Taichang Ming Dynasty

Chapter 354: Commonalities of the Four Cases

To facilitate management and collect taxes, the government required that all rentals and purchases take place through licensed brokerages, not private transactions. However, the government often couldn't oversee every minor private transaction, so it often turned a blind eye to these seemingly minor matters.

But if there was just one thing, Shen Guangzuo would have gone to extremes and ordered the old man in charge to be brought back to the government office and beaten. If the lessor was still alive, the government could force the sale to be registered with a brokerage firm. Even the imperial inspector wouldn't be able to intervene.

However, Shen Guangzuo only glanced at the old man, pointed at the clothes in the cabinet in front of him and asked, "Are these all his?"

"Master Huihui." The child was so frightened by the dead man's horrific death that he couldn't stop crying. To protect him from the soldiers' beatings, the old man could only comfort him while trembling. "Except for the furniture and bedding, everything in this house is his."

"Take him out. Just leave a message." Shen Guangzuo waved his hand.

"Thank you, sir!" The old man felt as if he had been pardoned and hurriedly left the room with the child in his arms.

"How much does he pay you per month for rent?" Shen Guangzuo walked over to the deceased and examined his fingernails. He discovered that there were a lot of tiny pieces of human tissue stuck in the cracks between his fingernails, and several of his fingernails were clearly turned outward and even bleeding.

"Master, I charge him two cents of silver every month," the old woman replied.

"Are meals provided?" Shen Guangzuo continued to check other containers in the room.

"How can two cents of silver cover our meals?" the old woman shook her head.

"You only have one kitchen at home. Do you have to cook twice for one meal?" Shen Guangzuo waved to Yang Zhang, then pointed to the area behind the corpse and said, "Tell someone to move the table over here."

"Two cents is just for the room, food is charged separately." The old woman's eyes followed Shen Guangzuo's footsteps. When his figure moved behind the corpse, the old woman immediately lowered her head.

"Yes." Yang Zhang looked back and found that his soldiers were all outside the wing room, and quite far away, so he simply helped move the table to the position designated by Shen Guangzuo.

"Bring that stool over here too." After the table was put in place, Shen Guangzuo pointed to the stool that had fallen to the ground.

"What do you want?" Yang Zhang lowered his head, picked up the stool and handed it to Shen Guangzuo.

"Of course I'll go up and take a look." Shen Guangzuo took the stool and asked the old woman, "How do you calculate the food expenses?"

The old woman didn't know why the master was asking about such trivial family matters, but she still answered honestly, "We agreed to give you three taels of silver first."

"Three taels of silver a month?" Shen Guangzuo asked, "He's just one person. What kind of food could cost so much?"

Prices were relatively normal these days, especially in Beijing, where grain prices could even be described as "low" thanks to government intervention.

For example, in the 32nd year of the Wanli reign, the Ministry of Revenue proposed famine relief measures, suggesting "distributing 200,000 dan of rice from the Beijing granary for a flat sale at 6.5 qian per dan." During the 43rd year of the Wanli reign, Li Changgeng, then the prefect of Shuntian Prefecture, reported, "Yours truly supervise the distribution of rice from two counties for a flat sale, in accordance with the Ministry's proposal, at 6 qian per dan of polished rice and 5 qian per dan of millet."

Although the price of grain in the capital has been rising in recent years due to the impact of the Liaodong war, it is still within a controllable range.

The old woman heard the doubt in Shen Guangzuo's tone and hurriedly explained, "It's not three coins every month. It's three coins at first, and then you can supplement as much as you eat."

"Hmm." Shen Guangzuo stopped asking questions. He stepped onto the table with a stool and observed the neck of the corpse closely. He found that there were no cross-strangle marks on the neck of the deceased, only some scratches caused by the instinct for survival.

Yang Zhang thought Shen Guangzuo wanted to put the body down, so he said, "Mr. Shen Zan, we can do this job."

Just as Shen Guangzuo was about to refuse, Yang Zhang shouted towards the door, "Someone, come here! Help the master get this dead man down!"

Two soldiers from the military headquarters, guarding the gate, entered the room. At that moment, Tan Shijiang returned with the coroner. Not counting those hanging from the beams, eight people suddenly crammed into the small room.

"No need, just leave it hanging like this." Shen Guangzuo waved his hand to stop the two soldiers, then returned to the ground and said to General Tan Shi: "Send someone to inform Zheng Baizai and ask him to send someone to take a look."

General Tan Shi did not immediately go to pass on the order, but instead asked, "What if they want to take all this evidence away? Dazan Mansion, the things in this yard do not count as evidence from Shuntian Mansion."

"If he wants to take it away, let him take it away. We're not trying to steal his credit. And I think..." Shen Guangzuo glanced at Fang Zhenru subconsciously. "They won't want it."

Shen Guangzuo knew full well that the Imperial Guard wanted evidence either to facilitate inspection or to suppress the news. Since the Shuntian Prefecture had facilitated their efforts, and the news had already leaked, there was no need for the Imperial Guard to take the evidence, especially the body. Taking the body away would not only be unlucky, but would also require the time and effort of buying a coffin and finding a place to bury the body before it decomposed. The Imperial Guard were not some kindhearted charity cemetery worker, so they wouldn't bother themselves with such trouble.

"Okay then." Tan Shijiang left the room again.

Shen Guangzuo said to the coroner, "Feel it out and see if this person is the real one."

"Yes." The coroner, who often worked with corpses, had no reservations about this. He raised his head and reached directly under the hem of the deceased's clothes. However, because the corpse's legs were hanging straight down and rigor mortis had already begun to set in, the coroner hadn't reached the right spot until Tan Shijiang returned.

Shen Guangzuo was getting a little impatient. He looked at Yang Zhang and said, "Help him break it."

"You come." Although Yang Zhang was not afraid, he did not want to bring bad luck to himself, so he handed the task to the soldiers in the room.

The soldier he had called out didn't want to touch the body, but he had no one else to turn to, so he had no choice but to come over and pry the dead man's legs apart by the ankles.

With the help of the soldiers, the coroner quickly felt the deceased's lower body. He gently pinched it twice, then turned to Shen Guangzuo and said, "My Lord, this man really has no eggs."

"Well, you guys go out first." Shen Guangzuo nodded and waved to the coroner and the two soldiers.

"Yes." The three of them followed the order and left the room.

"Apart from this room, is there any other place in the yard where the deceased's personal belongings are stored?" Shen Guangzuo asked the old woman.

The old woman replied, "No, all his things are here." "Tan Tui Mansion." Shen Guangzuo walked around the crowd and walked out of the wing room.

"Sir, please speak." Tan Shijiang and Yang Zhang immediately followed. Only Fang Zhenru was willing to greet the old woman. "You come out too."

"Thank you, sir." The old woman had just stood up and followed him out when she heard the official who had been questioning her give the order: "Search every corner of the house, including the well. Regardless of whether it is valuable or not, pile it all in this yard."

Tan Shijiang arrived at the gate and called out to the runners they had brought from the Shuntian Prefecture Office. "Come here! Search!"

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During the evidence search, the three civil servants did not continue to interrogate the owner of the house, but gathered in the back room that was the first to be turned upside down and waited silently.

The first person to lose his composure was Fang Zhenru, the Imperial Censor inspecting the northern city. He looked around for a long time before finally gazing at Shen Guangzuo, who had sat down in deep thought, and softly called out, "Mr. Shen Zan."

Shen Guangzuo blinked and withdrew his gaze from the gradually increasing pile of debris in the yard. "Haiwei, what's wrong?" Fang Zhenru, whose courtesy name was Haiwei, asked.

"Is this a serial case?" Fang Zhenru asked.

Tan Shijiang's expression changed immediately after hearing this, but Shen Guangzuo's voice remained as steady as usual: "Why do you think so?"

"Because I heard similar cases occurred in the south city and outside the city," Fang Zhenru said. "The deceased were all eunuchs. Although the causes of death were different, they all appeared to be suicides."

"They are not eunuchs, but middlemen. Current speculation is that these people should be the redundant ones who were laid off during the recent palace downsizing. Moreover, it is not yet confirmed whether the first two cases were suicides." Shen Guangzuo implicitly admitted the similarities between the several cases.

"Do the Jinyiwei know?" Fang Zhenru suddenly realized something and, without waiting for Shen Guangzuo to answer, he changed his question and asked, "The Zheng Baizai you just asked Tan Tuifu to invite is a centurion of the Jinyiwei, right?"

"You guessed right. Zheng Baizai is the actual captain of the East Chamber." Shen Guangzuo nodded.

"So Shuntian Prefecture is planning to transfer the case to the Embroidered Uniform Guard for investigation again?" Fang Zhenru had heard of similar things many times.

"If it's been transferred to them, then why are we here?" Fang Zhenru's tone was full of questions, but Shen Guangzuo didn't take it as an offense. "The Jinyiwei will investigate the Jinyiwei, and the Shuntian Prefecture will investigate the Shuntian Prefecture. Don't interfere with each other."

"I'm sorry for being rude." Fang Zhenru bowed and apologized.

"It's okay." Shen Guangzuo waved his hand.

"Then may I ask what you have found?" Fang Zhenru continued to ask.

"Almost nothing has been found." Shen Guangzuo shook his head and smiled bitterly. "I imagine you've heard that in the two cases outside Nancheng and Guangning Gate, the bodies were both found in the river. We've posted a reward notice, and the Tan Tuifu has also led people to question people near the scene, but so far, we haven't received any useful confessions. If it weren't for the similar suicide outside Dongzhimen, Shuntian Prefecture wouldn't even dare to declare it a 'similar suicide.'"

When the first body was discovered, it was already swollen. The coroner from the Nancheng Military Headquarters bravely performed an autopsy, but could find no cause of death. All he knew was that the body was a middle-aged man without testicles. The deputy commander in charge of collecting the bodies treated it as a simple drowning and didn't even report it to Shuntian Prefecture. He simply had the clerk write a memorandum and prepared to remove the body to the communal cemetery.

A few days later, the Nancheng Military Commission received another report from a district outside the city. Again, a body had been found in the river, and the deceased was a middle-aged man. The military commission felt there might be something fishy going on, but they couldn't definitively say. So, they wrote an ambiguous report and sent it to Tan Shijiang, the magistrate of Shuntian Prefecture.

Tan Shijiang had originally planned to conduct a brief investigation, and if nothing turned up, close the case as an unrelated incident. However, not long after, another intermediary was found hanged outside Dongzhimen, so he immediately reported the case to the Jinyiwei, hoping to pass on the trouble as per custom. Unexpectedly, the newly appointed prefectural governor took the case back with a few words.

"Even if the first two cases were a dead end, there should be a witness for this one at Dongzhimen, right?" Fang Zhenru looked toward the main room, where the two elderly people and the child were imprisoned.

Tan Shijiang continued, "Yes, but you could also say no. The body was found in a dilapidated Taoist temple outside the city. Before the Liao refugees were repatriated last year, there were still some people living nearby, but after they were driven away, the temple became deserted."

During the Jiajing era, many Taoist temples were built around the capital because the emperor was a sycophantic Taoist. However, the two emperors after Jiajing did not believe in Taoism. Emperor Longqing even carried out a large-scale expulsion and even a purge of Taoist priests in and outside the city. As a result, many Taoist temples that were very popular during the Jiajing era fell into ruin.

"Since there is no trace of life, who discovered the body?" Fang Zhenru turned to look at Tan Shijiang.

"A wandering Taoist priest who hopes to present medicine to the emperor." Tan Shijiang said.

"A Taoist priest offers medicine?" Fang Zhenru was surprised.

"Yes, according to him, he heard the news that the emperor had summoned Master Zhang to the capital, and thought the palace was going to hold another fasting ceremony, so he came to offer the elixir." Tan Shijiang added, "He is from Jiangdu County, a county-level city in Yangzhou Prefecture, Nanzhili. He has a certificate of ordination issued by the local government. The update date on the certificate is very recent, which almost makes it impossible for him to have a direct connection to this case. That's why I said there are witnesses, but there are none."

"Has the person been released?" Fang Zhenru asked.

Shen Guangzuo said, "Not yet. Out of caution, I left him in Shuntian Prefecture."

Shen Guangzuo was even more worried about the rumors of the emperor's flattery than the case itself. If possible, he even wanted to arrest all those who pretended to be gods and made elixirs, and drive them out of Beijing, so that they would stay away from the emperor.

"Apart from being middle-aged men, do these deceased have anything else in common?" Fang Zhenru asked.

"No money." Tan Shijiang took over the conversation again.

"No money?" Fang Zhenru was puzzled.

Tan Shijiang explained: "As far as we know, the palace gave out severance pay when it was cutting down on redundancies. Each person received a severance pay ranging from a few taels to dozens of taels. But until now, not even a tael of silver has been found in the three bodies. So I guess the murderer's motive must be money." Tan Shijiang didn't want this to be a political murder from the bottom of his heart.

"Tan Tuiguan, isn't it a bit arbitrary for you to use 'killing for money' as the motive so early?" Fang Zhenru asked.

Tan Shijiang glanced at Shen Guangzuo, frowned slightly and said, "How can it be arbitrary? Aren't there many cases of people killing people for embezzling a few ounces of silver?"

(End of this chapter)