Chambers

By Phillip Thompson

The knock on my hotel room door came at two-fifteen in the morning.

The staccato rapraprap startled me for a couple of reasons. For one, nobody knocks on a hotel room door in the wee hours with good intent. Two, I was not expecting—or wanting—visitors, especially since I’d made it crystal clear to the desk clerk downstairs earlier in the evening.

I’d asked Stefan if the hotel, as a policy, gave out room numbers, should anyone come looking for me. Stefan, with a wink, assured me he’d do no such thing—unless that’s what I wanted. He punctuated that last part with another wink.

So the knock came sounding of nothing good, if not outright malice. I grabbed the remote and turned off the black-and-white Richard Widmark movie I’d been watching as I ironed shirts on the round table in the kitchen area of my “suite.”

I’d been in this place, the Ozark Inn, in northern Arkansas for three days, working on a job for a husband in West Memphis. The husband, who owned a car dealership, believed he was being cuckolded by a rival dealership owner. I’d tracked the wife to this tiny spot on the map, Marked Tree, Arkansas, though for the life of me couldn’t understand the need for a rendezvous in such a desolate place. But that’s a matter of the heart that bears little relevance to my job. When I wasn’t tailing the missus in a car or on foot through the dreary streets of a town forgotten by time and the American Dream, I spent my time in this room, mainly because at six-three with blond hair and a slight limp, I don’t blend in well in small towns, which can be a hazard in my line of work.

Another knock came, this one a harsh double-tap. I set down the iron by the towel I’d thrown across the table, grabbed my .45, and stepped to the peephole. Killers don’t knock twice.

As a private investigator, I pride myself on always being prepared for the unexpected, but the last person I expected to see in a tiny circle of light was Daphne.

My ex-wife.

The last time I’d seen her was in a Memphis courtroom a year ago, when the judge pronounced our divorce final. I walked out of the courtroom free, but broke. But mostly free.

I stared through the weird fish-eye lens of the peephole. Daphne stood staring in the direction of the elevators. Hadn’t changed much. Hair the color of printer’s ink that fell past her shoulders in a line as straight as a laser beam. Big green eyes that could cut you like a razor. Yeah, I’d loved her once. Badly.

A thin, brown leather strap over her right shoulder led down to a purse the same color. The purse was no bigger than a loaf of bread. Unzipped, with her right hand resting atop the open compartment.

I’m not sentimental or an idiot. She had a gun in that bag. Daphne had grown up with a cop father, and she had a piece when we were married. So, of course she had a gun now.

I hit the wall switch by the door and killed the overhead light. The lamp on the nightstand remained on, casting a thin blade of yellow light over the bed. I yanked the door open and feigned surprise.

“Daphne? The hell are you doing here?”

She turned toward me and hit me with those jade eyes. “You going to let me in or what?”

I opened the door wide and stepped back. “By all means.”

She took her time strolling past the darkened kitchen area and the table/ironing board. She scanned the unmade bed and Chinese food boxes on the desk against the wall, then gave me a look I registered as disappointment.

“Hmmm,” she said. “No girlfriend?”

“Nope,” I said, realizing that was the source of her disappointment, or at least part of it.

“Your boyfriend waiting outside in the car? Which one is it this time?”

She faced me. “Let’s not.”

“You started it.”

“Goddammit, Ray.”

I nodded toward the table. “Fine. Have a seat.”

She pulled out a chair and sat, and I followed, sitting across from her. She stared down at the towel.

“Ironing,” I said with a smile. “So, what the hell are you doing in Arkansas, Daphne?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

I shrugged. “Work.”

“Ah, chasing cheating wives. Well, it takes a cheater to catch a cheater, I suppose.”

I didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

I could have told her to keep her hands where I could see them, but some morbid curiosity that’s always attached to my darker instincts wanted to see where this inane tete a tete was going.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

Her eyes met mine again, and slick as a magician, her right fist was on the table, and it was full of nickel-plated pistol. Even in the room’s low light, the snubnose .38 shone like a lighthouse beacon. I had to hand it to her. It was a smooth move, one I could tell she’d practiced. The gun itself I expected, but what did surprise me was that the piece wasn’t the Police Special she’d kept when we were married. That told me she’d planned this confrontation with a fair bit of detail. Among other things, the pistol pointed at my chest was easier to conceal.

“How’d you get my room number?” I said, making sure I wasn’t looking at the gun, even

though the black muzzle staring at me looked like a cannon—and was no less deadly.

“That’s what you’re worried about?” she said.

I had to stall and get under her skin—a particular gift I had, one that contributed greatly to the breakup of our marriage. That and my job, my friends, my drinking, my infidelity, and her affairs.

“At the moment, yeah” I said. “How’d you get past the desk clerk? He and I had an agreement.”

“An agreement?”

“Sure.”

“I showed him my boobs.”

I knew that was a lie, for two reasons. Daphne was far from prudish, but she was not one to go around exposing herself in public. Not to mention the fact that the form-fitting white top, cleavage peeking from the scoop neck, would have made the act a cumbersome one. Second, Stefan was not the type of man to be swayed by, or even notice, boobs.

“You coerced him,” I said, nodding at the .38.

Her smile was coy. “What did you used to say? The guy with the gun always wins?”

“Something like that.”

“Speaking of which, wherever yours is, put it on the table,” Daphne said. “Now.”

I sighed. Never get into a gunfight with your ex would have been the moral at this point. I pulled my .45 from the small of my back and laid on top of the towel, halfway between the two of us.

She smiled like she’d just been named prom queen. “I win.”

“What exactly did you win, Daphne? Why are you even here? How did you know I’d be here?”

She kept the gun aimed squarely at my chest, just out of my peripheral vision. “Friend of a friend. You think I gave up my contacts in your world when we split up?”

“Okay, but why? You show up in the middle of the night a year after our divorce and draw down on me. You won’t even take my calls. What the fuck do you want?”

“You have no idea, do you?”

I watched her face for any clue. Daphne has tells, of course. Every person does. And I, of course, knew hers. The puffed-out cheeks, touching her chin with her thumb, and the twitching bottom lip. But her face was as passive as the Venus de Milo.

“Not really,” I said. “But maybe if you put that pistol back in your purse, I could think a little more clearly.”

She let out a laugh. Not a full-on crazy laugh, but close. She raised the pistol and aimed it at my head, with her crimson-tipped trigger finger pointed at me alongside the trigger guard.

“You failed.”

The words hit me like the glancing blow of a hammer—not enough to kill me, but enough to hurt like hell. She was right. I’d had many failures in my life, not just in our marriage. Even so, that marriage had been dead for a year. Longer, really. So I had not a clue what she was talking about.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” I said.

Her scoff turned into a harsh laugh, like dry leaves rattling across a sidewalk. “Do you remember the day we split up?”

“You mean the day you left?”

“The day we split up.”

“The day you filled a moving truck with half the shit in our house and drove off? With God only knows how much money you’d stashed away? Yeah, I remember.”

Daphne lowered the gun to the table and leaned back against the chair with a smug look on her face. I’m sure the gun was getting heavy. Still aimed at me, though. “Yes, that day,” she said. “That was my money, by the way.”

“Your money?”

“That’s right.”

I shook my head. “That was our money, Daphne. Just because I didn’t know what you were doing with it or where you had hidden it doesn’t make it less so. We were married, after all. So, the money was ours, not just yours. But I’ll give you credit where it’s due. You hid it well. You definitely flimflammed me good with that one. Took me a while to figure it out, but then it all made sense. The quick divorce and all.”

“That’s not the point,” she said. “I’m talking about the day we split up.”

“What about it?”

“That was a test.”

I squinted at her. Even in the semidarkness, I could see she was serious. “Come again? A test? What kind of test?”

“One you failed.”

An image of a dog chasing its own tail came to mind, and I was the dog.

“You fucking left me, Daphne. Not sure how that necessarily rates as a failure on my part.”

“You never tried to get me back.”

She had me there. But when a woman walks out on you via moving van, it has the feeling of a certain finality.

“I see,” I said. “So that whole scene was, what, you bluffing?”

“It was a test, I said. “

“It was a bluff, and I called it.”

“Semantics,” Daphne said.

“Semantics my ass, Daphne. You’re the one who filed the divorce papers, not me.”

“That was another test.”

“You mean another bluff. What did you think was going to happen?”

Her face clouded, like a blue sea gone gray. I watched her eyes soften into something close to reminiscence, then an odd form of regret.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “You thought I’d just flounder out there on my own, unable to survive.”

“Yes,” she said in a much softer voice.

“You thought for sure I’d come running back to you, begging even. That I couldn’t live without you. And when I didn’t, it pissed you off. Infuriated you, didn’t it? And it kept eating at you every day until you decided you needed to set me straight. That’s what this is, right?”

Her arm went up, and I saw the black maw of the pistol again, aimed right between my eyes. I heard the unmistakable sound of the hammer being thumb-cocked. I’d gone too far and I knew it. My desire to be right had gotten ahead of my desire to not get shot. Over the top of the pistol, two green eyes, feline and furious, burned into me. I knew I had less than a second to make a decision.

I flung my left arm out, swinging it like a baseball bat, and swept the table, sending the iron airborne. With my right hand, I snatched the towel, pulling my .45 toward me into my waiting hand. The iron crashed into Daphne’s gun hand, knocking her sideways and sending her weapon flying.

She howled in pain and fell out of her chair. She hit the carpet in a crumpled heap, screaming at me that I’d broken her hand. And cussing. Lots of cussing.

I stood and held my .45 steady. The snubnose lay five feet from her broken hand. I started to step toward her, but the hotel room door seemed to explode in a shrieking cascade of splintered wood. Two uniformed policemen burst through the shattered door, guns drawn, eyes seeking a target. The lead cop leveled a Glock at me, his eyes commanding me to drop the .45. I complied. And he didn’t have to tell me to put my hands in the air.

Behind him and the second cop, Stefan called out, “That’s her, officer. That’s the woman who pulled a gun on me.”

The second cop pounced on Daphne, who howled some more as he dragged her to her feet.

“My hand is broken,” Daphne said, half-sobbing and half-yowling.

It didn’t matter to the cop, who spun her around and cuffed her, which made her shrieks even louder as he hustled her into the hallway.

The lead cop and I stared at each other for a long minute. He holstered his weapon, and I started breathing again.

“What’s your name, sir?” the cop said.

“Ray. Raymond Griffin. I’m a private investigator. I have ID.”

“I’ll need to see that,” the cop said. Then he noticed Daphne’s pistol on the carpet, like it was a discarded toy. He stooped to pick it up. He glanced at me, then popped the cylinder out. Spun it. He grunted, then stood upright. He held the pistol at my eye level. “Look at this.”

I peered at the pistol’s cylinder and saw six dots of light.

Six empty chambers.

“What do you make of this?” the cop said.

I shrugged. “Some kind of test, I suppose.”

At least I’d passed this one.