The result, of course, confirmed her suspicion.
She literally froze, looking down at the positive result. What would Tom say if he found out? Her mind was racing, full of anticipation. “He’ll marry me, of course, now that I have his child,” she assumed. Who wouldn’t when he made his girl pregnant?
“But I can’t be fat and heavy now!” She gasped when she glanced at the evening dress hanging behind the bathroom door. “What happens if I can’t fit into my evening gowns anymore? I have to attend his concerts!”
Yes, the concerts! “I can’t tell him at the moment,” she said to herself because Tom couldn’t be distracted right now. “I probably should wait until the season ends. Plus, what if I miscarry? Lots women lost their babies in the first few months of pregnancy. I’ll tell him when I’m at least four months along.”
She wrapped up the test kit with toilet paper when she heard Tom had stopped playing in the living room.
“What are you doing?” Tom was behind her back, eyed her suspiciously. Her hands were buried in one of the drawers in their bedroom.
“Tidying up the drawers,” she said, pulling out a pair of loose socks. “By the way, I don’t know why you have to keep the gun. It always makes me nervous when I touch it.” She found his revolver when she first moved in, trying to rearrange his drawers so she could have a few to use. It was a small handgun, and she was quite curious as how it could kill. It looked harmless in her palm.
“I told you it’s from my father. What am I going to do with it? I can’t give it back to him, and I can’t drop it in the Charles River either,” he said impatiently and took the socks away from her hand.
To cover her nervousness, she started kissing him passionately, which surprised him somewhat because he was usually the aggressor. He responded the way exactly as she had expected, and pretty soon, he was on the top of her.
She didn’t say anything until more than a month later when they were making out on the living room floor. He had the day off, and they planned to go out to eat. Before going out, he told her they should make love first.
For the first time, his passionate lovemaking made her uncomfortable. It was in fact painful when he went for it. “Oh, Tom, please, you’re hurting the baby!” she cried, trying hard to prevent him to go too deep.
He stopped dead and stared at her. “What did you say?” he asked.
She smiled nervously and took one of his hands into her own, guiding it toward her tummy. It was soft with a tiny bump, which was more like belly fat than a baby.
“No!” he cried, pulling his hand back as of being burned on the stove, and sat up on the floor in horror.
Yi-yun was very taken aback by the anger in his voice before noticing his eyes, which looked like a wounded animal. “It cannot be!” he shouted at her, red in the face.
“But I am!” she burst into tears. “I am pregnant with your child,” she said.
“No!” his voice trembled with panic. “You can’t.”
“Why,” she cried pitifully.
“Don’t you understand?” He raised his voice a pitch higher. “I can’t have a baby in my life right now!”
“Why?” She started sobbing. It was definitely not what she had expected.
“I just started my career! I can’t have a crying baby while practicing. Look, if you want, we can have it when we are more settled, like a few years later,” Tom pleaded with her, “or at least when we can afford a house so you can keep it in the basement when I practice.”
He held her tightly in his arms, and his warmth melted her heart. He did love me, she thought and stopped sobbing; he didn’t want a baby only because the apartment had one bedroom. Really, how could he practice in the living room when a baby was crying in the bedroom? She inhaled heavily and sighed, and he intercepted the sigh with a wet kiss.
“My love, I know you will understand. You can have anything you want if you just give me a few more years,” he said and went back to their lovemaking.
The next day, Yi-yun got a letter when she came home from work. It was from INS, which informed her that she needed to go in for some inquiry regarding her immigration status.
For more than ten minutes, she just stood there, too shocked to think straight.
Why did they want to inquire into her immigration status? She already had a green card, or not? She suddenly remembered in panic. The green card she got was a temporary one. When she received it, Fang Chen had joked that he would have to sign off after two years before she could get the permanent one. Did she lose her residency because she was divorced? What was she going to do?
She looked into the living room where Tom had been practicing. As usual, he was totally absorbed in his music that he didn’t even hear the door open.
I have to find a lawyer, she thought while looking at him, if my legal status is in limbo, he has to marry me. This time, it would be serious because her livelihood was depending on it.
Chapter 12
Paul Winderman was nursing a beer while watching a hockey game on TV, too restless to sleep. The DA’s office had decided to try Tom Meyers who had been formally charged as the suspect in a second-degree murder case.
This new development troubled him quite a bit because as far as Paul was concerned, most of the evidence against Tom Meyers was circumstantial. Sure, the bullet that killed the victim was from a .22 handgun, which old Meyers admitted to have given to his son, the pillow that muffled the gunshot was Tom Meyers’s own, and the suspect admitted he caused the bruises on the victim’s arms when they had an argument.
Tom Meyers’s colleagues had said he wasn’t himself when he arrived at the airport; he was nervous and anxious. The conductor noticed the tempo of Tom’s playing was slightly off when he practiced with the orchestra. In addition, Ms. White was quite sure now that she had heard the fight and the victim screaming in pain before everything went quiet the night before. Even though there was no eyewitness, the DA’s office considered the evidence strong enough to warrant a trial.
It made Paul Winderman uneasy because he preferred to have an airtight case before putting a suspect on trial. He didn’t want a killer to walk free if there was no chance to get him convicted. So far, they still hadn’t found the murder weapon, and the location of the pillow was the sticky point in Paul’s mind. If the boyfriend threw away the gun, why should he have left the pillow in the neighborhood for the police to find? He would have gotten rid of the pillow as well. Some of Paul’s colleagues pointed out that the killer was running out of time, and he didn’t know the police would have found the pillow so quickly. They went door-to-door, opening trashcans and using K-9 sniffing dogs. If they had waited for one more day, the trash in that neighborhood would have been dumped in the landfill.
They also pointed out that there was no sign of forced entry in the apartment. The lack of a forced entry indicated nothing but the possibility that the killer or killers were someone the victim knew. It could have been the boyfriend, or one of her friends, or her ex-husband.
He thought about her ex-husband.
“What, Fang Chen?” Shao Mei cried incredulously when he interviewed her and dropped his name purposefully. “No possible way. He loves her, still loves her, if you know him at all.”
He admitted it was true. When he mentioned her badly decomposed body, he watched Fang Chen’s eyes welled up with tears. His pain was obvious.
But the ex-husband did send a letter to the immigration office trying to deport her back to China. If he loved her as much as everyone said, the love could easily have turned into hatred. If so, had it been strong enough to prompt him to kill?
Paul Winderman shook his head. He doubted that the Chinese scholar with thick glasses would plan such a deliberate killing and then calmly walk back to school. They had checked with the university and everyone around him. One of his colleagues saw him l
eave his office around 12:20 pm but it was the time he usually had his lunch. Paul Winderman went to several restaurants near the campus with a photo. The noodle shop manager looked at the photo and said Fang Chen was a regular but couldn’t be sure if he was there that day because he normally paid cash. “Most likely he was here,” the manager had said. “He’s a good customer, eating at our place a couple times a week.”
The school said since he started working, Fang Chen hadn’t taken a sick day or a vacation day. He was a devoted teacher and researcher; he was always on campus, and his students loved him. Plus, it took too long for him to avenge if he ever intended to. Shao Mei thought he was a saint. Paul smiled when he thought of Shao Mei who was so opinionated that he doubted if she would accept any opposite view.
“He basically let her do whatever she wanted,” Shao Mei had said. “If he would just have stood up to her, she might not have walked out on him, if you ask me.”
Ann told him that Fang Chen had spent several thousand dollars and bought a resting spot for his ex-wife. The girl was extremely moved. “So kind,” she said. “I don’t know what we would do without his help.” She said the victim’s parents had refused to collect their daughter’s ashes.
If the killer weren’t the ex-husband, it would most likely be the boyfriend. Paul wished they could locate the gun. He and his men had searched all the ponds and rivers near the apartment building, but nothing came up. He didn’t think they would find any fingerprints even if they did find the gun; it would have been submerged in the water for too long. This was assuming the killer dropped the gun in one of the rivers near or around the city. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the manpower to search them all. No, nothing on the gun would pinpoint the killer, but having a murder weapon was much better than not having one. Paul just wanted to know if the suspect’s gun was the gun that fired the bullet. It would at least tie up the case better.
Paul Winderman shook his head disgustedly when he thought of the suspect. He basically collapsed when they formally charged him, wetting his pants, screaming and crying, telling anyone who wanted to listen that he never, ever killed his girlfriend.
From what he gathered, the suspect was a talented pianist who loved his piano more than anything in the world. Paul Winderman interviewed two of his ex-girlfriends, and both of them said they left him because they didn’t think they could have a meaningful relationship with him. “He was a passionate lover, mind you,” one of them said. “He could be extremely sweet if you were willing to baby him. But he could turn into a cold fish when he was in one of his moods. I was always a second class citizen in his eyes, and I was sick of him after a semester, but we didn’t separate until we graduated from college.”
“He’s just selfish,” another girlfriend told him. “Never shy to take a handout from anyone he knows. Sure, he’s talented, but I can’t live with a spoiled brat and babysit him all my life.”
A selfish, passionate musician who could care less about anyone but himself and his music, Paul Winderman thought. If his girlfriend wanted to force his hand and get between him and his career goal, would he get mad enough to kill? Or if he turned her down, would she be mad enough to kill him?
He closed his eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Obviously, the girlfriend was the one killed, not the other way around. Paul Winderman remembered the spine-tingling laugh Tom Meyers’s college girlfriend made when he asked if the suspect ever thought of marriage. “Never,” she laughed out loud. “Not even in his dreams,” she said. “We were basically in a mutual agreement that he would never marry me although I thought he really loved me.” She shook her head sadly.
If the suspect told Yi-yun as such, why should he kill her? As Paul Winderman analyzed it, Tom Meyers would be too selfish a person to lift his finger to do anything other than playing piano. On the other hand, the victim had been put into a very difficult position, five months pregnant and with no prospect to get married. She had to choose either to be a single mother or to kill the baby or kill herself if she were desperate.
This was crazy. If only he could figure out how she got killed and where the gun was… It was unlikely she had killed herself; the gun was missing. Although, the fact that she was killed in a very close range did fit. Only two inches, which was another sticky point. Who could get to her so close if it weren’t her boyfriend? If she did kill herself, where was the gun?
He had her phone records subpoenaed from Verizon, the local phone company serving her apartment building as well as the surrounding areas. No phone calls were made the days before and after the murder. In fact, there weren’t too many phone calls in or out of her apartment. Apparently the couple didn’t have many friends and wasn’t very social.
If she did kill herself, she needed to have an accomplice who had to be someone she was close to. For all it’s worth, Paul Winderman had requested all the phone records being subpoenaed from her nearest and dearest including Ann Lee, Shao Mei, Amy and Fang Chen. Nothing stood out as suspicious. Ann had one call from Yi-yun a few weeks ago and that was it. Nobody else got a call from the victim at all.
Paul Winderman finished off the beer, turned off the TV and headed to his bedroom. Hopefully, he had done everything, leaving no stone unturned. Or had he? He stopped with his hand was resting on the doorknob of the bedroom. What if the victim called someone using a public payphone? Was it possible?
Soon he would be on the witness stand, cross-examined by the defense lawyer regarding the crime scene, evidence, and all that. The little birds told him the court-appointed public defense lawyer was young and smart. It might be good for the defendant; it might be not. It all depended on the members of the jury who got to analyze all the evidence put in front of them and decide whether the boyfriend was the killer. Paul Winderman just wanted to make sure it was the real killer he would testify against.
Chapter 13
The prosecutor for the state was an ambitious man who had been looking forward to replacing his boss in the near future. He grabbed the case because it had generated quite a media buzz as the victim was a foreign student and the suspect was an upstart award-winning musician. With hint of a subpoena, he sweet-talked Fang Chen into being a prosecution witness even though Fang Chen tried very hard to get out of it.
Sure enough, Fang Chen’s disdain for the suspect was obvious. In less than ten minutes, it was established that the suspect was a shameless philanderer who had come between a loving husband and the victim, breaking up a marriage so he could have a slave to support him financially. “He forced my ex-wife to go back to work as a bartender at a Chinese restaurant so he could go to Prague,” Fang Chen said. “He didn’t have the financial means to do so before he met her.”
“You married the deceased when she was a poor immigrant on an F-1 student visa, is that correct?” the defense lawyer asked when it’s time for cross-exam.
“Yes,” Fang Chen said.
“She left you after she got the green card, is that correct?”
“Yes,” he answered dully. It hurt him so when he remembered the day she left.
It was past three in the morning, and Fang Chen had been sitting on the couch, widely awake, tormented by the anticipation that his wife would be gone and their two-year marriage would be over in a few hours.
Tom Meyers! He could kill him with his bare hands if he had him alone. In fact, he had intended to do just that when he stormed out of his apartment. He wanted to knock Tom’s brain out so he wouldn’t steal his wife from him. Unfortunately, the bastard wasn’t at the Ritz when he went to search.
After he gulped down two glasses of wine at the bar, Fang Chen headed toward the nightclub Yi-yun had mentioned before. Having failed to grab a jacket before leaving home, he hailed a cab outside the hotel to avoid the evening chill.
“Please wait for me,” he told the driver. “It won’t take long.” He didn’t want to walk home afterward.
There were two bouncers at the door, one was young and one was a middle-aged man.
“Is my friend Tom playing tonight?” Fang Chen asked casually.
“Oh yes, he’s playing all right,” the middle-aged man answered with a grin, “but I can’t say if he will be tomorrow. He’s leaving us, Tom the pianist.”
“Why?” Fang Chen asked, pretending to be surprised.
“He won a competition, a big international one I heard,” the bouncer said proudly. “Oh yes, the young man did.”
“How wonderful,” Fang Chen said coldly.
The bouncer had been too engaged in talking to notice the change of Fang Chen’s expression and tone. “Too bad we couldn’t keep him,” he continued cheerfully. “He’s heading to the Symphony Hall.”
Gripped by anger and fury, Fang Chen abruptly turned his back to the bouncers and stepped into the lobby. To his surprise, Tom Meyers was playing jazz, not classical music, for a large and cheerful crowd inside the club.
Fang Chen felt the blood rush to his face. How could the guy enjoy himself so when his victim was suffering? A perfect marriage had been destroyed because of him, the ruthless son of a bitch! Pushing the crowd aside, Fang Chen jumped at his enemy with a force as madly as a bull in front of a red flag. “You bastard!” he yelled. “Go fuck the chicks if you can’t keep your cock in the right place!” With all his strength, he hit Tom on his head and knocked him right off the bench.
The piano went dead after Tom punched an ugly chord with his elbow as he fell. People on the dance floor started to scream.
“I’ll kill you if you dare to go near my wife again!” Fang Chen shouted as two muscular men swiftly blocked his access to his foe. One of them punched him on the face when he tried to get free. Fang Chen groaned as a hot stream of blood ran down his nose.