“I talked to your manager the other day. He didn’t say anything about Weng or about his relationship with Jasmine.”

“He may not know,” she said. “Besides, the hotel business has been affected by her murder. There may be no interest in drawing more public attention like that.”

“Is Weng at the hotel right now?”

“He came in from the States this morning. He has been shut up in the room ever since.”

“I’ll come over immediately. If he comes out, tell him not to leave the hotel.” Yu said, “Are you sure he was in the United States for the last two weeks?”

“When she died, he wasn’t here, but I’m not sure where he was. And he arrived with all his luggage this morning.”

“Can you check his passport? Particularly the date of his latest entrance.”

“That should be easy. He leaves his passport in a safety box here. I’ll check it out for you.” She added, “But I don’t want to be seen talking to or passing information to a cop.”

“No problem. I understand. I won’t come in uniform.”

Forty-five minutes later, Yu arrived at the hotel lobby dressed in a gray jacket Peiqin had bought him. No one seemed to recognize him. He soon saw Yaqin, a short woman wearing her hair in an old-fashioned knot, though probably only in her mid-forties. She sneaked him a photocopy of the passport. It showed that Weng left via Guangzhou the day Jasmine was murdered and came back only this morning. Weng would have hardly had the time for the first crime. Definitely not for the second.

“Thank you, Yaqin,” he said. “Is Weng still here?”

“Room 307,” Yaqin said in a whisper.

“I’ll call you later,” he said in a low voice. “So we can meet away from the hotel.”

She nodded, picking up a full ashtray from the lobby table like a conscientious hotel employee.

He stepped into an old elevator, which bobbed him up to the third floor. Following the narrow corridor to the end, he knocked on a brown door marked 307.

The door creaked open. The man inside appeared to be in his early forties, his hair uncombed, his eyes red, slightly swollen. Yu recognized him as Weng, though his passport picture looked younger. It was evident that Weng had not changed since his arrival, his clothes rumpled, encompassing his stout body like an overstuffed duffle bag. Yu produced his badge and came straight to the point.

“You must know why I am here. So tell me about your relationship with Jasmine, Mr. Weng.”

“You are moving fast, Comrade Detective Yu. I’ve just come back this morning, and you already have me as a suspect.”

“No, I don’t. As you may not know, there’s been another victim here while you were in the States. You don’t have to worry about being a suspect, but what you tell me will help our work. You want to avenge her death, don’t you?”

“Yes, I’ll tell you what I know,” Weng said, letting Yu into the room. “So where shall I start?”

“Let’s start when you met-but no, let’s go to the very beginning. Tell me first about your trips back to Shanghai,” Yu said, taking out a mini recorder. “It’s just our routine procedure.”

“Well, I left Shanghai to continue my studies in the United States about seven or eight years ago. I got my PhD in anthropology there, but I couldn’t find a job. Finally I started working for an American company as their special buyer in China. With no factory or workshop, the company designs the products in the US, has them manufactured here, and then sells them for a good profit all over the world. Sometimes they simply buy wholesale at the Yiwu Small Product Market and put their own labels on them. They hired me because I speak several Chinese dialects and am capable of negotiating and bargaining in the countryside. So I fly back and forth regularly, with Shanghai as my base. After all, it’s my home city, and it’s convenient for me to go anywhere from here-”

“Hold on a minute, Weng. You still have your family here, why don’t you stay at home?”

“My parents had only a room of sixteen square meters, in which my elder brother still lives with his wife and two kids, all huddled up together. I can’t squeeze back into that one single room. My brother might not say anything, but his wife would grumble nonstop. The company pays all the expenses for my business trips. Why should I save money for them?”

“I see,” Yu said. “So you met her during your stay in the hotel.”

“I met her about half a year ago, in an elevator incident. The ancient elevator stopped moving between the fifth and sixth floor. We were trapped inside, just two of us, facing each other and the possibility of its crashing down the next instant. All of a sudden, I felt her so closely. In her hotel shirt, skirt, barefoot in plastic slippers, carrying a pail of soap water. At a flowerlike age, she looked too good to be at such a menial job. Then the light went out too. She grasped my hand in panic. After the longest five minutes in my life, the elevator started moving again. In the light, which came back like soft water, she looked so pure and charming. I asked her to have a cup of tea with me in the canteen-to relieve the shock in an old convention. She declined, saying that it was against the hotel policy. The next morning I happened to see her again in the lobby. She looked worn out, having just finished the night shift. I followed her out and invited her to a restaurant across the street. She agreed. That’s how things began to develop.”

“What kind of a girl did you find her?”

“A really nice girl. There are not too many left like her nowadays. Not materialistic at all. She could have earned much more at a nightclub, but she would rather earn her honest money at the hotel. I don’t think she took me as a Big Buck. She knew better. And she was so devoted to her sick, paralyzed father too. An extraordinarily filial daughter!”

“Yes, I’ve heard that. Have you visited her home?”

“No, she didn’t like the idea. She wanted to keep our relationship a secret.”

“Because you were staying at the hotel?”

“You could say that.”

“But you went out a lot with her. People would have discovered your relationship sooner or later.”

“Maybe, but we didn’t go out that much. I was busy, flying here and there, and she had to take care of her father.”

“Now a different question. Did she ever wear a red mandarin dress in your presence?”

“No. She was not a fashion butterfly. I tried to buy some new clothing for her, but she invariably said no. She had a pajama top made from her mother’s fifteen years ago. No, she did not-” Weng broke off, as if overwhelmed in memories. “The Old Heaven is blind. A girl like her should not have suffered such a string of bad luck, and such an end-”

The room phone started ringing. Weng snatched it up as if he had been expecting it.

“Oh, Mr. Newman, about that deal-hold on,” Weng turned around, covering the phone with his hand. “Sorry, it’s an international call. Can we talk another time?”

“That’s okay,” Yu said, pulling out a business card and adding the cell phone number the bureau had temporarily given him. “You can call me anytime.”

The visit hadn’t yielded much, but at least he could rule out two possibilities. First, Weng was excluded as a suspect, and more importantly, Jasmine was not an easy-pick-up target engaged in sex business, contrary to Liao’s suspicions.

Still, he felt he might have missed something in the interview. Though what it was, he couldn’t figure out.