Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

checked it carefully, then placed it on the desk and rubbed his chin with a finger.
    “Now, let me ask you a question. Where do you think the host would usually receive a guest?”
    “The living room, naturally. But we thought about that too. Liu might have simply stepped into the office to get a document or something.”
    “In that case, he would have entered the room first, and the murderer would have followed behind him—”
    Chen didn’t go on, apparently having a difficult time visualizing the murderer striking Liu from behind.
    “What do you think of the position of the other chairs in the office?” Chen resumed, sitting down on the swivel chair at the desk. “They haven’t been moved, right?”
    “No. But what do you mean?”
    “It doesn’t make sense. If Liu were sitting here, like I am, then the murderer would have been sitting opposite him. So why are the other chairs in the corner of the room?”
    “That’s a good point,” Huang said, writing it down in his notebook.
    “If he’d been talking to someone who was standing in front of him and who then swooped down on him ferociously—”
    “Then,” Huang said, nodding, “how come there is no sign of a struggle?”
    “Exactly.”
    “But what about the possibility that Liu was showing his visitor a file on the computer—something like a document about the antipollution efforts—when the visitor struck him from behind? That’s a scenario that I discussed with my colleagues.”
    “In the pictures, the computer isn’t on.” Chen picked up one of the photographs. “So, in your scenario, Liu had to have been struck at the very moment his hand was just touching the computer button.”
    Huang could see the chief inspector wasn’t convinced. As a matter of fact, neither was Huang.
    “That’s a good point. I’ll write it down,” Huang said, opening his notebook again.
    “In the pictures, there wasn’t a glass or a cup on the desk in the office. Or in the living room. Or in the list of the items bagged for testing. For a man who was working late at night, a cup of coffee or tea on the desk would seem logical.”
    “That’s true.”
    “And another thing. The estimated time of death is between 9:30 and 10:30. That’s very late for a visitor such as the one theorized by Internal Security to arrive. Maybe Liu and the visitor had already been talking and arguing for an hour or more. But then where? Surely not in the office. That brings us back to your hypothesis—that they moved from the living room to the office. But then why wasn’t there a cup of tea in the living room for the guest?”
    “Or at least a cup of water,” Huang said, scratching his head.
    “Now look on the shelf. An impressive array of Puer tea cans, a very expensive tea from Yunnan—”
    But Chen left his sentence unfinished, as he started to examine a row of gilded statuettes that were lined resplendently along the top shelf. He picked one statuette up. It was a tall, muscular worker holding aloft a shining globe and standing on a solid marble base. It bore an inscription: “In recognition of the outstanding increase in production and profit achieved by the Wuxi Number One Chemical Company for the year of 1995. Issued by the Wuxi People’s Congress.” The statuettes were all identical in design, size, and caption, except for the year.
    “The chemical company under Liu’s leadership won that prestigious award nine years in a row,” Chen said
    “Wow, they are gold-plated too, ” Huang said, picking one up. It was quite heavy. “Such a statuette could be quite expensive.”
    “Let’s take some more pictures,” Chen said. “I’ll study them some more back at the center.”
    Chen took out a camera he had brought with him. He took photos for no less than fifteen minutes before he placed the framed picture of Liu and his son flat on the desk and photographed it as well. He then glanced at his watch.
    “By the way, I’ve contacted Liu’s attorney through some people I know in Shanghai,” Chen said. “While the Lius hadn’t made any specific moves regarding their marriage, Mrs. Liu made a joke over dinner about getting half of the IPO shares from Liu if he ever tried to divorce her.”
    A wronged wife out for revenge: that might throw a new light on a lot of things in the case. It gave Mrs. Liu a more plausible motive than Jiang’s. There was the possibility that Liu was going to divorce her before the IPO, with the little secretary pushing in the