Death of a Red Heroine

he said, putting down a few words in his notebook.
    “Thank you, Comrade Chief Inspector,” she said, flattered by his attention. “I checked into it myself. At that time I did not think about it in connection with Guan’s case. Just that it was suspicious, I thought, since it was after eleven o’clock. So I asked Yuan the next day, and she said that she had had no guests that night.”
    “Now what about the public bathroom at the end of the corridor,” he said. “He could have been coming out of there, couldn’t he?”
    “That’s not likely,” she said. “His host would have to accompany him there, or he would not be able to find it.”
    “Yes, you have a point. What did this man look like?”
    “Tall, decent looking. But the light’s so dim I could not see clearly.”
    “How old do you think he was?”
    “Well, mid-thirties, I should think, perhaps forty. Difficult to tell.”
    “Anything else about his appearance?”
    “He seemed neatly dressed; I may have mentioned it.”
    “So you think he could have been coming out of Guan’s room?”
    “Yes,” she said, “but I’m not sure.”
    “Thank you, Comrade Zuo. We’ll investigate,” he said. “If you can think of anything else, give me a call.”
    “Yes, I’ll do that, Comrade Chief Inspector,” she said. “Let us know when you solve the case.”
    “We will, and good-bye.”
    Walking down the stairs, Chen shrugged his shoulders slightly. He had been to the public bathroom himself without being accompanied by anybody.
    At the bus stop on Zhejiang road, he stood for quite a long time. He was trying to sort out what he had accomplished in the day’s work. There was not much. Nothing he had found so far presented a solid lead. If there was anything he had not expected, it would be Guan’s fancy clothes and intimate pictures. But then—that was not too surprising, either. An attractive young woman, even if she was a national model worker, was entitled to some feminine indulgence—in her private life.
    Guan’s unpopularity among her neighbors was even less surprising. That a national model worker would be unpopular in the nineties was a sociological phenomenon, rather than anything else. So, too, in the dorm building. It would have been too difficult to be a model neighbor there, to be popular with her neighbors. Her life was not an ordinary one. So she did not fit into their circle, nor did she care for it.
    There was only one thing he had confirmed: on the night of May tenth, Guan Hongying had left the dorm before eleven o’clock. She had a heavy suitcase in her hand; she’d been going somewhere.
    Another thing not confirmed, but only a hypothesis: She could not have been romantically involved at the time of her death. There was no privacy possible in such a dorm building, no way of secretly dating someone. If there had been anything going on behind her closed door, her dorm neighbors would have known it, and in less than five minutes, the news would have spread like wildfire.
    It would also have taken a lot of courage for a man to come to her room. To the hardboard bed.
    The bus was nowhere in sight yet. It could be very slow during this time of the day. He crossed to the small restaurant opposite the lane entrance. Despite its unsightly appearance, a lot of people were there, both inside the restaurant and outside it. A fat man in a brown corduroy jacket was rising from a table outside on the pavement. Chief Inspector Chen took his seat and ordered a portion of fried buns. It was a perfect place from which to keep his eyes out for a bus arriving, and at the same time, he could watch the lane entrance. He had to wait for quite a few minutes. When the buns came, they were delicious, but hot. Putting down the chopsticks, he had to blow on them repeatedly. Then the bus rolled into sight. He rushed across the street and boarded it with the last bun in his hand. It then occurred to him that he should have made inquiries at the restaurant. Guan might have sat there with somebody.
    “Keep your oily hand away from me,” a woman standing next to him said indignantly.
    “Some people can be so unethical,” another passenger commented, “despite an impressive uniform.”
    “Sorry,” he said, aware of his unpopularity in his police uniform. There was no point in picking a quarrel. To hold a pork-stuffed bun in an overcrowded bus was a lousy idea, he admitted to himself.
    At the next stop, he got off. He did not mind walking for a short