When Red is Black

This time she left the back door unlocked, as she chatted for a few minutes with the shrimp woman sitting on the corner, and went across the courtyard to unlatch the front door, which was her habit. Around that time, other shikumen residents got up. Some of them came out to wash up in the courtyard sink. There were at least three or four people there that morning, Lanlan remembered.
     
    The times fit. According to Doctor Xia, Yin had been suffocated to death by some soft object between six fifteen and six thirty. In other words, she had been killed shortly before Lanlan’s discovery of the body.
     
    Yu started putting some thoughts together in his notebook. There seemed to be two possibilities. In the first scenario, in accordance with Zhong’s theory that the murderer was an outsider, the criminal had followed Yin into her room and committed the crime. But that left several points unaccounted for. The milkwoman saw Yin walking back into the lane by herself. Of course, the criminal might have approached her somewhere in the shadows of the lane unobserved. But then, the murderer had to get out of the building. A stranger would have been noticed by those in the courtyard if he left through the front door, and, if he went out through the back door, someone happening to look in that direction from the courtyard might have seen him, and the shrimp woman sitting outside the back door could not have missed him. But no one had reported having seen a stranger during that period of time.
     
    Alternatively, Yin might have been murdered by one of the shikumen residents. If so, the doors, as well as the lane gates, presented no problem. Afterward, the murderer simply sneaked back to his own room. As long as he was not seen in the act of entering or leaving Yin’s room, no one would suspect him. This narrowed down the range of possibilities. It seemed Yu need only focus on the building’s residents.
     
    “I have made a list of possible suspects within the building,” Old Liang whispered in his ear. “And I have also started collecting their fingerprints.”
     
    “I’m going to study the list,” Yu said, glancing at his watch at the end of the meeting. “Thank you, Old Liang. We’ll start doing interviews tomorrow.”
     
    If the villain lived in the shikumen, Yu had to find a motive for the crime. Old Liang had hinted at the poor relationship between Yin and her neighbors, but that would not have been enough reason to commit murder. What could have caused a woman to be killed by one of her next-door neighbors?
     
    When the neighborhood committee meeting was over, Detective Yu decided to walk back to the bureau. It was a long walk. It would take him about forty-five minutes, and he wanted to do some solid thinking on the way. He was not in a hurry to decide on a course of action. He wanted to exclude other possibilities before focusing on the building’s residents.
     
    He came to a stop at the sight of a public phone near the foreign language bookstore. Stepping into the booth, he made a phone call to the Shanghai Literature Publishing House. He wanted to find how much Yin had earned from publication of her novel. After spending ten minutes searching for the editor responsible for Yin’s book, and almost emptying his pockets of change, he finally located Wei, the editor of Death of a Chinese Professor.
     
    “I took a huge risk in accepting the manuscript; we might have lost money by publishing it. At the time, no one expected that the book would turn out to be so controversial. Yin made about three thousand Yuan,” Wei said.
     
    That was not a large sum, even several years ago. Nowadays an eggroll peddler could have earned that much in a couple of months.
     
    Wei did not know the exact amount of money Yin had received for the English translation, but according to the information he had, it was not a large sum. The novel had been of interest to sinologists, but it was not a popular seller.
     
    “Besides,” Wei explained, “in the early eighties, China had not entered the international copyright agreement. The American publisher only paid a small one-time fee.”
     
    But Yu remembered those letters with English addresses, whose dates were much more recent.
     
    He dialed Chief Inspector Chen’s number.
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter 5
     
     
    C
    hen looked out of the window at the dull gray apartment complex in the morning light, and then down at the file on his desk, the New World proposal, and started