A Study in Sherlock

Gilbert Totemoff was short and stocky with dark hair that had been cut under a bowl and big brown eyes like a cow’s. His Carhartt’s looked like they’d started life going over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, and he smelled like woodsmoke and gasoline and tanned moosehide. His voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear him. He had a little bit of an accent, too, sounded like one of the aunties when they’re going all Native in front of a gussuk they don’t like. Village raised, for sure.

Max was right. Totemoff’s story was a weird one.

He had come to town on a Costco run the week after the permanent fund dividend came out from the state (http://www.pfd.state.ak.us/), the same week as the Alaska Federation of Natives convention (http://www.nativefederation.org/convention/index.php). He took his pickup on the fast ferry from Cordova, where he lived in the winter, to Whittier and then drove up to Anchorage.

“I met up with some cousins from Tatitlek and we went down to AFN and spent the afternoon there. That night we went to the Snow Ball to check out our old girlfriends.”

Kate grinned, Max laughed, and Totemoff blushed. “But there wasn’t much going on, so my cousin Philip said we should go somewhere else.”

“Where else?” Kate said.

Gilbert wouldn’t look at her. He mumbled something.

“Where?” Kate said.

He still wouldn’t look at her. “The Bush Company.”

Again he shut up. This time I think he was more embarrassed at telling a woman he’d gone to a strip club, especially a Native woman, especially a Native woman who was his elder. Brenda came over and gave us the fishy eye but Max winked at her and she went off and brought him back another martini. His third. Might have been his fourth.

Totemoff said that he and his cousins had a lot to drink, and between that and the lap dances they had their PFDs spent before midnight. Totemoff didn’t say all this, of course, but you can read a lot into a Native silence.

They were just about to leave when these two guys they knew showed up.

“What two guys?” Kate said.

“They were at the convention,” Totemoff said. “Not Natives, but hanging around the craft fair. One of them said he was looking for an ivory cribbage board for his mother. We got to talking, they asked us what tribe we were, and they seemed interested when we told them Eyak.”

So the two guys sat down at their table at the Bush Company and offered to buy them a round. One round turned into two and maybe more. Totemoff didn’t know what time it was when he got up to go to the john. When he stepped out of the door, somebody hit him, hard, a couple of times, and while he was trying to get his knees back up under him they threw a blanket or a bag or something over his head and carried him outside and tossed him in the back of a car.

“I was in and out,” he said. “Felt kind of sick. Maybe we drove for fifteen minutes. Maybe longer. Next thing, the car stops and they pull me out and toss me in the back of an airplane.”

“What kind of airplane?” I said. Totemoff stopped talking again. Kate frowned at me, Max said, “Shut up, kid,” and even Mutt gave me a dirty look. I could feel my ears turning red, and we had to wait until Totemoff started talking again.

“We flew about an hour,” he said. “I think. My head was hurting pretty bad and I barfed all over the inside of the blanket. They cussed me out and one of them hit me again and then I was out of it until we landed. They pulled me out of the plane and walked me into a cabin and pulled off the blanket. It was the two white guys from the convention who showed up at the bar.”

The cabin was one room, built of logs. “Looked pretty old,” Totemoff said. “The wind was whistling through the holes where the chink had fallen out.” There was a woodstove, the table a plywood sheet laid on a pair of sawhorses, some mismatched dining chairs, and a cot in one corner.

On the cot was an old man. A very old Native man, bruised and emaciated.

The whole time Totemoff was telling his story, Kate sat without moving a muscle, staring at her plate. I’ve seen her do this before. It’s a Native thing that you don’t look directly at the person speaking to you, but it’s like she’s listening with every cell of her body.

The old man was tied to the bed. The younger of the two kidnappers brought a chair and the older man forced Totemoff down on it. “Ask him if he’ll sign the papers,” the older one said.

“I didn’t know what he meant,” Totemoff said. “I was confused, so I didn’t say anything. He hit me, knocked me off the chair. When my ears stopped ringing, I heard the old man say something. In Eyak.”

Kate seemed to sigh, and sat back a little in her chair.

“They got me back in the chair and the young one hit me this time,” Totemoff said. “ ‘Tell him to sign the papers,’ he said.”