Death of a Red Heroine

it.
    If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn’t real.
    That was the line he had written under the poem “Miracle” to that friend far away in Beijing. It could be about poetry, but also about police work.

Chapter 28
    I t was already nine o’clock when Chief Inspector Chen reached his apartment.
    A message light blinked on his machine. Too many messages in one day. Again he sensed a dull pounding at his temples—a new headache coming on. It could be an omen, a signal for him to stop. But he pushed down the button before he dropped his briefcase.
    “Comrade Chief Inspector Chen, this is Li Guohua speaking. Please give me a call when you return. I’ll be working late in the office tonight. Right now it is ten to five.” It was Party Secretary Li’s voice, formal and serious even when leaving a message.
    He called the bureau; the phone was picked up on the first ring. Li was waiting for him.
    “Come to the office, Chief Inspector Chen. We need to have a talk.”
    “It’ll take me about thirty minutes. Will you be still there?”
    “Yes, I’m waiting for you.”
    “Then I’m on my way.”
    Actually it took more than thirty minutes before he walked into the Party Secretary’s fifth-floor office. Li was having instant beef-flavored noodles. The plastic bowl stood amidst the papers scattered across the mahogany desk. There was a small heap of cigarette butts in an exquisite tray of Fujian quartz with a dragon design.
    “Comrade Party Secretary Li, Chief Inspector Chen Cao reporting,” Chen said, observing the correct political form.
    “Welcome back, Comrade Chief Inspector Chen.”
    “Thanks.”
    “How’s everything?”
    “Everything is fine,” Chen said. “I tried to report to you this morning, but you were not available. Then I had to be out for the most of the day.”
    “You have been busy investigating the case, I know,” Li said. “Now tell me about it.”
    “We’ve made some real progress.” Chen opened his briefcase. “As Detective Yu may have reported, we targeted Wu Xiaoming as the chief suspect before my trip to Guangzhou. And now we have several other leads and they all fit together.”
    “New leads?”
    “Well, one is the last phone call Guan received on May tenth. According to the stub book of the public phone station at Qinghe Lane, it came in around nine thirty, about three or four hours before her death. That call was made by none other than Wu Xiaoming. It’s confirmed.” He put a copy of the record on the desk.
    “It’s not just this one particular call. For more than half a year, Wu made a considerable number of calls to her—three or four a week, on the average, some quite late at night. And Guan called him. Their relationship was apparently something more than what Wu admitted.”
    “That might mean something,” Li said, “but Wu Xiaoming had been Guan’s photographer. So he could have contacted her from time to time—in a professional way.”
    “No, it’s much more than that. We’ve also got a couple of witnesses. One of them is a night peddler on the corner of Hubei Road. She said that on several occasions shortly before Guan’s death, she saw Guan returning in a luxurious white car, in the company of a man, late in the night. Wu drives a white Lexus, his father’s car.”
    “But it could have been a taxi.”
    “I don’t think so. The peddler saw no taxi sign atop the car. She also saw Guan lean into the car and kiss the driver.”
    “Really!” Li said, throwing the empty plastic bowl into the trash can. “Still, other people have white cars, too. There’re so many upstarts in Shanghai now.”
    “We’ve also found, among other things, that Wu made a trip to the Yellow Mountains in Guan’s company last October. They used assumed names and fabricated documents, registering as a married couple so that they could share a hotel room. We have several witnesses who can testify to this.”
    “Wu shared the same hotel room with Guan?”
    “Exactly. What’s more, Wu took some nude pictures of Guan there, and then there was a violent quarrel between them.”
    “But in your previous report, you said Guan was not involved with anyone at the time of her death.”
    “That’s because they kept the affair a secret.”
    “That is something.” Li added after a pause, “But an affair does not necessarily mean a murder.”
    “Well, things went wrong between