Qiu Xiaolong - Red Mandarin Dress

“What about other services apart from the karaoke part?”

“Depends what you need, where and when. You have to be specific,” she said. “Let me sing a song for you first.”

Perhaps his manner of questioning bothered her. She had to sing a song or two for her tip, anyway. Her choice was a surprising one-Su Dongpo’s “Shuidiao Getou,” about the mid-autumn festival. She started singing and dancing, her bare feet floating sensually like lotus flowers on the red carpet, flowing to the second stanza of the poem.

Moving around the vermilion mansion, /coming through the carved window, / the moon shines on the sleepless./ No cause for it to be /so spiteful as to choose / to appear full, bright,/ when we stay in separation? / As people have sorrows and joys, / meeting or parting, / as the moon waxes and wanes / in clear or cloudy skies, / things may never be perfect. / May we all live long, sharing / the same fair moon, / though thousands of miles apar…

The madam came back like an apparition from the moon. “What a marvelous girl! You know what, she used to study ballet. May we all live long, sharing the fair moon. A generous tip for my introduction, please.”

“You did not tell me that,” he said, producing two ten Yuan bills.

“Every Shanghainese knows that,” she snapped, pocketing the money as she stalked out. “So cheap! You want me to live on the howling western wind?”

His Big Buck connections might have paid more, but he didn’t know.

“Don’t worry about her,” Green Jade said, perching herself on his lap. “She’s no real madam. Just a pimp.”

Perhaps he’d better ask his questions quickly, and then call it a night.

“I’ve heard that there’s a serial murderer stalking around, going after girls in the entertainment business. Are you worried, Green Jade?”

“You bet,” she said, squirming uncomfortably against him. “One of the victims worked in a nightclub like this, I’ve heard. Everybody is on alert. But it’s useless.”

“Why?”

“Why? You are a new customer here. A successful man-not simply a money-stinking upstart, but a man of learning, a successful attorney or something like that. That much I knew at first sight. But that’s about all. Still, if you ask me out, I will follow you without raising any questions. Our business has suffered because of the case. Customers are worried about police raids, like at the Joy Gate. Some of them will wait until the storm blows over-”

There was a light knock on the door.

Before she said anything, the door opened and a boy of five or six came in. “Mom, Uncle Brown Bear wants you to sing the Weeping Sand for him. Madam wants me to tell you that.”

“I’m sorry. He’s my son. There’s no one to take care of him at home tonight,” she said. “Brown Bear is a regular customer. It’s his favorite song. I’ll come back soon.”

“Brown Bear is your regular customer,” Chen said. Whether it was a deliberate arrangement with the madam, he didn’t know. Green Jade must have figured out he was anything but a real Big Buck.

“You are different, I know,” she said, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead before she turned to her son. “Go back to the office. Don’t come out again.”

For a moment, Chen didn’t know what to do, left alone in the room. Looking around, he saw it was not so different from other KTV rooms, except that it was more luxuriously furnished. And he was disconcerted by the light footsteps pattering outside the room. Perhaps the child’s. She shouldn’t have brought her boy to such a place. Fortunately he was “different,” not a regular. Or the little boy could have stumbled upon a traumatizing scene…

Suddenly, he shivered.

Now he had one suspect with a motive-Mei’s son.

On that fatal afternoon long ago, when Mei’s son returned home, what he stumbled upon was his widowed mother having sex with another man. That explained his running away in shock and her running out naked after him.

All the information gathered about him was coming back. He had the motive, he knew the dress, and he was familiar with things about her life.

That would explain a lot of things-the revenge against Tian and Jasmine, the exact duplication of the dress, the location of the first body…

But what kind of a man was he now? Neither Professor Xiang nor Comrade Wong knew much. He hadn’t disappeared, however. He had come back and sold the Old Mansion for understandable reasons.

All of this fit into a psychological profile Chen had discussed with Yu-a loner with a trauma in his childhood, possibly during the Cultural Revolution, and possibly with an attachment to his mother…

Another waitress walked into the room, this one wearing an apron that bore an image of a bag of popcorn. She placed a small basket of popcorn on the coffee table. Chen took out a ten Yuan bill.

“It’s fifty.”

“Fine.” He tried to behave like a good customer, taking out his wallet. For the moment, he would like to, for a new scenario had just dawned on him in this very room. He put a hundred Yuan bill on the table and motioned to her to leave.

“Thank you, sir. I used to be a model, but it’s a profession of only three or four years.”

It was then that Green Jade returned, staring at the popcorn girl like an intruding alien, who turned to leave in a hurry.

“Sorry,” Green Jade said. “Can I have another cup of juice?”

The drink came, along with another fruit platter. Maybe it was conventional in the house. The waiter didn’t even bother to ask for his approval.

That concerned him. The small fees were adding up, though he didn’t have to worry about extra service, like “the rain and cloud,” Green Jade had suggested. She started peeling an orange for him.

He excused himself and went out into the corridor toward a restroom in the corner. Closing the restroom door after him, he counted the money left in his wallet. He still had about nine hundred Yuan. That should do for the night. But he didn’t want to go back immediately. He wanted to straighten out his thoughts, and it was difficult for him to do so with Green Jade and other waitresses coming and going all the time.

But he noticed a hot towel on a white dish being pushed in through under the door-possibly by the restroom attendant kneeling on the ground. Chen was revolted. Pushing open the door, he put a handful of change on a white bowl on the sink and left.

When he seated himself on the sofa in the private room, Green Jade leaned over to feed him a fresh tangerine with her slender fingers, the candlelight incessantly flickering from the animal-shaped container.

“Where are you going to spend the night?” she softly inquired. “It’s so late. The frost thick, the road slippery. Don’t leave. Really, few walk outside.”

It came almost like an echo from a Song dynasty poem, he recalled, about the rendezvous between the decadent emperor and a delicate courtesan.

Seeing no response from him, she placed his hand on her bare, smooth thigh.

“Sorry, I have to leave, Green Jade,” Chen said. “Please give me the bill. It’s been a great night. Thanks.”

“If you insist,” she said. “You may pay me the tip now.”

After he paid her three hundred Yuan, she had a waiter send in the bill.

A glance at the bill showed him the trouble. A cup of fruit juice cost one hundred Yuan. She had two cups. Plus his tea at one hundred twenty. The two fruit platters at two hundred fifty each. The four small dishes of dried fruits on the table came with a price too, with eighty Yuan each. And there was a twenty percent service fee. Altogether, the bill amounted to one thousand, three hundred.

It was a ripoff. But he was not in a position to protest, not as a chief inspector. As such, he might be able to get away for the night, but the stories about it would cost him much more.