The Mao Case

with baked cakes and steamed buns, spent a
     penny or two for a cup of tea, then would talk and enjoy themselves like lords.
    But Shanghai was rapidly turning into a city of contrasts and contradictions. Across the street stood expensive new apartment
     buildings, but here beside the hot-water house, it remained pretty much a slum. In fact, no tea-drinking customers came in
     for hours.
    It suited Old Hunter well, though. He didn’t have to play a role. An old, non — Big Buck tea drinker, that’s what he was, even
     bringing in his own tea. All he needed to pay for was the hot water. He could sit there for hours, talking about the tea to
     the proprietor, or, like that
afternoon, drinking tea alone without a single waiter walking around with a long-billed kettle, ready to serve.
    The tea was getting cold but was still black as hell. He had put in a large handful of oolong, trying to revive himself with
     extra-strong tea. It was because of the scene he had caught at Jiao’s window last night and had continued watching, sitting
     there across the street, late into the night. As a result, the next day, he was feeling as groggy as a sick cat.
    He was old, he admitted, spitting out the bitter tea leaves, but the case — though not
his
case — was special to him. He thought about his interview yesterday of Bei, the security guard at the Jiao’s apartment complex.
    The meeting with Bei had yielded little. Like him, Bei was a retiree, working at a post-retirement job to supplement his scant
     pension. Unlike Old Hunter’s, Bei’s job paid little, and the security guard had to stand at the complex entrance, rain or
     shine, six days a week. To their pleasant surprise, the retirees shared a passion for tea. So they went to a better place,
     the celebrated Lake Pavilion Tea house at the City God’s Temple Market, where Old Hunter tapped Bei for information about
     Jiao over the exquisite Yixing tea set on the mahogany table. Bei started talking without reservation.
    According to Bei, Jiao had few visitors here. It was a well-guarded subdivision, where visitors had to call up from the entrance,
     so Bei was quite sure about that. Nor could Bei remember having seen her in the company of any man. Then he recalled that
     about half a year earlier, Jiao had had an unusual visitor, a poor old woman dressed in rags — a rare sight for the complex — who
     claimed to come from Jiao’s old neighborhood. She was not educated, not even that coherent, and Bei questioned her long and
     carefully. When he finally called up, Jiao hurried out to usher the visitor in. After two or three hours, Jiao accompanied
     the visitor out, calling her granny and hailing a taxi for her. The old woman never appeared again.
    It wasn’t too surprising for Jiao to be nice to a visitor from her old neighborhood. If anything, the question was, which
     neighborhood?
She had grown up in an orphanage. After that, she shared a room with “provincial sisters” until she moved over here.
    But Jiao had other visitors, at least another one, who went unnoticed by Bei, and by Internal Security. Old Hunter pondered,
     taking another drink from the half-empty cup, raising his hand, about to bang the table like a Suzhou opera singer, when he
     restrained himself. What he had seen last night, after his talk with the security guard, confirmed Peng’s suspicions about
     Jiao’s secret life. From across the street, the view of her room wasn’t good, but the one glimpse of the two standing close
     to the window was unmistakable, though it was just one fleeting glimpse.
    Now, a security guard like Bei might not have closely watched each resident every minute, but Internal Security’s video camera
     should have. How could the mysterious man have entered the building, and then her apartment, without being noticed even once?
     Old Hunter chewed the tea leaves he had scooped up from the bottom of the cup. A habit picked up from reading about it in
     a memoir about Mao.
    There was no progress in the investigation of Yang’s murder, either, not from what he had heard. No suspect arrested or even
     targeted. Lieutenant Song was furious with Chen’s unexplained vacation.
    Like Detective Yu, Old Hunter didn’t think the chief inspector was taking the vacation for personal reasons, even though the
     emergency number given by Chen suggested that during his stay in Beijing, he was in contact with, if not in the company of,
     his HCC ex-girlfriend.
    It was then that