Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

barking the cell
    in the distance.
     
    Who’s the one walking beside you?
     
    The moonlight streaming like water,
    and worries drifting like a boat …
    who’s whistling “The Blue Danube”?
    So close, yet so far away.
    All the joy and sorrow of a dream.
     
    A snatch of the violin sweeping over,
    a water rat creeps along the bank.
    The city wakes up sneezing in the morning,
    and falls asleep coughing at night.
     
    Who’s the one walking beside you?
    The lines kept pouring out, as if rolling up on wave after wave. He worked on with intense concentration, pouring himself another glass of the red wine, until the spell was broken by the ringing phone. It was Detective Yu in Shanghai.
    Apparently, Yu wasn’t calling from home, but from somewhere in the street. Chen could hear traffic in the background, and occasionally, Peiqin’s excited voice.
    Yu began relating to him what he and Peiqin had learned.
    It turned out to be a fairly long narrative. Yu made a point of including Peiqin’s analysis, sometimes even quoting her directly. Chen listened without interruption, sipping at his wine, until Yu finished relaying the part about Mrs. Liu.
    “So what’s your take on her frequent trips back to Shanghai?” Chen asked.
    “It’s difficult to say, Chief. According to Peiqin, it may be complicated. It might be more than just an escape from the unpleasantness in Wuxi. Only in Shanghai could she afford to keep up her image as a successful woman. She’s surely a character, desperate to keep up appearances—to preserve face—in the eyes of others.” Yu then added, “Oh, Fu, it seems, is another character.”
    “How so?”
    Yu summed up what he and Peiqin had seen while sitting at the café on Nanjing Road.
    “I took a number of pictures of him and the girl,” Yu said. “Peiqin calls me a private eye. Which is, you know, a fashionable profession in the city now. Old Hunter is thinking about making it his new career.”
    “That would be a good idea. Nowadays, there are quite a number of rich wives looking to find out about their husbands’ infidelities. Your father is experienced and energetic—an old hunter indeed. So why shouldn’t he?”
    “Oh, before I forget, one more thing. Peiqin and I contacted Gu, the chairman of the New World Group. As far as he knows, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the IPO plan for the Wuxi Number One Chemical Company. The top Party boss always gets most of the shares when a company goes public. It’s something that is taken for granted, but Gu promised that he would ask around.”
    “Thanks for everything you’ve done, Yu, and of course, thank Peiqin for me too.”
    After Chen hung up, he tried to fit this latest information into the puzzle, but without success. Instead, he found himself worn out by the fruitless speculations. To his surprise, he felt a little sleepy. Perhaps he really had needed this vacation.
    After another futile call to Shanghai, he made for himself a cup of Cloud and Mist tea, hoping that it might revive him a bit. It didn’t work. So he brewed himself a fresh pot of coffee as well. It wasn’t a day for him to go to bed early. Internal Security was already reaching their conclusions. He had to be up and doing, he told himself, pouring out a cup.
    Then a thought struck him. The night he was murdered, Liu, too, had tried to work. Of course, he might have dozed off while he was there all alone in the apartment. There was nothing really inconceivable about that scenario. But he probably wouldn’t have taken sleeping pills, certainly not that early. Allowing a half an hour for them to take effect, Liu would have to have swallowed the pills around nine, or even earlier. That was inexplicably early for a man who planned to work late into the night on an important document.
    Another argument against Liu’s having taken pills was the missing cup in the apartment. Occasionally, Chen swallowed pills without water, but that was due to specific circumstances, like being on an overcrowded train. It was hard to imagine that Liu, in his own apartment, would have chosen to swallow the pills dry rather than getting a glass of water.
    In a case of unpremeditated murder, the perpetrator was likely to have killed with whatever weapon they had found there and then left the apartment with it. A missing cup would have been too light for such a fatal blow. According to the autopsy report, the blow was definitely inflicted with a heavy object. So what