Chapter 69: The Wealthy Girl Starts Early
Sui Jing had played a crucial role in clearing Xiao Liang’s name.
Even if he didn’t make a special visit to thank her, there was no way he could run into her at the gates of Dongzhou Institute of Technology and simply wave before walking away.
“Officer Sui, what are you doing here?” Xiao Liang glanced at the girl beside her—a bright, youthful beauty in her own right—then walked toward the gatehouse with his brother and Gu Peijun to greet her.
Sui Jing covered the phone receiver and said, “I’m returning Captain Yuan’s call. He just paged me…”
Xiao Liang gestured for her to finish the call first.
“…What a coincidence. I came to the Institute this afternoon to see my classmate Sun Feifei, and just happened to see Xiao Liang walking out. You want him to come drinking tonight too? Fine, I’ll tell him. But if he refuses, I can’t exactly slap handcuffs on him this time…”
After hanging up, Sui Jing turned to Xiao Liang.
“Zhou Jun is treating Captain Yuan to dinner tonight to celebrate his promotion. He just paged me to head back to Shishan. Didn’t expect to run into you here. Captain Yuan wants you to come too. You’re not too busy tonight, are you?”
“You don’t sound very eager for me to come,” Xiao Liang said, looking at her.
“How could that be?” Sui Jing did think Xiao Liang didn’t look like a good person, but she wasn’t about to expose that little thought. Pressing her lips together, she said, “I’ve delivered the message. If you’re too busy, call Captain Yuan yourself.”
“Captain Yuan is being transferred to our Yunshe as station chief. If he invites me to drink and I refuse, won’t I have to worry about him making life difficult for me later?”
It had been some time since Xiao Liang last saw Yuan Wenhai. Since fate had arranged such a coincidence, he naturally didn’t find it troublesome to go to Shishan for a drink.
He stepped aside and said to Gu Peijun and Zhang Feili, “I was going to invite you to my place for a while, but that won’t work now. You head back to Yunshe first. I’ll go with Sui Jing to Shishan to drink with Captain Yuan. Also—Feili, Weiwei—the new company matter should stay quiet for now. Treat it as if it doesn’t exist.”
Liu Weiwei was young and new to the workplace, still almost a child in her understanding of the world. A casual reminder would be enough for her to keep silent.
Zhang Feili, however, was simple at times yet heavy with thoughts at others.
Her concerns were undoubtedly more complicated than Liu Weiwei’s. Xiao Liang couldn’t quite see through them. If he didn’t make the matter clear, and her father-in-law Zhou Jianqi asked about the juice factory, she might not feel obligated to keep anything secret for them.
“Mm…” Zhang Feili nodded, then, looking faintly melancholy, left with Gu Peijun, Xiao Xiao, and Liu Weiwei after briefly greeting Sui Jing. As they walked out of the school gate, she couldn’t help turning back for another look.
Zhang Feili, Gu Peijun, and Liu Weiwei weren’t especially close to Sui Jing, but they had all interacted with her during the investigation.
She also knew that Xiao Yujun’s arrest and Xiao Liang’s exoneration were directly tied to Sui Jing’s persistent investigation into the inconsistencies of the case.
Today, Sui Jing wasn’t in uniform. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, casual and strikingly youthful, especially those long legs of hers—slightly sturdy, yet perfectly proportioned, long enough to stab straight into a man’s heart.
The girl beside Sui Jing was slimmer. Her looks might have been slightly less dazzling, but her clean, delicate face behind narrow-rimmed glasses gave her the cool, refined air of a city girl.
Standing before those two young women, Zhang Feili couldn’t help feeling a little inferior. Perhaps only girls like them were truly worthy of Xiao Liang.
“That’s Zhang Feili from your juice factory? She’s really beautiful.”
Sui Jing smiled and waved at Zhang Feili, who had turned back to look, then asked Xiao Liang curiously, “I interviewed her about the juice factory case before. How did I not notice she was that pretty? Back when so many people at the factory and in Yunshe thought you were a rapist, she said a lot of good things for you. When I went to Gu Peijun for information, she kept hinting this way and that too…”
Xiao Liang thought that when Sui Jing had questioned Zhang Feili about the case, she had been working, so it was normal for her to overlook Zhang Feili’s appearance. Still, he was curious how, out of uniform, she seemed no different from any other gossiping girl.
Of course, if Sui Jing hadn’t said it, he wouldn’t have known Zhang Feili had played such a role in the investigation. His feelings grew complicated as he looked at Zhang Feili’s graceful back.
“Ah, you’re that ra—”
The girl in the long dress had been standing quietly aside. Only now, after hearing Sui Jing’s words, did she suddenly remember who Xiao Liang was and nearly blurt out the word.
“Sun Feifei, Sui Jing’s high school classmate.” The young woman folded her hands in front of her and looked Xiao Liang over, wondering how this man could possibly be as crafty and cunning as Sui Jing had described.
“It’s summer vacation now, isn’t it…” Xiao Liang glanced at the mostly empty campus. Aside from professors like Xu Yushan still doing research in their labs, there were barely any people around.
“Sun Feifei just got admitted as a graduate student here. She was tired of all the chaos at home, so she came early to report in—and to spend some time with me while she’s at it. What, do you have a problem with that?”
Seeing Xiao Liang look at Sun Feifei with that old-fox suspicion in his eyes, Sui Jing said directly, “Perfect timing. You can help us carry things.”
Sun Feifei had arrived at Dongzhou Institute of Technology early, before dorm assignments had been made, so she rented a place nearby on her own. She had just asked a teacher she knew to help her get a library card, and since Sui Jing happened to be off today, she dragged her along to borrow books from the library and move them back so she could make use of the holiday.
Now that she had caught Xiao Liang as free labor, Sui Jing naturally wasn’t going to waste him. She pointed toward two stacks of books tied with plastic cord and placed against the gatehouse wall.
“You should’ve said so earlier.” Xiao Liang looked at the two piles of books, each more than half a meter tall, and groaned. “My brother and the others hadn’t left just now. If you’d spoken sooner, I could’ve had them help too.”
He couldn’t exactly say that he had personally seen Sui Jing knock down two thugs with ease at Gu Peijun’s little wholesale shop, or that she was probably no weaker than he was. So he could only brace himself, lift one stack in each hand, and follow Sui Jing and Sun Feifei toward Yinhua Garden in the northwest corner of Dongzhou Institute of Technology.
At this time, Dongzhou Institute of Technology had not yet merged with the teachers’ college and other institutions to become Dongzhou University. Its only campus sat in the city center, just two blocks from Xiao Liang’s home. Yinhua Garden, where Sun Feifei lived, was behind the alley near his house—a high-end residential area in Jiangjiayuan.
If he hadn’t cleared his name and were still locked in the detention center, he would never have met Sun Feifei in this life. Thinking about it, fate really could be strange.
Yinhua Garden was one of the few high-end commercial housing developments in Dongzhou in recent years. In 1993, prices had once exceeded 1,400 yuan per square meter. Although prices had fallen quite a bit in 1994 under the impact of the Hainan real estate crash, they were still enough to make ordinary locals gasp.
Sun Feifei not only lived alone in a large apartment there, but the interior decoration was luxuriously rare for the era.
The entrance opened onto wooden flooring. The walls were covered in high-end wallpaper with raised patterns and gold and silver threading. The minimalist Japanese-style furniture was clearly not something domestic manufacturers were producing at the moment.
Not because it was technically difficult—but because very few people in China currently appreciated that style.
The kitchen also had a rare Japanese-style integrated cabinet system. Refrigerator, microwave, and other high-end appliances were all present.
Xiao Liang thought of his own home: terrazzo flooring in the living room and bedrooms, tiled counters in the kitchen. That already counted as decent in Dongzhou. But compared with this apartment, it looked practically impoverished.
The cabinet air conditioner standing alone in the corner of the living room was also extremely rare in the country at this time. Even wealthy families in Dongzhou who had started using home air conditioning mostly had noisy window units with internal and external components combined.
Sun Feifei’s long dress was made of fine material, though he couldn’t identify the brand.
Looking around, Xiao Liang suspected that after Sun Feifei had been admitted to graduate school at Dongzhou Institute of Technology, her family had specifically rented—or bought—this place and redecorated it. The imported interior finishes, furniture, and appliances together were probably worth several times more than the apartment itself.
This kind of interior wouldn’t be anything special twenty or thirty years later. But now?
This was 1994, when the average monthly income in Dongzhou was only three hundred yuan.
A place like this could blind people with envy.
“Stop looking around like a thief. This apartment belongs to a friend of Sun Feifei’s brother. It’s only being lent to her temporarily.”
Sui Jing’s current impression of Xiao Liang was that he was a slippery old fox. Remembering how he had used her before still annoyed her. Seeing the way he examined the apartment, she immediately knew what he was thinking. She widened her eyes and warned him, “Let me tell you now—you are not allowed to get any ideas about Feifei just because her family is well off.”
Although the apartment wasn’t Sun Feifei’s family’s property, the fact that her brother’s friend would lend her a newly renovated luxury apartment filled with high-end imported furniture and appliances—and that Sun Feifei herself showed not the slightest discomfort—made it obvious that her family background was extremely privileged.
Rich or powerful. Perhaps both.
Sui Jing could guess that Xiao Liang had noticed, which was why she warned him not to entertain crooked thoughts.
“Comrade Officer Sui, the facts have already proven that I’m innocent and upright. Why do you still think I don’t look like a good person?” Xiao Liang asked, staring at her.
“What do you think?” Sui Jing tilted her head, her bright eyes fixed on him. “Do *you* think you’re a good person? If you have the nerve to say it, I’ll believe you.”
“Fine. In the future, remember to stay far away from me. If you see me on the street, don’t even smile. Otherwise, I might get so dazzled by you that I lose myself and climb right up the pole,” Xiao Liang joked to Sun Feifei, who stood nearby watching him and Sui Jing bicker.
Sun Feifei could calmly live in a place like this for graduate school, while Sui Jing showed no restraint or unease here either. To be honest, what truly intrigued Xiao Liang was Sui Jing’s own family background—and why someone like her had ended up as a criminal police officer in an unremarkable little county like Shishan.
Of course, even Yuan Wenhai in his previous life had never known Sui Jing’s origins. Xiao Liang wasn’t foolish enough to ask directly. He simply took the can of chilled cola from Sun Feifei and drank.
