“Oh, Chief—Party Secretary Chen.”
“Please just call me Chen, Mrs. Wei.”
“Call me Guizhen, then.”
She stepped out of the doorway and invited Chen in.
She had a hard time finding a chair for Chen in the tightly packed room. Judging from the two beds squeezed into the less than fifteen square meters of space, Chen assumed one of the beds was for their son in middle school. Wei hadn’t been able to buy a larger apartment for his family, and now it would be totally out of the question.
Chen knew that Guizhen used to do piecework sewing for a neighborhood production group at minimum pay but that the group went bankrupt several years ago. Since then, the family had been dependent on Wei’s income alone. With his sudden death, they would have to apply for the minimum city resident allowance, which, if eventually approved, would be pathetically small.
Chen thought about the possibility of bureau compensation again. But regulations were regulations, and if Wei died in a traffic accident on his own time, then the only money available would be what his colleagues around the bureau chipped in for him.
“You might not know this, Guizhen, but I joined the police force about the same time as Wei did—though he was older, having come back from Jiangxi Province as an educated youth. I still remember that in our first year at the bureau, we were both assigned to traffic. He was transferred to homicide after that, and he’s done a great job all these years.” Chen paused briefly, then resumed. “Before he died, Wei was engaged in an important investigation, to which I was serving as a consultant. Since it was really a case for the homicide squad, we didn’t meet every day, and not on the day of his accident. Consequently, I don’t know exactly what he was doing that afternoon, nor why he was at that particular intersection.”
“He left early that morning without telling me what he was planning to do. As a rule, he didn’t talk to me about police matters.”
“Did he say or do anything unusual that you can think of?”
“Er—he was dressed rather formally that morning. He’s not the type of man who was particular about his clothes. But occasionally, he would choose to dress more formally because of his work.”
Occasionally, Chen would do the same. And if Wei was going to the hotel surreptitiously, that would have made sense.
“About the location of the accident, did he say anything to you? Like, if there was something he wanted to do there, or somebody he wanted to visit in that particular neighborhood?”
“Not that I can recall. Not at all.”
“Did he call during the day?”
“No. I called him toward evening, but I didn’t get him. He could work late, though, even stay overnight at the bureau. But the next morning I still hadn’t heard from him. I was worried, so I called the bureau.”
“In the bureau, some of his colleagues are suggesting that he might have been planning to take an evening class. There’s a night school in the area.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes. with the back of her hand. “He worked hard all those years but was still a detective of the second rank because he didn’t have a college degree. We were both ‘educated youths’ with our best years wasted during the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes he grumbled about it. But what could he do? Already in his fifties, he didn’t have the time or energy for night school. Besides, our son is in middle school, and we couldn’t afford the expense of another student.”
That made sense but left unanswered the question of why Wei had been where he was.
“Let me ask a different question, Guizhen. Did he bring his lunch with him that day?”
“No, not that day. He frequently brought his lunch but only on the days that he knew he’d be at his desk in the bureau.”
So it was possible that Wei could have gone to the intersection for lunch, given those inexpensive food stalls on that corner. But that was a stretch. It was difficult to imagine that, after leaving the hotel, Wei would have climbed the overpass across the street just to get lunch.
In the short spell of silence that followed, Guizhen stood up to pour him a cup of tea.
“I’m sorry, but the water isn’t that hot, Chief Inspector Chen,” she said in apology.
For a poverty-stricken couple, so many things are sad.
“The thermos bottle no longer really works,” she said desolately. There was only one old-fashioned, bamboo-shelled hot-water thermos, which stood on the table like an inverted exclamation mark. There was no refrigerator or appliances like that visible in the small room.
He couldn’t help remembering the home of another widow he’d recently visited. Mrs. Zhou was heartbroken, too, but at least her family would be well taken care of. Some of the money embezzled by Zhou might eventually be recovered, but some would never be found.