Red Mandarin Dress Read online

  “Whatever you want, Chief.”

  “Don’t worry about the expense. A portion of the chief inspector fund hasn’t been spent this year. If I don’t use it up soon, the bureau will cut the fund next year.”

  “So you are not going to quit, Chief Inspector Chen.”

  “Well-” He cut himself short, the soup spurting out of the thin-skinned bun despite his caution. She was perceptive, handing over a pink paper napkin to him. It was not too bad to be a chief inspector, after all, to have a “little secretary” sitting beside, like an understanding flower.

  At the end of the meal, she asked the waiter for a receipt as Chen was producing his wallet.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Let me buy this meal for you. No need to ask for government reimbursement.”

  “I know, but it’s for the government’s benefit.”

  The waiter gave her something like two receipts, one for fifty Yuan, and another for a hundred.

  “The city’s tax income has increased more than two hundred percent last month, because of the newly invented official receipt with a lottery number on it,” she said, scratching the receipt with a coin. “Look! You bring me luck.”

  “What?”

  “Ten Yuan. Look at the lottery number printed on each receipt.”

  “That’s a novel idea.”

  “Capitalism in China is like nowhere else in the world. Nothing but money matters here. In restaurants, people didn’t ask for the receipt except for ‘socialist expense,’ so most restaurants reported losses. With the lottery practice, everybody is asking for receipts. It’s said that one family won twenty thousand.”

  Chen also scratched a receipt. No luck, but no disappointment, with her hair touching his face over the number on the receipt.

  They then walked out to the oriental clothing boutiques scattered in the back area of the market. A sort of niche business created for foreign tourists, the small stores displayed an impressive array of mandarin dresses in their windows. Taking his arm, she led him into one of them.

  “The dress you are investigating is old-fashioned, not like any of these you may see here,” she said, examining around. “He is perverse, humiliating the victim in such a dress.”

  “Oh, you mean the murderer? Elaborate for me.”

  “He wants to display her as an object of his sexual fantasy. The graceful mandarin dress, elegant yet erotic with the torn slits and loose buttons. I have seen several pictures in newspapers.”

  “You’re talking like a cop,” he said. At this moment, everybody in the city seemed eager to be a cop, but she had a point. “Surely you know a lot about the fashion.”

  “I have two or three mandarin dresses. Occasionally, I have to put one on in haste, but I have never ripped the slits.”

  “He might have put the dress on her after her death-her body rigid, and her limbs uncooperative.”

  “Even in that scenario, the ragged, torn slits don’t make sense. Whatever way you put it on, you won’t damage it like that,” she said, turning to him. “Would you like to do an experiment-on me?”

  “An experiment, how?”

  “That’s easy,” she said, scooping a scarlet mandarin dress from the hanger and dragging him into the fitting room. Closing the door, she handed the dress to him. “Put it on me as roughly as possible.”

  Kicking off her shoes, she was peeling off her dress, and in less than a minute, she was standing in her white panties, wearing a lace bra.

  It was only for his work, he told himself. Drawing in a breath, he found himself in a clumsy attempt to put the dress on her.

  She held herself still and rigid-like a lifeless victim-against his rough hands. No expression on her face, hardly any flex in her muscle, her limbs unresponsive, yet her nipples visibly hardened. She blushed as he yanked the dress down on her.

  No matter how hard or violently he tried to pull the dress down, the slits were not damaged.

  And he noticed her lips trembling, losing color. There was no heat in the fitting room. It was hard for her to play a half-naked, lifeless model for long.

  But she had already confirmed her point. The slits must have been deliberately torn. And that was an important fact.

  He insisted on paying for the dress. “Don’t take it off, White Cloud. It looks wonderful on you.”

  “You don’t have to do that. It’s for your work,” she said, producing a small camera. “Take a picture of me in it.”

  He did, having her stand in front of the boutique store. And then he put her coat over the dress.

  “Thank you,” she said wistfully. “I have to go to school now.”

  Afterward he decided to walk back, alone, at least for a while.

  It required strenuous effort to expel the image of her body struggling in and out of the mandarin dress. The image got juxtaposed with another, of her standing naked in a private room of the Dynasty karaoke club, in the company of other men.

  He was disappointed with himself. She had done that for his police work, but he kept thinking of her as a K girl, imagining things about her, in a mandarin dress or not.

  And that excited him.

  He thought about the stories of women being trouble and monsters. Subjectivity exists only to the extent of its being subject to the discourses-an idea from a book of postmodernist criticism he had picked up in his effort to deconstruct those classical love stories.

  Perhaps the stories had read him.

  THIRTEEN

  ANOTHER BODY IN A red mandarin dress was discovered early Friday morning.

  The body was found at another public location-by a shrub grove on the Bund, close to the intersection of Jiujiang and Zhongshan Roads.

  Around five that morning, Nanhua, a retired teacher, was heading to a small square called Tai Chi Corner on the upraised bank near the intersection. As he was about to climb up the stone steps, he saw the body lying underneath the bank, partially concealed by the grove. He started shouting for help and people gathered around. Reporters hurried over from their offices nearby. It was only after they had all taken pictures, from various angles, that one of them thought to report the body to the police bureau.

  When Yu and his colleagues arrived, the scene looked much like a farmer’s market in the morning, noisy and chaotic, full of people making comments and comparisons, as if bargaining with peddlers.

  It wasn’t just an area with people and traffic moving through it all night long, but it was one of those “most sensitive areas” with heightened patrol activities by the police as well as the neighborhood committees. That the murderer had left the body there spoke for itself. It was a more defiant message than before.

  The murderer must have thrown the body out of a moving car. It was out of the question for him to pose the body like before. That accounted for the different posture of the third girl.

  She was lying on her back with one arm thrown over her head, wearing an identical mandarin dress with torn slits and loose buttons. The left leg was bent and the knee drawn up high, revealing her pubic hair, black against her pale thighs. She looked to be in her early twenties, though with plenty of makeup on her face.

  “That bastard,” Yu cursed through his clenched teeth as he squatted down by the body, pulling on his gloves.

  Like the first two victims, death appeared to be the result of asphyxia. For the time of death, he roughly estimated it at three or four hours earlier, judging by the loss of the pinkish color in her fingernails and toenails. Aside from the fact that she had nothing under the dress, there were no outward signs of sexual abuse. No semen visible around the genitals, thighs, or in the pubic hair; no blood, dirt, or skin under her nails. Her legs and arms were unbruised, without lacerations or bite marks.

  The police were busy gathering up whatever was discoverable at the crime scene, cigarette butts, stray buttons, scrap paper. With the scene already so damaged, Yu didn’t think their efforts would yield anything useful.

  But he saw a light-colored fiber on the sole of h
er left foot. Possibly from her socks, or she could have picked it up while walking barefoot somewhere. He removed it and put it in a plastic envelope.

  He stood up. A chilly wind was blowing from the river in a squealing gust. The big clock atop the Custom House started striking. The same melody, never lost in the change of times, reverberated against the gray sky, oblivious of the irreversible loss of a young girl in the morning.

  He knew he had to go back to the bureau, leaving his colleagues to work the scene.

  The Shanghai Police Bureau, too, seemed to be shuddering in the cold morning wind. Even the retired-and-rehired doorman, Comrade Old Liang, stood there shaking his head at Yu, like a helpless plant frostbitten overnight.

  Phone calls started pouring in from the city government, from the media, from the public. Everyone was talking about a serial killer at large, a murderer brazenly defiant of the city police.

  The knowledge that all this had happened twice before and that it was likely to happen again was a staggering blow to the police force. Three victims in three weeks and, given that they had made no progress in their investigation, quite possibly another one at the end of another week.

  Yu’s colleagues were going all out, extending the search into every possible corner. The technical division was reexamining the scene of the crime, a temporary hotline was receiving tips from the public, every radio patrol car was on the watch.

  A picture of the victim was faxed and posted everywhere. There was no point covering it up, and no attempt was made. Far more graphic pictures were being printed in the newspapers along with lurid descriptions. The news was spreading like wildfire, threatening to consume the city.

  Grinding out his fourth cigarette in the morning, Yu looked up to see Liao striding into his office with the initial medical report. It confirmed strangulation as the cause of death. Lividity and rigor were also consistent with Yu’s estimated time of death. Like the second victim, there were no indications that the girl had sex before her death.

  Since the second victim was a three-accompanying girl, Liao suggested that they try to identify the new victim by focusing on the entertainment business. It was consistent with his new focus, and Yu agreed.

  Sure enough, around eleven o’clock, her identity was established. She was Tang Xiumei, a singing girl, more commonly known as a K girl, at the Music Box Karaoke Center. The manager, alert after the earlier cases, recognized her from the faxed picture.

  “What did I tell you?” Liao said, waving a fax page in his hand.

  What a K girl did in a private K room was open knowledge in the city. If a Big Buck took a fancy to her, he could demand services other than singing, and outside of the karaoke room, too, by paying for the so-called “company hour.” No club would say no. Tang’s coworkers said that she hadn’t shown up at the club that evening. But that wasn’t uncommon for her.

  According to the manager, Tang didn’t come to work last night or the night before. What a girl chose to do on her own time was beyond the club’s control or knowledge. The manager’s statement, along with the testimony of several other girls, ruled out the possibility that the murderer picked her up in the club Thursday night.

  Inquiries about the customers she’d met for the previous few nights led nowhere; the regular customers had solid alibis for that night, and none of the new ones had left their name or address.

  Yu contacted Tang’s neighborhood committee. Liu Yunfei, the head of the committee as well as a neighbor of Tang’s in the same building, answered the phone.

  “What can I say about those girls? Materialistic from head to foot. Tang had a favorite saying: to work well is not so important as to marry well. So she went to work in a K club, hoping that she could meet and marry a Big Buck.”

  “Did you notice anything suspicious about her in the last few days?”

  “She hardly talked to anybody in the neighborhood. If she wasn’t ashamed for herself, we were ashamed for her.”

  “Did her neighbors notice anything on Thursday?”

  “Well, she left a bit earlier, according to Auntie Xiong, who lives on the same floor. Around three. Normally she did not leave until around dinnertime. That’s her shift. Of course, we didn’t really know about her work schedule.”

  “So she stayed at home all day?”

  “Not exactly. She could be busy with so many things. But when she left for her shift, she was dressed like a vamp. Always in her pantyhose and high heels. So we knew.”

  “Can you write me a report?” Yu said. “Include whatever you and your neighbors know about Tang.”

  Yu made some more calls, talking to her neighbors and coworkers. After more than an hour on the phone, he learned practically nothing beyond the initial details he had gotten from Liu.

  Shortly afterward, a three-page report came in through the fax machine. It was from Liu and contained everything he had learned from the neighborhood. It was fairly detailed, considering the short notice.

  Tang had lost her mother quite young. When her father was laid off, she, still a high school student, became a K girl with a government-issued license. Her father, too ashamed to continue living in the lane, went back to his old home in Subei. So she lived alone and occasionally brought people home. The committee was well aware of it, but unlike in the years of class struggle, the neighborhood cadres couldn’t go barging into her room without something like a warrant. Fortunately, most of her clients preferred to go to a hotel instead of her small room in the squalid lane.

  She had no phone at home, nor a cell phone, since both were still too expensive for her. Occasionally she used the public phone service at the lane entrance, but she had a beeper with text messaging, which she used a lot.

  Yu checked with the beeper company. The response came back fast. There was no activity on Thursday night.

  As Yu finished reading the report, another emergency meeting was called at the bureau.

  “Look at the headline. ‘Shanghai in crisis,’ ” Party Secretary Li said, his face livid, his words stumbling out in rage. “Our bureau is a laughingstock.”

  Neither Yu nor Liao had an immediate response. The headline might be an exaggeration, but the bureau was in a crisis.

  “Third! On the Bund!” Li went on. “Have you found anything?”

  Yu and Lao were pulling hard at their cigarettes, shrouding the office in smoke. Hong looked flushed, with a hand pressed against her mouth for fear of coughing out loud.

  “The investigation must take a new direction,” Liao said. “Two of the three victims were in the entertainment business-the sex business. Both the second and the third were easy targets at a restaurant or a karaoke bar. Most of those girls wouldn’t tell their families about their activities, so clues about their disappearance would be hard to find. More importantly, such a girl usually believes she is going out with a customer and goes to a secluded area to perform her job. They wouldn’t have resisted until it was too late.”

  “What about Jasmine?” Yu said.

  “She worked at a hotel,” Liao said, “but he could have easily picked her up. In fact, her boyfriend met her like that. That’s why I’ve been pushing for a different focus.”

  “What’s your point?” Li said.

  “The motive is evident. Hatred against those girls. He could have paid a terrible price because of someone in the business-a sexually transmitted disease, for instance-and wants revenge. That’s why he stripped those victims without having sex with them.”

  “What about the red mandarin dress?” Li asked again.

  “He makes a point of dressing his victims like the one who gave him the sexual disease. A sort of symbolism.”

  “But there could be different revenge scenarios,” Yu said. “A woman he loved, let’s say, dumped him for another. In his mind, she’s no better than a prostitute.”

  “But that explains his choice of locations too. Inspector Liao’s theory, I mean,” Hong cut in. “A protest against the booming sex industry in the city. He must blame n
ot only those girls, but the city government as well, I believe, for allowing it to take place.”

  “Leave our government out of it, Hong,” Li said. “Whatever scenarios or theories we come up with, the killing will continue. And what are we going to do to stop the killer?”

  A short spell of silence ensued in the office.

  With the entertainment industry increasingly prosperous in the city, it wouldn’t be difficult at all for him to find new victims. And it was out of the question, everyone in the room knew, to shut down the business.

  “I suggest we check the hospitals,” Liao said. “They keep all records of all sexually transmitted disease.”

  “It’s too much of a long shot,” Li said. “Before you could go through all the records, he’ll strike again. We only have one week’s time, Inspector Liao. Besides, even in your scenario, he could have sought medical help secretly.”

  “Most sex murderers are sexually impotent,” Yu said. “According to Chen, the murder is a sort of mental orgasm. So the theory of sexually transmitted disease may not hold.”

  “Liao has a point,” Hong said more resolutely. “Out of the three victims, two were engaged in some sort of sex services. That at least suggests a pattern. Often, the victims fit a certain stereotype, which plays an important role in the killer’s sexual fantasies. He may or may not have been hurt by one of these three-accompanying girls, but it is evident that he has a grudge against them.”

  “So what’s your proposal?” Li demanded.

  “I would like to make a suggestion based on Liao’s analysis. If he is going to strike again, it’s probably among those girls. Let’s set up a decoy for him.”

  “There are so many karaoke clubs, nightclubs, and restaurants in the city,” Yu said. “How could you tell from which one he’ll pick his next victim?”

  “I don’t think he would repeat himself.”

  “Please explain.” Li appeared to be interested.

  “After Jasmine, one was an eating girl, one was a singing girl-out of the three-accompanying girls. The next one, logically, would have to be a dancing girl. People are all creatures of habit,” Hong said. “So he locates his victims by frequenting those entertainment spots of the city. They are easy targets, as you just said. But more importantly, he is a man given to symbolism. The red mandarin dress may be just part of it. So he will most likely choose a dancing girl as the next victim in his elaborate scheme.”