Red Mandarin Dress

according to Comrade Weng, the circumstances of her death were suspicious, with a man possibly involved.
    Now he at least had a better grasp of the connection between Mei in the original mandarin dress and the victims in the red mandarin dresses. As he had discussed with Yu, Jasmine, the first victim, could have been the real target, and the rest, possibly picked for a different reason. The murderer could be someone connected with Mei, knowledgeable about her death and how it was related to Tian.
    And he had partial answers to some of his other questions. The long wait between Mei’s death and Jasmine’s, for instance. The murderer might have taken delight in Tian’s long years of suffering instead of making one fatal strike.
    So meeting with the neighborhood cop could be crucial. He was probably the only one knowledgeable about the exact circumstances of her death and about the relationship between Tian’s revolutionary activity and Mei’s death.
    Only with that established could he move forward with the scenario in his mind.
    The waitress started serving the cold dishes on his table.
    “We also have special Dongzhi dishes,” she said. “Would you like to try some of them?”
    “Oh, Dongzhi dishes,” he said. “Not now, thanks.”
    He had no appetite, though the color combination of the white tofu and green scallion looked quite enticing. He tried a spoonful without tasting it, then he took out his notebook again.
    It was too late to contact Yu at home, so he dialed Yu’s cell phone. No one picked up.
    He hadn’t called his mother, either, since the day he had left for the vacation village. She usually went to bed late. So he dialed her number.
    “I knew you would call. Your partner Yu has already contacted me,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, but take good care of yourself. In my eyes, you’re still Little Cao.”
    “Little Cao” was something he hadn’t heard for a long time. She, too, was sentimental on the eve of Dongzhi Festival.
    And he was vaguely aware of something stirring in the recesses of his mind.
    “I’ll try to come over as early as possible, Mother.”
    “Tomorrow night is Dongzhi. If you can make it, that will be great,” she said at the end of their talk, “but it doesn’t matter if you can’t.”
    He finished the tea, making a gesture for the waitress to add hot water. She came with a tray that also contained the bill.
    “Can you pay the bill now, sir? It’s late.”
    He tossed out two hundred fifty Yuan. “Keep the change.”
    People were not supposed to tip in the socialist China, but the restaurant was owned by a “capitalist.”
    He tried to make a plan for the coming day. He had only one day’s time, and it had to be a plan that would work against all possible odds.
    When he looked up again, he noticed the waitresses clearing away the other tables in the dining hall. He was the last diner sitting there. Because of the tip, perhaps, she did not come to hurry him up.
    At the back of his mind, he seemed to hear the refrain from a poem he had read long ago. Hurry up. Please, it’s time.
    He stood up, leaving most of the dishes untouched.
    “Good night, sir,” a new hostess said at the gate, slightly shivering. “Good night.”
    Again, he hesitated at the prospect of going back home.
    He had to be here early the next morning. Hurrying back and forth like that, he wouldn’t be able to get much sleep anyway. Nor was he sure that he could get a taxi at around five o’clock in the morning—for a meeting he couldn’t afford to miss.
    Perhaps an all-night café in the neighborhood would be an alternative, so that he could easily walk to the food market around five thirty.
    The night was a deep metal blue against the neon lights. He reached for a cigarette, aware of a woman approaching him from the shadow of the restaurant.
    “I’m a madam for the Henshan Nightclub,” she said in a Beijing dialect. “Come with me, sir. There are hundreds of girls for you there. Only one hundred Yuan for the room fee. No minimum expense.”
    He was confounded, as if dragged into a movie scene of the old Shanghai red quarters. Little did he expect that it could have happened to him.
    For once, he didn’t instantly reject the offer.
    He hadn’t been unfamiliar with three-accompanying services. In the company of Big Bucks, however, Chen had never gone “all the way,” feeling obliged to keep up the police officer image when with people like Gu, who made a point of paying