Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

enquiries about him. He’s not a suspect, and I’m just curious, you know. It’s probably nothing more than a hunch.”
    It was strange. Despite what he was saying, Chen sounded more than casually curious to Yu.
    “Oh, Fu lives in the Old City area, quite close to the intersection of Renmin and Henan Road. I’ll also text you his Shanghai address,” Chen went on. “Unless I’m remembering wrong, it shouldn’t be too far from Peiqin’s old home.”
    “I’ll get on it, Chief. Is there anything specific you’re looking for?”
    “Anything you can find out. I know it’s a Saturday, so I owe you one, Yu. Give my regards to Peiqin.”
    “What’s up?” Peiqin said the moment Yu put down the phone.
    Yu repeated Chen’s requests, which had come out of nowhere, especially if Chen was truly in Wuxi on vacation. He wished that Chen had explained further, but as always, the chief inspector must have his reasons.
    “I see,” Peiqin said. “Sure, we’ll do our best to help.”
    Yu got up, smiling at the pronoun in her quick and crisp response. As in the past, she was eager to join in.
    In years past, Peiqin had been reluctant to get involved in his duties as a policeman. But since he started working for the chief inspector, she had completely changed. In fact, she had helped—in her way—with the investigation in several difficult cases.
    After getting Chen’s text message, Yu dialed the phone number of the woman who had been with Mrs. Liu the evening of the murder. Bai was her surname. She was not at home, so Yu left a message asking her to call back at her earliest convenience.
    “We might try to talk to her neighbors,” Peiquin said.
    “Good idea.”
    The lazy Saturday that Yu had envisioned was suddenly no more. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that Yu would complain about.
    They set out to Mrs. Liu’s old neighborhood in Zhabei. It was a part of Shanghai not familiar to either of them. Zhabei had been something of a slum—full of old, shabby, ramshackle houses and dirty, ugly factories. The construction of plain-looking concrete “workers’ homes” there in the sixties and seventies had hardly helped. There weren’t any well-known stores or attractions there, and with the terrible traffic congestion in the city, they had previously no reason to spend a couple of hours going there.
    But Zhabei had changed a lot in recent years. As Yu and Peiqin stepped out of the subway, recently extended to this part of the city, they saw a number of new high-rises.
    The overall impression was, however, singularly mixed. Just two or three blocks from an ultramodern skyscraper, they saw shabby side streets with dilapidated buildings, tiny lanes with sordid entrances, and scenes that they imagined were typical of the old neighborhood.
    They approached a small family grocery store near the entrance of the lane in which Mrs. Liu had lived. To their surprise, Xiong, the owner of the store, a garrulous woman in her early fifties, claimed to know Mrs. Liu well, having been her childhood neighbor and friend. According to Xiong, Mrs. Liu came back quite regularly, though her parents had passed away. Her old home was unoccupied most of the time, with only occasional visitors staying there. Among her old neighbors, Mrs. Liu had plenty of face, having once invited a large group of them to a fancy restaurant. She also owned a high-end apartment in Xujiahui, one of the top areas in Shanghai, but she didn’t seem to go to that apartment often, and none of her old neighbors here had ever visited. Still, the very location of it spoke volumes about her wealth.
    “You should see the way she plays mahjong—a hundred yuan a game, not including tips. It’s as if she was printing money at home,” Xiong said, in proud excitement.
    “She comes all the way back here to play mahjong? Does she lose a lot too?”
    “She won’t bankrupt herself on a mahjong table. You don’t have to worry about that. For a woman, having a good husband is far more important than having a good job,” Xiong concluded. “She always has an eye for men. In the early years, Liu was still a nobody from the countryside, yet she followed him all the way to Wuxi. No one else had that kind of far-sighted vision. No wonder he provides her whatever she wants.”
    But all of this information was neither here nor there, and despite her claims of profound friendship with Mrs. Liu, Xiong hadn’t even heard about the death of Mrs. Liu’s husband.
    After taking