“In the pictures, there wasn’t a glass or a cup on the desk in the office. Or in the living room. Or in the list of the items bagged for testing. For a man who was working late at night, a cup of coffee or tea on the desk would seem logical.”
“That’s true.”
“And another thing. The estimated time of death is between 9:30 and 10:30. That’s very late for a visitor such as the one theorized by Internal Security to arrive. Maybe Liu and the visitor had already been talking and arguing for an hour or more. But then where? Surely not in the office. That brings us back to your hypothesis-that they moved from the living room to the office. But then why wasn’t there a cup of tea in the living room for the guest?”
“Or at least a cup of water,” Huang said, scratching his head.
“Now look on the shelf. An impressive array of Puer tea cans, a very expensive tea from Yunnan-”
But Chen left his sentence unfinished, as he started to examine a row of gilded statuettes that were lined resplendently along the top shelf. He picked one statuette up. It was a tall, muscular worker holding aloft a shining globe and standing on a solid marble base. It bore an inscription: “In recognition of the outstanding increase in production and profit achieved by the Wuxi Number One Chemical Company for the year of 1995. Issued by the Wuxi People’s Congress.” The statuettes were all identical in design, size, and caption, except for the year.
“The chemical company under Liu’s leadership won that prestigious award nine years in a row,” Chen said
“Wow, they are gold-plated too, ” Huang said, picking one up. It was quite heavy. “Such a statuette could be quite expensive.”
“Let’s take some more pictures,” Chen said. “I’ll study them some more back at the center.”
Chen took out a camera he had brought with him. He took photos for no less than fifteen minutes before he placed the framed picture of Liu and his son flat on the desk and photographed it as well. He then glanced at his watch.
“By the way, I’ve contacted Liu’s attorney through some people I know in Shanghai,” Chen said. “While the Lius hadn’t made any specific moves regarding their marriage, Mrs. Liu made a joke over dinner about getting half of the IPO shares from Liu if he ever tried to divorce her.”
A wronged wife out for revenge: that might throw a new light on a lot of things in the case. It gave Mrs. Liu a more plausible motive than Jiang’s. There was the possibility that Liu was going to divorce her before the IPO, with the little secretary pushing in the background. In that case, Mrs. Liu could have lost everything. She had the access to his home office, along with knowledge of his whereabouts that night. Furthermore, it would explain the points raised by Chen about the crime scene-Liu’s body being found in the office rather than in the living room, there being no sign of struggle, and the position of the chairs in the office. All of that would then make more sense.
“That was a brilliant stroke, Chen. Contacting the attorney, I mean. What she said about getting half of the shares from the IPO probably wasn’t a joke,” Huang said. “Liu was good at cover-ups, and so was she. The couple must have been trying to sound out possible divorce arrangements with the attorney. Liu was going to do it, and she knew it.”
There was a glitch with that scenario, however. Mrs. Liu had an alibi. Then again, the people who supported her alibi were close friends, and unlike witnesses in those mystery novels Chen translated, some Chinese didn’t worry too much about perjury. For one thing, there was no Bible for them to swear upon. For her friends, doing Mrs. Liu a favor might have outweighed other considerations. Besides, even if she were in Shanghai that night, she could have dispatched someone in Wuxi to achieve her ends.
“Time for the next item on our agenda, Huang,” Chen said, breaking out of his reverie. “Let’s go to the company office.”
“Fine,” Huang said, closing his notebook.
Huang had been there several times, so he suggested they walk from the apartment complex to the back door of the chemical company plant. “It’s only about five minutes away. We can leave the car here.”
Huang didn’t want to leave his name at the front gate of the chemical company while he was in the company of Chief Inspector Chen. His colleagues would be upset if they learned about this excursion, but he didn’t have to explain that to Chen.
“As when we spoke to Mrs. Liu, you’re the one in charge of the investigation,” Chen said as they made their way to the company’s back door.
At the door of the chemical company they saw an elderly security guard, who nodded at Huang’s badge and let them in without further ado.
“The back door is locked after eight P.M.,” Huang explained to Chen, “but people can still open it from the inside. On one occasion, when Liu had to come back to the company for some important documents, he had to call the guard at the front gate to come around and open the back door for him.”
“I see,” Chen said. “So it’s really a shortcut.”
The general manager’s office was in a two-story building in the middle of the chemical company complex. They had arranged to meet Mi in the outer office, and she was already there waiting for them.
“What can we do for you today, Officer Huang? Oh, this is-” she said, rising from her desk.
A tall, willowy girl in her early twenties, Mi had almond-shaped eyes, a sensual mouth, and a fashionably thin body like a runway model. She was wearing a short, white, neckless halter top, which revealed her belly button; jeans; and high-heeled sandals, which showed her toes painted bright red.
There wasn’t much about her, however, that really appealed to Huang.
“You know why I’m here, Mi. This is my colleague Chen. We want to talk to you about Liu’s murder.”
She pressed a key on a brand-new computer, which Huang didn’t remember seeing last time. She motioned them to sit down in two black chairs opposite.
“We’ve already talked about it, Officer Huang,” she said.
“I’m new to the team,” Chen cut in, “so anything you say will be of great help to me.”
“Anything specific,” Huang echoed. He noticed another difference about her desk. A silver-framed photo of Liu speaking at a national conference had disappeared, and a golden plaque stating
“Let’s start with what you can tell us about Liu,” Chen said.
“He was an extraordinary boss. When he first took over, the company was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. In a large state-run enterprise like ours, with more than three thousand employees, his was not an easy job. But he managed to turn it around.”
“We learned about his work from all the media coverage. But what do you think of him as a man?”
“He was a good man-generous, intelligent, and always ready to help.”
“Now, let me ask you a different question. As someone who worked closely with him, what do you know about his family life?”
“He didn’t talk much about his family life.”
“Do you think he had a satisfactory one?”
“I don’t know,” she said, then added, “But a busy man like him should have had better care taken of him.”
“We talked to his wife,” Chen said, looking her in the eye. “She told us something.”
He paused deliberately, letting a silence eat away at her reserve like a crumbling wall in the room. Huang thought he knew what Chen was up to.
“Whatever she may have told you,” she said, without meeting his eyes, “I don’t think she was a good wife to him. Everybody here could see he wasn’t happy at home.”
“Can you give us any detailed examples?”
“It’s just something I heard. They were schoolmates in Shanghai-she from a good family in Shanghai, and he from a poor village in Jiangxi. In spite of her family’s opposition, she married down and followed him to Wuxi. She got it into her head that she should be compensated for her sacrifice, so to speak, by him waiting on her hand and foot, and obeying her in everything, big or small. She was a typical Shanghai woman.”
“But then in Wuxi he became successful.”
“Exactly. For a busy, overworked man like him-a virtuous wife would have taken good care of him at home, especially after she quit her job and became a housewife, leaving the family dependent on Liu’s income alone. But no. She frequently went back to Shanghai during the week and over the weekends too. He was often left all alone in
