Red Mandarin Dress

his daughter—”
    There was a light knock on the door. Chen opened it and in came a couple of girls wearing house pajamas and slippers.
    “Do you need massage service?” one of the girls asked sweetly. “Everything’s on the house, General Manager Xia has given us specific instructions.”
    The other girl carried in a thermos bottle and made more tea for them in new cups with fresh tea leaves and hot water.
    “No, we don’t, thanks. Tell Xia not to worry about us. If we need anything, I’ll let her know.” The girls withdrew from the room and Chen resumed. “Well, so much for his history as a Mao Team member. How about his bad luck?”
    “Strange things happened to Tian and his family. His ex-wife started seeing other men, which was to be expected for a divorced woman in her early thirties, but soon pictures of her sleeping with her boyfriend got around. Some were sent to her factory and those pictures ‘nailed her to the pillar of humiliation.’ In the early eighties, it was still a crime for people to have sex without a marriage license. She committed suicide out of shame. The local police looked into it. They suspected the incident was a dirty trick played by one of her lovers, but the investigation yielded nothing. The daughter went back to Tian.”
    “That was strange,” Chen said. “An ordinary worker, divorced, not too young, and with a child. The men she was seeing were perhaps ordinary workers too. How could those pictures have been taken? By a professional? I don’t think an ordinary worker could have afforded to hire one for that.”
    “Strange things also happened to Tian’s restaurant—”
    “Yes, I checked into the restaurant part,” Chen said. “Did you talk to his former colleagues about his rotten luck?”
    “Like his neighbors, his colleagues saw all of this as retribution,” Yu said. “Whatever the interpretation, he has had the worst luck imaginable, like in some folk story.”
    “Retribution is a common motif in our folk stories. A man who has committed wrongs in his life—or in his previous life—is punished by a supernatural force that metes out justice. But do you really believe in such?”
    “Do you believe there is something behind his bad luck?” Yu said, looking up sharply. “As a paralyzed man, more dead than alive, how could Tian be involved in the case?”
    “Yesterday morning, I was at the Jin’an temple, rereading your interview with Weng, Jasmine’s boyfriend, when an idea occurred to me. What if it wasn’t luck, but a series of mishaps caused by a man? Something you learned at Tian’s factory might very well confirm my suspicions.”
    “Now there’s an idea,” Yu said, though impatient with the way Chen talked, digressing like Old Hunter before finally coming to the point, “but I still don’t see the connection to the case.”
    “You’ve just said that, as a Mao Team member, Tian forced a woman to have sex.”
    “Yes, somebody mentioned it, but it wasn’t confirmed.”
    “Do you know the name of that woman?”
    “No one mentioned her name but she was probably a faculty member at the institute.”
    “You’re following a very important trail. Let me show you something,” Chen said, producing a picture. “Take a look at the woman.”
    “The woman—” Yu said. “She’s in a mandarin dress.”
    “Look at the style.”
    “Yes, the style!” Yu examined it closely. “The very style. Do you mean—”
    “The woman in the picture was Mei, a violinist who taught at the institute. She was abused by Tian—to be exact, she was forced to have sex with him for the sake of her son. On the afternoon she died, Tian was seen sneaking out of her room.”
    “Did he kill her?”
    “No, she died in an accident, technically, but he was responsible for it.”
    “But no one at the steel mill told me anything about that.”
    “Either they didn’t know, or they didn’t think it necessary. It was more than twenty years ago and Tian is paralyzed, more dead than alive.”
    “No one—I mean her family members—complained to the authorities about it? Others did, like the son of the old professor with broken ribs.”
    “Now take a look at the boy in the picture,” Chen said.
    “Yes?”
    “He is Jia Ming.”
    “Jia Ming, the attorney for the housing development case?! You told me to—”
    “Yes. The very Jia Ming. The furious luck dogging both Jasmine and Tian.”
    “Now, supposing Jia is the boy in the picture, the son of Mei, he has a