I gave up trying to sort out my jumbled thoughts and finally allowed sleep to overtake me. But whatever it was that had kept me awake obviously hadn’t vanished. It must have been rattling around in my brain all night because I woke up groggy, out of sorts, and as the saying goes, loaded for bear.
Chapter Thirteen
Kathy, Bill, and I came off the ship and stood on Front Street, Ketchikan’s main drag along the waterfront. As in our other ports of call, the Glacial Queen wasn’t the only cruise ship docked at the huge pier, constructed to accommodate Ketchikan’s thriving tourist industry. And, as with those other stops we’d made, Front Street was already clogged with tourists seeking bargains in the shops.
I was about to pull out my cell phone when I saw Trooper McQuesten approaching.
“I must’ve missed you when you disembarked,” he said, his signature smile on his rugged face. “I ran a little late this morning.”
“And we were earlier than usual,” I said. “It’s good to see you, Trooper McQuesten.”
“I see you’ve brought along reinforcements,” McQuesten said, referring to Bill Henderson.
“I’m afraid I’m no help,” Henderson said. “I’m just along to provide moral support.”
“You can never have too much moral support in a situation like this,” McQuesten said. “I’ve arranged for us to meet up with Detective Flowers. He’s already contacted the floatplane operators who were listed on that piece of paper we found with the murder victim in Juneau.”
“Any luck?” I asked.
“Afraid not,” McQuesten answered. “He showed Ms. Copeland’s picture to all of them. Only one remembered her, but he said she’d never booked any of his planes. Still, I think it might be worthwhile to revisit that company. Sometimes a second go-round results in things being remembered that weren’t the first time. Come on. My car is over there.”
We drove in McQuesten’s unmarked sedan to a series of small docks to which a variety of floatplanes were tethered. The trooper led us into an office where half a dozen pilots sat around drinking coffee and talking. A man behind a desk stood as we entered and warmly greeted McQuesten. He, in turn, introduced us to the man we were looking for, whose name was Gilroy. “Bob Gilroy owns this floatplane operation,” McQuesten said.
“Pleased to have you visit us,” Gilroy said. “Grab some chairs.”
We formed a semicircle around the desk.
“Detective Flowers showed me the picture of the missing woman,” Gilroy said. “I remember her coming in here asking about renting a floatplane and pilot. I don’t know whether the price was too high, but she said she’d think about it and left. That’s the last I saw her.”
Gilroy looked up as the door opened. “Here’s Detective Flowers now,” he said.
The detective was a short, slight man wearing a double-breasted blue blazer, gray slacks with a razor crease, a white shirt, and a regimental tie. If I’d been asked to pick out a detective from a lineup of men, he would have been the last one I would have chosen. Another round of introductions was made, and Flowers pulled up a chair and joined us.
“I was just telling these good folks about my brief encounter with the missing woman,” Gilroy said to Flowers. “Wish I could be more help.”
“Did she indicate why she wanted to rent a floatplane?” I asked.
Gilroy shook his head. At least she hadn’t shared with him her quest for gold.
“None of the other floatplane operators remembers her at all,” Flowers said.
“Are the other floatplane operators listed on that piece of paper the only ones in Ketchikan?” I asked.
Gilroy replied, “The only ones licensed to operate here. There are some independent operators who own planes and rent themselves out. They’re not always reliable, and a few don’t keep their equipment up the way we do.”
“But they’re allowed to take passengers?” Henderson asked.
“Sure,” Gilroy replied. “When I say they’re not licensed, what I mean is that they aren’t licensed as businesses in Ketchikan, or registered with the steamship companies as official shore excursion operations. But they’re okay as far as the FAA is concerned. They can legally take paying passengers.”
“Maybe Willie decided to go with one of them,” Kathy offered.
“How many of these independent operators would you say there are in Ketchikan?” I asked.
Gilroy shrugged. “Hard to say,” he said. “A dozen, maybe.”
“Would you have a list of them?” I asked.
“No, I don’t. No need for me to keep such a list. I can give you the names of a couple off the top of my head.”
“Please,” I said.
He came up with three names, which I dutifully jotted down in my little notebook. He pulled a phone directory from a desk drawer, looked up the addresses and phone numbers of the names he’d given me, wrote them down, and handed the paper to me.
“Anything else I can do for you this morning?” he asked. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, every plane booked solid. It’s tourist season, you know.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” I said. “Thank you for your time.”
“I feel as though we’ve just hit a brick wall,” Kathy said as we stood next to Trooper McQuesten’s car.
“Don’t talk that way,” Bill Henderson said. “We’re just getting started. Maybe one of those independent pilots Mr. Gilroy mentioned was hired by your sister. I say we visit every one of them.”
I judged from the expression on Detective Flowers’s face that his thinking was more in line with Kathy’s than Bill’s. Had I been totally honest, I would have sided with the detective. There we were, in Ketchikan, Alaska, without a tangible bit of evidence to justify continuing our search for Wilimena. But I wasn’t about to express my inner feelings. We’d come this far, and to throw up our hands and admit failure was the last thing Kathy needed. Yes, it was entirely possible—no, make that probable—that we would not find Willie before it was time to get back on the ship at the end of the day and leave for Vancouver, the final stop on the cruise before returning to Seattle. That would be an unfortunate conclusion, especially for Kathy. We had to use the day to at least follow up on every lead, and the list of names Mr. Gilroy had given us was a start.
There was also Dolly Arthur’s former brothel to visit. It was now a tourist attraction, according to the guidebooks. Whether anything there would prove helpful was pure conjecture. But then again, everything at that moment was conjecture.
“I agree with Bill,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out anything from these independent floatplane pilots.”
Trooper McQuesten said, “That’s probably a good idea. Now, Detective Flowers and I need to go to our barracks here in Ketchikan.”
Flowers added, “We have a task force operating around the state, troopers looking for your sister, Ms. Copeland. They report in every morning at nine.” He checked his watch. “Trooper McQuesten and I need to be there to coordinate their reports.” He handed Kathy his business card. “Check in with us later this morning.”
McQuesten slid behind the wheel, and Flowers headed for his car, parked a few feet away.
“There’s one problem,” Bill Henderson said.
Both officers looked at him.
“We don’t have any way to get around,” Bill said.
McQuesten laughed. “Yes, I’d say that is a problem.”
“Will you drop us off at a car rental agency?” Bill asked.
McQuesten gladly accommodated us, and thirty minutes later we drove away from a car rental lot with Bill behind the wheel of a relatively new Subaru.
“Where to first?” he asked.
I consulted the list given us by Gilroy. “Might as well start here,” I said, calling out the address. “His name is Borosky. Bob Borosky.”
Kathy consulted a map of Ketchikan she’d brought with her from the ship. “Up that road,” she said, pointing.
The road took us along a narrow strip of la
nd that jutted into Tongass Narrows, the body of water on which Ketchikan is situated. As we pulled up in front of a small house in need of painting, a man who was fixing something on a floatplane looked up and scowled.
“Do somethin’ for you?” he asked, wiping oil-stained hands on an oil-stained towel that was once white. He looked as though he’d just gotten out of bed. Thinning hair sprouted in multiple directions. He needed a shave, and the yellow T-shirt he wore hadn’t benefited from a washing machine in a long time.
“Mr. Borosky?” I said.
“That’s my name.”
“My name is Jessica Fletcher,” I said, “and these are my friends. We’re in Alaska trying to find a woman who disappeared from a cruise a few weeks ago.”
“That so? What’s her name?”
“Wilimena Copeland.”
He screwed up his weather-beaten face in exaggerated thought. “Nope, can’t say that I ever heard of her.”
“We think she hired a floatplane here in Ketchikan,” I said.
“Well, if she did, she didn’t hire me,” he said. “Probably went with one a’ the big boys, paid a fortune compared to what I charge. Don’t make any sense to me. I’m FAA-certified, keep my plane in tip-top shape.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do,” I said. I turned to Kathy. “Show him Willie’s picture.”
She did. He shook his head. “Never seen her before.” He broke into a toothy grin. “Wouldn’t mind knowin’ her, though,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “thanks for your time.”
“How about you folks take a ride with me? Take you into the Misty Fjords. Make a good deal for the three of you.”
“Love to take you up on it,” Bill said, “but we’re busy looking for the missing woman. Much obliged, though.”
“Suit yourself. Good luck findin’ her.” He cackled. “You’ll need it.”
We got back in the car and tried to decide where to go next.
“This is a waste of time,” Kathy said. “We don’t know for certain that Willie took a floatplane anywhere. All we’re basing it on is that piece of paper the Frenchman, Maurice, had in his room. If Willie had taken a floatplane, she would have chosen one of the bigger operators.” She looked back to where the pilot had resumed work on his aircraft. “I wouldn’t get in that plane with him for any kind of deal.”
Bill laughed. “He is a little scruffy, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a good pilot.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “We can check out these other independent pilots later. Let’s head for Dolly Arthur’s house.”
They agreed, and Bill drove us as close as we could park to Creek Street. I don’t know of many other cities or towns in which a former brothel is a magnet for tourists, but then again Ketchikan isn’t just any town.
They call it Alaska’s “First City” because it’s the first stop for most cruise ships plying the Inner Passage. Before that, in 1900, the U.S. Customs House was moved to Ketchikan from Mary Island, and all northbound vessels of any size were forced by regulation to stop there. Ketchikan boomed. It became a center for the smoking and canning of salmon, which are abundant, and it soon became an important trading community, serving gold miners who’d flocked to the area in search of their fortunes.
While stores proliferated, so did saloons and brothels. It was estimated that at one point, as much as two-thirds of the miners’ money went to Ketchikan’s prostitutes and barkeeps.
Shortly after Ketchikan was incorporated as a city in 1900, the town fathers decided that the girls from the brothels were becoming a public nuisance. Most of them were located in Newtown, and that area’s residents petitioned to have the bawdy houses relocated to Indian Town, on the opposite side of a small creek. The Indians of Indian Town weren’t happy with this arrangement and promptly moved out. That was when Creek Street became established as a legal red-light district, and it remained so until, remarkably, well into the 1950s.
There were ups and downs, of course. The Depression caused a slump in business, and many of the working girls, including Dolly Arthur, headed south for extended vacations. Business picked up again until World War II, when the military closed down the brothels. The girls took it in good humor, even holding a “Going Out of Business” sale, with themselves as the discounted merchandise. But once the war ended, prostitution thrived until the early 1950s, when a federal grand jury held hearings in Ketchikan (part of a sweeping national inquiry into official corruption) and identified the primary reason why prostitution had remained legal there for so long. Elected officials were impossibly corrupt. A married chief of police was in business with one of the bawdy houses. Another top-ranking cop was routinely drunk while on the job, and offered an out-of-town spread that he owned to the prostitutes for vacations. Virtually every elected official was fired or charged with myriad crimes, and the days of “legal” prostitution in Ketchikan, Alaska, were officially over, leaving the houses of ill repute on Creek Street as nothing more than relics of a colorful bygone era.
Although it’s designated as a street, you can’t drive on Creek Street. In reality, it’s nothing more than a rickety wooden boardwalk built on stilts above the creek that runs below. It’s said that when the salmon are coming upstream during spawning season, you can almost walk across the creek on the backs of the fish. That’s how plentiful they are.
We parked in a lot close to Creek Street and went by foot to where it began. The ramshackle old wooden structures that line both sides of the boardwalk were once Ketchikan’s infamous bawdy houses. Now they house an assortment of gift and curio shops. Business was already brisk. Men, women, and children moved from shop to shop, holding up T-shirts with amusing sayings to check their sizes, perusing arts and crafts created by local Native Americans, and chatting with shopkeepers, who were more than willing to share with their visitors the city’s rich, albeit infamous, history.
The recorded music and the chatter coming from the shops as we passed were appealing, almost drawing us in. But we resisted until reaching our destination, number 24 Creek Street, the Dolly Arthur Museum, a small, modest house painted pale green with white trim.
The first thing I noticed was a plaque on the front of the house.
Dolly’s House
Circa 1905
Presented by
Ketchikan Historical Commission
We were reading it when the door opened and a slender young blond woman came from the house. She wore a red dress with fringe hanging from the bodice and waist, and red high heels. Red-and-white feather boas were draped over her arms.
“Good morning,” she said in a seductive voice, her attention on Bill Henderson. “Care to come in for a party?”
Bill seemed flustered. He looked at Kathy and me before replying, “Too early for a party.”
“Never too early for a party,” she said in the sexiest voice she could muster.
“You work here?” Kathy asked.
“I certainly do,” she said.
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