”

“I don’t know, Comrade Detective,” she said. “Well, I suppose it’s about Yin Lige. Poor woman. Old Heaven is blind, truly. She did not deserve it.”

“Poor woman?” He was rather surprised by her sympathetic tone. The shrimp peeler was wrapped in an ancient imitation army overcoat, its collar raised against the cold wind, and her fingers were swollen, cracked, covered with the shrimp slime. Surely she, not Yin, was to be pitied.

“She was good-hearted. Life is not fair. She suffered such a lot during the Cultural Revolution,” she explained.

“Can you tell me something more about her?” Yu asked. It was strange, he reflected: her attitude toward Yin was quite different from that of her other neighbors. “About what you call her good-heartedness. Give me one or two examples.”

“A lot of people in the lane treat me like trash, complaining about the smell of the shrimp. I understand. But I have no choice. I cannot prepare them in the courtyard, or the other residents would have kicked me out of the house.

“Yin alone was really compassionate. After her piece in Wenhui Daily, the neighborhood committee came to her, asking whether she had some other suggestions for lane work. She put in a good word for me as well. Afterward, the neighborhood committee gave me a special permit allowing me to work in the lane.”

“It sounds like she could be quite helpful to people in need.”

“She was. She gave several textbooks to my daughter. And a new plastic folding chair, a recliner, to me. She gave it to me three or four years ago.”

“She gave you a new plastic folding chair? Why?”

“That summer she had a visitor, her nephew, I think-”

“What?” Yu cut in. He had never heard of a nephew before. Nor had one been mentioned by Old Liang. “Hold on-her nephew? Did she describe him that way?”

“I’m not absolutely sure, but she introduced him to me. He was just a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old at the time. He came from the countryside, I don’t know where. He had no other relatives in the city, she explained.”

“Did he stay with her here in the tingzijian room?”

“Yes, but not exactly. It would not be convenient to have a guest in so tiny a room. She bought the folding recliner for him to use, so he could sleep in the courtyard. It’s quite common for people to sleep outside here. Some even sleep in the lane. One night, the courtyard was so full, Yin had to set up the folding chair for him in front of my door. That’s when she introduced him to me, but her introduction was not that specific.”

“How long did he stay here with her?”

“Maybe four or five days. Less than a week.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, he was out during the day, I think. I saw him coming back with her one evening. She must have gone out with him. After he left, she gave the chair to me.”

“Has he ever returned since?”

“No, not that I know of. Perhaps he was a poor relative from the countryside making his one visit to the city.”

Yu took out his notebook. The shrimp woman wiped her hands on her apron apprehensively, which reminded him once more of the trace of coal dust on his hand the previous afternoon.

“Let me ask you another question. You said you that were busy peeling shrimp on the morning of February seventh, the morning Yin was murdered, and that you never moved a step away from here.”

“That’s correct. The food market pays by the weight of the finished product. I cannot even afford time to go to my chamber pot.”

“You work very hard, I know. But I also know that you got to Yin’s room some time between six fifty-five and seven ten. Now, with the back door open, you must have heard Lanlan shouting for help and seen others rushing upstairs. How could it have taken you somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes to reach Yin’s room?”

“Fifteen minutes?” She was momentarily flabbergasted. “I don’t know. I do not know what you are driving at, Comrade Detective. I heard the noise, let me think, yes, I heard the noise, and I went over.”

“Don’t be nervous. We don’t punish innocent people,” Yu said. “Did something else happen in the lane that morning?”

“No, nothing I can remember.”

“Take your time. Try to recall every detail, from the moment you picked up the frozen shrimp supply from the market. It might have been trivial, perhaps an unexpected sound in the lane, or something else that distracted you.”

“A sound-let me think-yes, I do remember now. There was some noise coming from the green-onion-cake booth. It’s always a noisy place. Lei hawks his wares at the top of his voice, you know. But that morning the noise was louder, mixed with another voice. So I stepped out to the main lane to take a quick look.”

“How long did that take?”

“I don’t know. One minute. A couple of minutes, maybe. From where I stood, I could not hear clearly. It took a little time for me to make out what was happening.”

“Did you walk up to the booth?”

“I took a few steps in that direction, but I never went really close to it, not with my hands covered in shrimp slime.”

“Don’t move, Comrade Peng,” Yu said, standing abruptly. “I’ll be right back.”

He strode to the front lane entrance, and came back with Lei following him, his hands covered in flour. The shrimp woman, her face now a mask of anxiety, was unaware that she was crushing a shrimp to a pulp between her fingers.

“Did you have an argument or a quarrel with somebody on the morning of February seventh, the morning Yin was murdered?” Yu asked.

“Yes, I did. Some bastard complained about a piece of hair in his onion cake, and he demanded ten Yuan as compensation. That’s bullshit. He could have put his own hair into his food. Anyway, we don’t claim to be a five-star restaurant!”

“Do you remember the time?”

“Quite early. Around six thirty.”

So the shrimp woman’s statement was true.

One fact was now established: there had been three or four minutes that morning during which somebody could have left through the back door without being seen.

Yu crossed off Lei from Old Liang’s suspect list, since at least his time was now accounted for.

It was far from a breakthrough, though. This merely made it possible, in theory, to consider an outsider as the murderer.

Yu thanked Peng and Lei. The shrimp woman grasped Yu’s hand in gratitude, forgetting about hers being wet and dirty.

Lei insisted on treating Yu to a brown bag full of his hot green-onion cakes. “Yin was a good woman. We will do whatever we can to cooperate with your investigation. As long as you are working in the lane, breakfast and lunch are on me. Free. But for her help, I would not have my business today.”

Savoring a hot cake stuffed with chopped green onion and minced pork fat, Yu returned to the neighborhood committee office, where Old Liang was waiting with excitement written all over his face.

“A breakthrough, Comrade Detective Yu!”

“What?”

“Remember Cai, the cricket gambler we discussed yesterday?”

“Yes, I do. Is there new information about Cai?”

“I have been working hard on the background checkups, as I told you,” Old Liang said, pouring out a small white porcelain cup of Dragon Well tea for Yu, and then another for himself. “This is extraordinary, excellent tea; all the tea leaves were picked and processed before the Yuqian festival. I keep it for special occasions, like today. It’s really special.”

“Oh, yes. Please tell me what you have found out,” Yu said. “You surely have done a great job. The older the ginger, the spicier.”

On the first day of the investigation, before Yu’s arrival, Cai had told Old Liang that on the morning of February 7, he was not in Treasure Garden Lane, but at his “nail” room in Yangpu District, and that his mother would support his alibi. Old Liang had tried to call the mother, but was told that public phone service there had been canceled several months earlier, as part of the government’s pressure to force out those “nails.” Old Liang did not let the matter drop; he himself went to the nail room. Cai’s mother was not there-and, according to her neighbors, living conditions in the area were so hard that she had long since moved out to stay with her daughter. On the night of February 6 and then on the morning of February 7, no one had seen Cai at that address. As there was only one common sink with running water in the building, residents encountered one another several times a day. They had not seen him, however, for at least a week.

Old Liang had another talk with Cai, who clung to his earlier statement. Instead of contradicting him, earlier that morning Old Liang insisted on walking with him back to his nail home in Yangpu District. When the door was opened, the mail that had accumulated there for over a week stared Cai in the face. One unopened letter bore the stamped date of January 25. Cai had no explanation. Old Liang immediately took Cai into custody, and re-approached his wife and mother-in-law. They continued to swear that Cai had not been in the shikumen building on the morning of February 7, although they could not say where he might have been. They also proclaimed his innocence-which, of course, had no effect on the investigation. All suspects were “innocent.”

“Walking him back to the nail room was really a master stroke,” Yu commented.

“Cai has a motive,” Old Liang said. “As an addicted gambler, he may have been desperately short of money. Cai has that history. And even more important, Cai has a key to the house. He could have sneaked into Yin’s room to steal, not knowing that she would come back earlier than usual, then murdered her, and run upstairs. I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that his wife and mother-in-law are attempting to cover up for him.”

“What did he say after you had destroyed his alibi?”

“He denied having anything to do with the murder,” Old Liang said. “Don’t worry, I have ways of cracking such nuts.”

“Cai is a suspect, I agree,” Yu said. “But I have just a couple of questions. Somebody like Cai bets big-time, thousands or ten-thousands of Yuan on a little cricket, as you have told me. Yin seems to be too small a fish for someone with his appetite.”

“No, I disagree. When you’re desperate, you’re desperate. As an incorrigible gambler, if he had lost several cricket fights in a row, he might have done anything for a few hundred Yuan.”

“It’s a possibility. But why should he have given a false alibi? It didn’t help him at all.”

“Well, you remember the saying, If you had not stolen, you would not be so nervous.”

“Yes, you have a point,” Yu said. “We’ll work on him.”

Yu told Old Liang about his discovery, the possibility that someone could have left through the back door without being seen by the shrimp woman.

Old Liang, proud of his own breakthrough, brushed aside that possibility. “Let’s say there was an opportunity to leave unseen for two or three minutes at most. So the murderer must have waited somewhere in the shikumen house for his chance. But where could he have waited without being seen?”

Detective Yu did not have an answer, not immediately.