Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

Peep Show at the

Chicken Ranch

Matt had heard the women toasting with champagne and planning to invade the upstairs. He’d figured out from the loud phrases that had drifted up the staircase that they must be intimate enemies, if not rival mobsters. That didn’t mean they weren’t formidable.

Problem was, they sounded ready to raid every bedroom.

Problem was, he needed to find a hiding place for a good half hour, at least. And then they’d be coming up again, with their captives.

Matt could get stuck in some closet, party to who-knows-what intimate fun and games all night long.

He knew he didn’t like bachelor parties, without ever attending one, and now he really didn’t like them.

He started cruising the bedrooms, trying to remember one that had offered a likely place of concealment. One where he was effectively blind and deaf too. Someplace as dark as an old-fashioned confessional.

He had to find one now! Before he was found out and subjected to who-knows-what hanky-panky. He shut the door quietly, when he ached to slam it, on a Victorian boudoir with only a stand-alone wardrobe for a closet. Even if he was willing to hunch for hours in a crouching position, the wardrobe was crowded with lacy, feathered apparel doused in cloying scents. He was sure to sneeze, like a cuckolded husband in a French farce.

Under the bed? Embarrassing, but at least he’d be able to stretch out.

But searching under the brass four-poster in the next room, he fished out such intriguing treasure as peacock feathers, a small riding crop, something long and rubbery that plugged in . . . no, under the bed was no sanctuary.

Another room had a rococo, painted standing screen. Diving behind there, he found pegs with numerous changes of lingerie. Not here.

By now the women’s giggling sounded like the baying of bloodhounds.

Matt opened the door on another room. This had to be it. He had to go to ground.

It was one of those sterile modernistic rooms full of metal and leather and odd accoutrements. The laughter came closer.

But, wait! That far mirrored wall didn’t match up panels evenly.

He rushed toward his own foggy reflection like a man in a nightmare, fingered the beveled seams. One gave way to his desperation. He was in a small black-painted room. With a chair. He could sit all night if he had to.

The mirrored wall clicked shut on him.

He’d been wishing for a small, dark, old-fashioned confessional.

Oh.

On this side, the mirror was a window. This room was a peephole for the perverted. It could see the entire outer room as through amber glass.

A woman with a champagne glass was pausing in the doorway.

“Oh, this looks kinky,” she said. “This’ll really give my guy the creeps, and a huge thrill, I bet. This one!”

“Too austere,” another girl said. “The next room has a Jacuzzi.”

Matt brushed his hand over the walls, looking for a latch that would release the door. His palm found a plastic rocker panel, like for a light. Light he didn’t need. It would expose his hiding place.

He pressed it anyway.

The mirror went black.

He was in absolute isolation in the dark.

He couldn’t see a thing.

Thank God.

He sat down in the chair, feeling like he’d taken a seat in an X-rated theater, with a certain “ick” factor, and went into meditation mode.

Temple would never believe what this outing had turned into, and he’d never tell her what he did the night of Aldo’s bachelor party. So help him God. Amen.