Had this all been happening in some major metropolitan area, I’m sure the FBI agents sent to handle it would have been older, wiser, and far more experienced operatives than the likes of poor Todd Bowman. He did his best to play with the cards he’d been dealt.
“I have every confidence that what’s going on here has nothing whatever to do with targeting Alaska-bound tourists.”
That’s what he said, but I don’t think the lady in the back row believed him. Before anyone else could comment, Bowman took advantage of the slight pause to bolt from the stage. End of discussion. As the audience made their way up the aisles, there was more grumbling and griping. Lars added his own complaint to the voices of dissent.
“Whole t’ing was a waste of time,” he muttered. “They didn’t tell us anyt’ing we didn’t already know.”
I didn’t bother explaining that’s how press conferences work, because that’s what the whole exercise had been—a press conference minus the press. I doubt there were any reporters in attendance from the Starfire Courier. During the course of the briefing I had looked around, more than half expecting to spot Christine Moran, notebook in hand, busily taking notes. But the Starfire Breeze’s resident freelancer was nowhere in evidence. Not right then. But she turned up soon enough.
When we met up with Beverly, Naomi, and the Wakefield girls in the Atrium Lobby, Christine Moran was right there with them.
“Why, hello, Mr. Beaumont,” she said with a smile. “So nice to see you again.”
“You two know each other?” Beverly asked.
“He seems to know darn near everybody,” Lars said.
“Christine wanted to talk to me about Margaret,” Naomi put in. “I told her we were going into Sitka and she’s offered to come along.”
I could see from Naomi’s expression that the last thing she wanted to do was talk to a reporter about Margaret Featherman. As for me, I sure as hell didn’t want to have Christine Moran hanging around all day while we walked around Sitka in hopes of running into the mysterious Dulcinea. Still, I was afraid that saying no might arouse more suspicions than saying yes.
“Of course not,” I said with as much phony enthusiasm as I could muster. “The more, the merrier.”
21
SITKA IS A PORT where there are no docking facilities large enough to accommodate cruise ships. As a consequence, the Starfire Breeze had to drop anchor in Sitka Sound. Some of the ship’s tenders, which, in time of crisis, serve as lifeboats, were lowered into the water. Shore-going passengers were loaded into those and then ferried over to the visitors’ dock.
The storm that had blown through the day before wasn’t quite done with us yet. It was still dripping rain as we landed, but it looked as though it might clear eventually. It was possible that whichever cruise ships had drawn lots for that day’s trip to Glacier Bay would have better glacier viewing than the passengers on the Starfire Breeze.
Once the ladies’ plastic rain caps were all in place, our little group started off after Lars. As a tour guide, he set a brisk pace. Even with the morning dose of Advil, I was glad I had opted for tennis shoes.
Lars was enthusiastic about showing us the sights. “That’s the P-Bar,” he announced, pointing to a business adorned with more than its share of neon beer signs. “The real name is the Pioneer Bar, but nobody here calls it that. There’s more than one fisherman who’s walked out through that door and disappeared for good. The police and newspaper reports always say, ‘Was last seen leaving the Pioneer Bar.’ ”
“Were they murdered, or what?” Claire Wakefield demanded while puffing vigorously in an effort to catch her breath.
“Some were, I suppose,” Lars said with a shrug. “Especially the ones dumb enough to come in here flashing a roll of cash after selling their fish. But most of the time it’s just accidental. Some of the guys leave this place with enough of a load on that they walk right off the dock or fall off their boats. Or else they climb aboard, fire up the engines, and run smack into a rock. Believe me, there are plenty of those around here, too.”
“Did you go there?” Beverly asked.
“Used to,” he said. “Back when I was drinking.”
Like a hen with a bunch of chicks, Lars herded us through town. We spent some time inside the old Russian Orthodox Church—a frame building that had been constructed while Alaska still belonged to Russia. He showed us the Pioneer Home where Lars’ younger brother, Einar, had lived out his last days before succumbing to the ravages of diabetes. After that he took us to Castle Hill, where drooping, bedraggled gardens only hinted at their summer glory.
All the time Lars was leading us around and administering his travelogue, I tried to keep one ear trained on the low-voiced conversation between Naomi Pepper and Christine Moran. As far as I could tell, Naomi was sticking to providing only the most basic background information about Margaret Featherman. I found it interesting that Christine was pursuing those questions with Naomi rather than asking them of Sharon Carson and Virginia Metz, but it wasn’t any of my business, so I didn’t ask.
And while all that was going on, I still had to keep an eye peeled in case anyone—Dulcinea or one of her minions—made an attempt to contact me. After all, if the middle-of-the-night caller hadn’t been trying to reach Naomi, then, barring crossed phone connections, I had to assume I had been her target. She had said she’d see me in Sitka the next day. Everywhere we went, I wondered if that would be true, and if Christine Moran would be on hand to witness whatever was going to happen. With all that going on, it’s no wonder that the process left me feeling somewhat stressed.
Lars, for his part, was totally unaware that the rest of us weren’t enjoying ourselves nearly as much as he was. Caught up in his reminiscences, he had no idea that his flock was running out of energy and patience both. Seeing Sitka with Lars Jenssen brought back memories of Ted Moffit, my first wife’s father.
Ted was a good old boy who was blessed with boundless energy and enthusiasm. Over scores of yearly family vacations he took countless numbers of slides featuring his three children—Karen and her younger brother and sister—posed grinning in front of every American tourist icon including Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Boothill Graveyard, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful, and South Dakota’s Wall Drug and Mount Rushmore. The collection included shots of all the stopping-off places in between—long-closed diners and motels that had died slow and painful deaths after President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system came into being. Ted was a great one for summoning hapless neighbors and relatives for evenings that consisted of pie, coffee, and marathon slide-viewing sessions. He had absolutely no sense about how long people could endure sitting and nodding through endless hours of incredibly boring slides.
Lars was exactly the same way about Sitka. He wanted to show us everything about the place and then some. When he suggested our next stop would be the dock where all the fishing boats were tied up, a minor mutiny occurred.
“Not me,” Beverly announced. “I’m tired and my feet hurt. I’ve walked as far as I’m going to walk.”
Claire and Florence were quick to nod in agreement while Lars, on the other hand, looked as though the women had just broken his heart. My feet hurt too, but having had no contact with the mysterious Dulcinea, I wasn’t ready to give up and go back to the ship.
“I’ll stay,” I volunteered. I turned to Naomi and Christine. “What about you two?” I asked. Christine had stuck to Naomi as if they’d been connected with a layer of superglue.
Something on my face must have given Naomi a hint of what I was feeling. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Christine and I will go back to the ship with Beverly and the others and make sure they arrive safely. That way, you men can take in the docks and whatever else you want to without a bunch of party poopers slowing you down.”
“Good idea,” Christine said. “I need to be getting back anyway.”
I felt like giving Naomi a kiss out of sheer gratitude, but I knew better than that—not with Lars
and Beverly looking on. “If that’s what you want to do,” I said as casually as I could. “That’ll be fine with me.”
Up to that moment the women had been lagging behind. Now, with the prospect of going back to the ship and getting out of the drizzling rain, they set off at a much faster pace. Lars looked after them, shaking his head.
“Women,” he muttered in disgust. “Probably want to stop off and do some shopping.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Yust more yunk to carry home,” he said.
We went down to the dock then, just Lars and I. It had been years since he had been in Sitka. Nevertheless, he recognized many of the boats moored there, calling out their names and giving me a rundown of their various former skippers and crews. Listening to him talk, I had a sense of living history. Here was someone who knew firsthand the history of Alaska’s fishing fleet for over half of the twentieth century. When Lars Jenssen died, much of that history would die with him.
“You should write all this down,” I told him. “Or at least record it on tape.”
“Naw,” he said. “Nobody’d be interested in hearing what I have to say.”
We had walked as far as the last set of docks. It was when we turned around to come back that I saw it. Painted on a shed far from where even the most daring tourists would venture was a billboard featuring a scrawny knight seated on an equally scrawny horse. The picture was a reasonably good plagiarism of the one by Picasso. QUIXOTE CLUB, the sign said. Below the club name was a toll-free number, and below that were the words, “Call for free shuttle service.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Lars shrugged. “The Quicksaudy Club,” he returned. Lars’ mangled pronunciation, an authentically Ballardese version of Quixote, was a long way from Naomi Pepper’s perfectly enunciated Spanish kee-hoy-tay from earlier that morning.
“But what is it?”
“Whaddya t’ink?” Lars returned. “It’s full of women strippers. You got no business going there.”
“You know about it then?” I asked. “You’ve been there?”
“Everybody in the fleet’s been there,” he said defensively.
“What do you know about it?”
Lars sighed. “It’s a long story,” he said. “There used to be this place out of town a couple of miles. It was called the Kiksadi Club named after one of the Tlingit clans. In the old days when they used to allow after-hours drinking outside the city limits, it was a real booming place. Every summer they used to import lady strippers. They came up and worked the place for a month or two at a time. One of the girls told me once that she made enough money dancing in Alaska each summer that she could pay her tuition and go to school the next year without having to work a part-time job. Sort of like fishing,” Lars added. “Used to be real good pay for what was seasonal work.”
“I take it you knew some of these girls personally?” I asked. By then we had left the dock area and were walking back to the ship—strolling, really, rather than walking.
“I was drinking then,” Lars said. “Anyways, one of the girls who came up one year got friendly with the guy who was the manager of the Kiksadi Club. Real friendly. So friendly, in fact, that she thought he was going to divorce his wife and marry her, but he didn’t. He dumped her instead. So she got herself some financial backers, went down the road half a mile or so, and opened her own place—the one you saw on the sign back there, the Quicksaudy Club. It’s spelled different, but it sounds a lot like the other one. It was easy to get them confused, and I think she counted on that. It worked in her favor.”
It was only easy to confuse the two if you were a Norwegian fisherman from Ballard who was half lit most of the time. But Lars Jenssen had been sober for years. From the newness of the sign, it looked as though the Quixote Club, no matter how you pronounced it, was still a going concern.
“Ya, sure,” Lars said after a thoughtful silence. “That Dulcie always was one smart cookie.”
I stopped short. “Who?”
“Dulcie—the woman who runs the Quicksaudy. She was a real looker back then, but she also had something upstairs.”
“Dulcie?” I asked. “That’s her name?”
“Not her whole name,” Lars said. “That’s just what the guys in the fleet called her. I can’t remember her real name.”
“Dulcinea maybe?” I asked.
Lars looked at me and frowned. “You know, that may be it. How did you know that?”
So Dulcinea wasn’t going to contact me; I was supposed to contact her. Desperately, I looked around, searching for a cab. Naturally I didn’t see one anywhere. “How do we get there?” I asked. “How long will it take? Can we walk?”
“You want to go to the Quicksaudy Club?” Lars demanded suspiciously. “How come? Looks to me like you’ve got a perfectly good woman waiting for you back on the ship. Matter of fact, I’ve got one, too. There’s no need . . . And hell, no, you can’t walk. It’s a good five miles out of town.”
“Where’s the nearest pay phone then? I’ll call a cab.”
“There’s one back at the dock, but the shuttle’s cheaper. It’s free.”
I turned and headed back in that direction, with Lars dogging my heels and protesting my every step. At the docks, I went far enough to be able to see the club’s sign and make a note of how to contact the shuttle service. I’ve never dialed one of those telephone sex lines, but the voice that answered the shuttle number was sexy enough to be worthy of a 1-900 designation.
“Welcome to Quixote Club, where your pleasure is our only business,” she said breathlessly while a pair of castanets clattered evocatively in the background. “If you are in need of our shuttle service, please press one now. Your call will be transferred to an operator for assistance.”
I turned back to Lars. “What is this, a whorehouse?”
He glowered at me. “Not as far as I know,” he said.
When the dispatcher came on the phone, her voice was pleasant enough if not quite as sultry. “What’s your location?”
“I’m down by the docks,” I said. “The docks with the fishing boats.”
“Very good. Our next shuttle will reach your location in approximately ten minutes,” she said. “Our next show starts on the hour. How many people will be in your party?”
“One,” I said.
“Two,” Lars growled behind me. “There’ll be two.”
“No way,” I said to him.
He shook his head. “Two,” he insisted. “Either I go, too, or you don’t.”
I gave up. “Two,” I grumbled into the phone.
“Very well, sir,” the operator said. “You’ll have no trouble recognizing our vehicles. They’re all painted pink. You’ll need to come up to the road and wait there. The shuttle will stop by and pick you up. And we’ll need your name, sir, so the driver can verify that she’s picked up the correct passenger.”
“Beau,” I barked back at her. “The name’s Beau.”
“Very well, Mr. Bow. Someone will be right there.”
I put down the phone. Lars was standing behind me, shaking his head. “I t’ink this is a bad idea,” he said. “If Naomi and Beverly hear about this, there’ll be hell to pay. You can count on that.”
“So it is a whorehouse then?”
“It may have started out that way,” Lars admitted. “Yust at first. But I mostly went there to watch the girls and to drink single-malt Scotch. Dulcie always made it a point to have one of the best bars going. I’ll bet she still does.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m sure she does. Now go on back to the ship, Lars. I’m a big boy. I don’t need you along to hold my hand.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “If you went there by yourself and got into some kind of scrape, Beverly would never forgive me.” And that was the end of that.
The shuttle arrived in less than ten minutes. Most of that time Lars and I stood side by side without saying a word. When the shuttle showed up, it was a sturdy Suburban painted th
at distinctive shade of pale pink favored by successful Mary Kay ladies the world over. Stenciled in black on both front doors was the same silhouette image we had seen on the sign back at the docks—Don Quixote on his knobby-kneed horse.
The driver rolled down her window. “Mr. Bow?” she asked.
“Right,” I said without bothering to correct her. Lars and I clambered in.
The driver was a young woman in her early twenties. She was dressed in what looked like high-class waitress gear—a tuxedo shirt, black bow tie, and black slacks. Like the girls in the cruise-ship gift shop, she reminded me of my daughter.
“Rosinante,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Rosinante,” she repeated. “That’s the name of Don Quixote’s horse. People always want to know the horse’s name. I’ve started telling people that first thing, just to get it out of the way.”
Carefully she threaded her way through narrow streets clogged with cruise passengers determined to do their last bit of Alaska-based shopping. I peered through the crowd looking for familiar faces. Riding in the back of the pink Suburban, I wasn’t eager to be recognized. It made me grateful for the dark-tinted glass in all the back windows.
“Look’s like the weather’s clearing up some,” our driver announced. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned sunny late in the day.”
That’s right, I thought grimly. Talk about the weather.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Seattle,” she said. “Lynnwood, actually. I have one more quarter to go at the U Dub before I get my degree in counseling. The season’s winding down here. I’m headed home in a few weeks.”
A hooker with a degree in counseling, I thought. That’s rich.
Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) Page 27
