Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

morning, to Huang, it didn’t seem that far from Liu’s office, particularly not with a company car at his disposal.
    Liu’s house was a three-story building located in a cul-de-sac of the complex, with a large yard in the back and a three-car garage at the side. There was a car parked in the driveway. It wasn’t a company car, Huang noted.
    “It’s larger than the villa at the center,” Chen commented, walking up the stone steps.
    “The center was built in the early fifties,” Huang said, as he pressed the doorbell, not sure about Chen’s point.
    The woman who answered the door appeared to be in her early fifties. She was slender and quite nice-looking for her age, her hair slightly streaked with silver. She was wearing an elegant silk house robe and soft-heeled slippers, and beside her were several pairs of slippers spread out on a wool mat inside the door.
    “Mrs. Liu, I’m Sergeant Huang of the Wuxi Police Bureau,” he said, showing his badge, “and this is a colleague of mine.”
    “My name is Chen,” Chen introduced himself. “Shall we remove our shoes, Mrs. Liu?”
    “I don’t think the police have to do that,” she said indifferently.
    “Of course we want to do that,” Chen said, bending to untie his shoelace. “It’s such a magnificent house.”
    She led them to an immense living room with tall windows overlooking a well-maintained meadow and flowerbeds in the back. There appeared to be something of a small pond in the distance, but Huang couldn’t see clearly. She motioned them to a beige sectional sofa and offered them tea, before she perched herself on a leather chair opposite them.
    “Your people have come here before, officers. So what else do you want with me?”
    “First, I want to express my sincere condolences,” Chen said. “General Manager Liu did a great job for the Party, for the people, and for the company. We will do our best to bring him justice, Mrs. Liu. At the present, however, our investigation has made little progress, so I would like to talk with you. Anything you can tell may be valuable to us—about him, about his work, or about the people close to him.”
    “Liu was busy, working like crazy all the time. When he made it home at night, more often than not, he was beat. He had no energy left to talk to me about things that were happening at the company, or about the people working for him.”
    “Well, what about that evening? Did he tell you that he was going to meet someone at his home office?”
    “No, he didn’t. He didn’t discuss his work with me, as I’ve told you.”
    “Did you notice anything unusual about him before that evening?”
    “He was getting busier all the time. Other than that, no, nothing.”
    “A different question: was he sleeping badly of late?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Did he have trouble falling asleep and, as a result, was he taking sleeping pills?”
    Chen must have read through the autopsy report closely, Huang observed without making a comment, but that’s something confirmed by Liu’s colleagues.
    “Occasionally, I think, but he was a healthy man for his age.”
    “So you knew that he wouldn’t be coming back that evening, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, I did. He mentioned that he had to work on something important in the office that evening.”
    “So he always told you his schedule, Mrs. Liu?”
    “It really depended on his work. If it wasn’t too late, he’d try to come back home and he wouldn’t call. But I never knew.” She added wistfully, “When he first got his home office, he would always call with his plans for the evening. But then he got so busy, he didn’t—not every time.”
    “You go back to Shanghai frequently—practically every weekend, I’ve heard.”
    “Not every weekend.”
    “But when you heard that Liu wouldn’t be coming home for the night, you left for Shanghai that afternoon. Was that Saturday or Sunday?”
    “Sunday—” She looked a bit uneasy. “I got back to Wuxi Sunday afternoon, but I was disappointed with his ever-busy work arrangement, so I went back to Shanghai again the same day.”
    “In other words, you made two trips to Shanghai that last weekend.”
    “I didn’t like the idea of being all alone in this big house.”
    “So you weren’t worried?” Huang cut in. “Leaving such a successful Big Buck all alone, if you know what I mean.”
    “He was a family man. Our son is graduating from Beijing University this year where he is a literature major, but