Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Cell in Solitary

Matt listened hard in the dark at the top of the stairs. The silence downstairs was reassuring, for the moment. No gunshots and crashing bodies or furniture.

He slipped out of his loafers, stuffed them in his side jacket pockets as best he could, and moved slowly down a long, low-lit hall like a hotel’s.

Actually, the layout of this place should come pretty close to a hotel.

The first room—a bedroom—he ventured into was a fussy Victorian affair: high four-poster brass bed with a lot of knobs and curlicues, dressing table, upholstered ottomans, fringe, and feathery dried floral arrangements.

He spotted an oil lamp on the dresser and found a box of long farmers’ matches beside it. The oil broadcast a heavy floral scent once the flame was going. Matt stifled a sneeze and went back into the hall, using the flickering light to search for a rear exit. There had to be one, thanks to fire safety standards.

He surveyed each room he passed, making sure they were vacant.

It was like opening the doors onto a series of stage sets. The entrances were set back in niches. Every room had its theme, although shades of blue decorated each one. The colors reminded Matt of the Virgin Mary, hardly the idea here. After three “visitations,” he realized that a blue glass Cinderella slipper was a feature in every vignette.

Some rooms teemed with vintage froufrou from the Gay Nineties to the 1940s. After that, nostalgia faded and the décor was showy modern, furnished with sleek mirrors and stainless steel and suede. Every room was pristinely neat, lavish and gaudy in whatever its style, and empty.

How unnerving to think that each room had hosted a paid-for thousand-and-one one-night stands . . . several times over if the bordello was a few decades old.

Some rooms had Jacuzzis and brittle little fountains everywhere. Some rooms, both Victorian and modern, housed strange devices of leather and metal that looked as if they’d been imported from Inquisition Warehouse.

Matt was glad his knowledge of the darker shores of sex for sale was pretty limited.

As he suspected, the hall ended in a back service stairway. He eased the heavy metal fire door open and padded down a few steps. Muffled voices!

He crept down a few more risers.

Several voices. The captives wouldn’t be jawing away like this. The gang must have taken over the back rooms as their headquarters while the Fontana party and the residents were held hostage in the front parlor and the adjoining barroom he’d glimpsed through the double interior doors before he’d ducked out.

Not good. He leaned against the wall, holding up the oil lamp and hitting redial on Nicky’s cell phone. No bar graph showed up, nothing but a message that the phone was “searching for a signal,” and then nothing.

Matt was searching for a signal too.

Call it a sign.