It seems that it is best to find this bar first and investigate about Xu Xiaoli.
Now that he had made his decision, Zhang Ke stood up and tidied up his appearance and blood stains as before, put on his clothes, picked up the necessary items, quietly slipped out of the room, and returned home through the fire escape staircase.
Yuan Mengmeng's text messages and phone calls came unexpectedly. After the two spent the night together like in the last reincarnation, Zhang Ke sent her directly to the bus and then returned home again.
"I feel a little tired of repeating the same past over and over again——"
Zhang Ke sighed slightly. Although the fear, fear and panic he felt when he saw the corpse had been gradually smoothed over in countless reincarnations, until now he could almost ignore the existence of the corpse next to him and think about the problem calmly.
But so far, the best way he can find is this - trying to lure Yuan Mengmeng to him from the door of Xu Xiaoli's house - one is to stabilize her, and the other is to let her serve as
alibi witness.
Although this plan may not completely clear him of the murder suspicion, let alone find the real murderer, it can at least expose the matter as late as possible and prevent him from having no time to move freely due to the premature revelation of the incident.
Based on previous experience, the news of Xu Xiaoli's death would not be exposed for the time being until someone informed the police or other related things happened to alert them. This gave me the opportunity to move freely for most of the day.
So, according to the initial plan, let’s go find this place called Shanghai Flower Bar.
Zhang Ke opened the map software on his mobile phone, entered keywords such as Shanghai Flower Bar and Shanghai Flower Club, and began to investigate carefully.
"There are actually dozens of similar names... What a terrible name." Zhang Ke complained while starting the distance search.
Since Xu Xiaoli lives nearby and I met her at the Shanghai Flower Bar, it must be that her place of work cannot be thousands of miles away from home, right?
Sure enough, after turning on the filtering condition of "within two kilometers", the number of suspected locations was suddenly reduced to only five.
Wait, five?
"Isn't it a bit much? There are five nightclubs with the same name within a radius of two kilometers? This is not a chain supermarket."
Zhang Ke frowned and clicked on each store's introduction and customer reviews, only to find that almost all of them were blank information.
Even the business phone number I left behind when I dialed it was just an empty number.
Damn it, why can't I get through to any store? It's like a ghost store. I don't know if it actually exists.
Moreover, there is not a single customer review for the five stores in total, which is even more confusing. No matter how popular the store is and how poor the quality is, there will always be some idle people who leave nothing to do.
Just a phrase.
It was as clean as evaporating from the human world. It was really a bit abnormal, as if someone deliberately erased the traces of its existence, or deliberately hid his voice from the outside world.
Fortunately, the five stores are not very far from here. It is only a two-kilometer journey, and even walking on two feet only takes half an hour at most. I will spend the whole morning today to investigate this strange thing.
"This is the closest one."
After only crossing about two roads, only four to five hundred meters away from Jixiang Community, and only one bus stop away at most, Zhang Ke arrived at the location of the first bar.
Zhang Ke looked at the scenery around him. This is a small commercial street. Most of the fly shops line up on both sides. They are basically private and self-employed, so many shops share the same house number.
"No. 23, Lane 707, Jiyuan Road - why are there so many shops with No. 23..." Zhang Ke looked helplessly at the small shops on the right. Each store number was exactly the same, so he had to go one after the other.
Find it.
However--
"Are you kidding? Let alone a bar, there isn't even a restaurant!"
Along the way, all the stores sharing the door number 23, although they have different business projects, are all shops selling various items, and none of them are related to catering and entertainment.
What's more, the area of each store here hardly exceeds 20 square meters. It is really difficult to open a bar based on objective conditions.
"Hello, has there been a bar here before, called 'Shanghai Flower'?" Zhang Ke turned around and couldn't see any shops that met the requirements, so he had to turn around and sneak into a hardware store and asked.
.
"You mean a bar?" The hardware store owner wore thick reading glasses, squinted his eyes and looked at the mobile phone screen handed over by Zhang Ke, nodded and said, "This address is indeed here, but my store has been open for five or six years.
It’s been years and I’ve never heard of a bar next to it.”
"You mean, there hasn't been a bar for five or six years?" Zhang Ke frowned and asked, "Have you been looking after the store for the past five or six years? Could it be that you forgot?"
"My family lives on the street behind me. This shop is my livelihood. I pass by this street every morning and evening. I can't possibly have no impression of what's new or closed in my mind."
The boss said very firmly:
"Not to mention next to our store, there are no bars on both sides of the road. This is not a prosperous area. The stores that are open serve the residents of the surrounding communities. Who would think not to open a bar here? No one would.
It's a good time to cut it."
After listening to what he said, Zhang Ke took another look at the surrounding environment.
Indeed, although this street is still quite lively and crowded, the shops are basically supermarkets, markets, small restaurants and grocery stores, as well as convenience businesses such as beauty salons. When planning the location, they are obviously used to supply several nearby restaurants.
Daily needs in densely populated communities, including Jixiang communities.
And more fashionable and high-consumption places like bars and nightclubs are really not suitable to be established in this kind of environment. Even if they open, they will not do very good business. After all, the atmosphere is not suitable.
Even so, Zhang Ke still asked several stores without giving up, and the answers they gave were mostly the same, basically similar to what the hardware store owner said - there had never been a bar nearby, and he had never heard of Shanghai Flower.
"So, is it an error in the map navigation?" Zhang Ke felt a little depressed, but he still followed the map's guidance and walked to the second nearby location.
This time he only crossed two roads, but the surrounding environment did become quiet, and only the sound of reading loudly floated into his ears.