A Case of Two Cities

has been doing a great job for us.”
     
    “But what do we do in the evening?” Shasha said. “She won’t be here with us all the time.”
     
    It was a good point, so Chen requested that Catherine stay with them at the hotel, at least for one or two days. It appeared to be a very reasonable request. Chen himself was busy with many things, and there needed to be an interpreter around for the Chinese writers.
     
    She agreed quietly. “It’ll save me downtown traffic in the morning.”
     
    The hotel manager cooperated promptly. Instead of giving her the room Huang had occupied, he promised her another one on the same floor as the delegation. Chen was pleased with the arrangement. Perhaps later, after the delegation political study, he would run into her in the corridor.
     
    * * * *
     
    And he did, only earlier. As the delegation was having their evening political study, Catherine called into Chen’s room.
     
    “Miss Rohn wants me to come and discuss tomorrow’s activity,” Chen said to the delegation at the end of the phone conversation. “Americans like to stick to their schedules.”
     
    “That’s true,” Shasha said. “They have to cook with the recipe in their hands. No improvisation or imagination. But she is so attractive, and speaks good Chinese too.”
     
    To his surprise, Chen found Detective Lenich in Catherine’s room. Her true identity, as a U.S. marshal, was no longer being kept from the American investigator. She was dressed in shorts, sandals, and a light yellow T-shirt. She must have taken a shower, her hair still wet. She started making a fresh pot of coffee for Chen.
     
    Detective Lenich elaborated on his theory. “The murder was a collaboration between an outsider and an insider. An insider to point out the target, and an outsider with a car to move the body. My colleagues have made a more thorough search of Huang’s room. Nothing there matched the fiber found on his clothes, and the bus in which the delegation traveled to St. Louis is equipped with imitation leather seats.”
     
    But this theory opened up a number of new questions, Chen observed. For such collaboration, the plan must have been made far in advance. That afternoon, the delegation was originally scheduled to arrive for lunch at the hotel, but, because of a traffic accident along the highway, they arrived several hours late. Then there was the unforeseeable factor of Little Huang’s bath in his room. So the outsider in Detective Lenich’s conspiracy theory would have had to wait hours outside of the hotel, and the insider—a delegation member—would have had to be there too, see Little Huang walking out, and point him out to the murderer. And during that time period, there must have been some contact between the insider and outsider.
     
    Lenich had checked with the hotel phone service. Nothing. It was no surprise, Chen thought. He himself had made a point of not using the hotel phone except for official business. For such a murderous conspiracy, the hotel phone would have been unacceptable. The only phone calls Detective Lenich had discovered were from Shasha’s to Chen’s room. And another one from the lobby house phone—possibly a wrong number, since no one spoke when it bounced back from Chen’s room to the hotel operator.
     
    “A room-to-room call,” Detective Lenich commented. “It was around five-forty. No one picked up. It proves only one thing. Little Huang must have stepped out of the room by that time. Incidentally, that also rules out Shasha as a suspect.”
     
    They then discussed the delegation activity for the next day. Lenich thought the Chinese writers had better remain in the hotel, but Chen said that they had been complaining. It would be hard to keep them in for another long frustrating day.
     
    “Let’s go to the Arch,” Catherine suggested. “It’s close to the hotel. If there is any new development, Detective Lenich can come over.”
     
    Lenich and Chen left her room around ten-thirty. She walked them to the door with a wan smile. It had been a long, exhausting day, and she looked pale in the corridor light. Chen then accompanied the American cop to the hotel’s front gate.
     
    Back in his room, he found several fax pages about Little Huang from the Chinese Writers’ Association. The information from the official channels showed nothing suspicious in his background. He didn’t start working for the association immediately after graduation; he was assigned to