Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  ALSO BY TIMOTHY EGAN

  The Good Rain

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1992 by Timothy Egan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Egan, Timothy.

  Breaking blue / by Timothy Egan. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80040-4

  1. Murder—Washington (State)—Pend Oreille County—Investigation—Case studies. 2. Police murders—Washington (State)—Pend Oreille County—Case studies. 3. Police corruption—Washington (State)—Pend Oreille County—Case studies. 4. Bamonte, Tony. 5. Ralstin, Clyde. 6. Conniff, George, d. 1935. I. Title.

  HV6533.W2E36 1992

  364.1’523’0979721—dc20 91-27848

  v3.1

  To Joni, for the time

  There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue.

  There’s just stuff people do.

  JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath

  The following story is true, based on public records, newspaper and archival material, and the recollections of people who lived through the summer of 1935 to tell about it in the last years of their lives.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  THE LAST ACT OF LIFE

  SEPTEMBER 1989

  1. Judgment Day

  TWO

  THE FIRST ACT OF DEATH

  AUTUMN 1935

  2. The Need for Butter

  3. Cop Code

  4. Mother’s Kitchen

  5. The Night Marshal

  6. The Search

  7. Stone Fortress

  8. To the River

  THREE

  PSYCHIC DUEL

  1989

  9. The Student

  10. The Sheriff

  11. Metaline Falls

  12. A Family Visit

  13. Men With Badges

  14. A Stirring

  15. The Net

  16. The Nurse

  17. Home

  18. Men Without Badges

  19. In Big Sky Country

  20. Retreat

  21. Character Colors

  22. The River

  23. Last Gathering

  EPILOGUE

  MAY 1990

  Commencement

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Prying this story from people who were around in 1935 was not nearly so hard as was tracking down the most basic of police documents from that era, most of which have disappeared. For help in the tracking, I am grateful to the staff at the Cheney Cowles Museum in Spokane, to the Newport Historical Society, and to Joan Egan. I owe much to Jon Landman in New York, who has the best eye for storytelling of anyone on West 43rd Street. I’m grateful to Carol Mann, for insight and guidance. At Knopf, my thanks to Ash Green, Melvin Rosenthal, and Jenny McPhee.

  ONE

  THE LAST ACT

  OF LIFE

  SEPTEMBER 1989

  1.

  Judgment Day

  WHEN IT CAME TIME for Bill Parsons to die, he crumpled into his wife’s arms and started talking about the things cops seldom share with the women in their lives. She ran her fingers through his hair, this silver thatch, and felt the faintness of life: a tired and congested heart following a directionless beat, torn-up lungs gulping from the plastic tendrils of a metal appendage, a body in full retreat. Here it was, an Indian-summer morning in a valley cut by the Spokane River, and he couldn’t take a breath of cool air. The wind blew down from the Selkirk Mountains, carrying a scent of the year’s final hay-cutting and apples pressed to cider; his oxygen came from the pharmacy, bottled.

  The doctors could keep him from dying, but they could not make him feel alive. After thirty-five years of service to the city of Spokane, Washington, the former chief of police had a first-rate pension and medical plan, but it seemed to amount to nothing more than an open ticket to see more urologists and respiratory therapists—the young men in running shoes waiting to stick something new up his ass or down his throat. Retirement was supposed to be about poker games in the light of a campfire, hip waders instead of tight shoes, chasing elk through huckleberry thickets, not about chrome trays and hospital gowns and a daily breakfast of color-coded horse pills. He seldom left the doctor’s office feeling any better, just more burdened with stuff. The bottled oxygen, the stimulants and slow-you-downs—all this crap—for what? To sit in a trailer park, on the fringes of a city whose laws he’d once enforced, waiting for Oprah to come on the tube?

  From his office beneath the Gothic tower of police headquarters, he used to look away and imagine a salmon fly floating down the Spokane River below, taking the bend in slow motion until—thwap!—a big brownie rose to snap the line. On the river that carried snowmelt from two states to the Columbia rode the retirement dreams of the former chief. In the inland Northwest, where the great coastal ranges blocked the rainstorms from the Pacific and the land was ripe with the kind of wildlife that most of America has lost, the outdoors was the only place for honest work and decent play. Ten minutes from the center of town, downstream from the raging falls, an old man could be Huck Finn again, lost in the eternal flow of the Spokane River.

  Life was supposed to ebb away, like the river. But Parsons’s body answered to its own schedule, throwing in a heart attack and emphysema, payback from earlier years. Physical pain he could tolerate; the toll on his good name was something else. Suspicion, half-truths, a vague and unfinished story about corruption and death from another era—that was not the sort of thing a person wanted to leave behind. The body would not go cold before the gossip would harden to gospel.

  A rancher’s son, born when followers of Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé still dreamed of driving homesteaders from the ponderosa pine forests and alfalfa fields of the inland Pacific Northwest, Edward W. “Bill” Parsons had seen the length of the twentieth century, only to have one incident, the worst mistake of his professional life, come back at him now. He started in police work at a time when bootleggers and Chinese numbers rackets could provide a patrolman with a healthy income on the side, and he got out just before crack dealers and the state lottery commission made a mockery of the Depressionera enforcement routine. When he retired, plotting a good life in the woods, serving on citizen boards and honorary panels, the chief thought he had escaped with his reputation intact. Baby-faced Bill Parsons, rookie cop in 1935, silver-topped dean in 1970, leader of the state police chiefs’ organization, past president of the Fraternal Order of Police. But where were his brothers now, when he needed them? The secret Parsons had carried with him his entire career was coming out: people were whispering; it was in the papers, on television. And it wasn’t even his secret; yes, he was its custodian during his years on the force, but once he retired, he had passed it on—or so he thought. The damn thing belonged to the Spokane Police Department, an institutional responsibility. Why, he wondered in these last days of his life, should he have to answer for it? It wasn’t fair! Parsons had held up his end of the Blue Wall, keeping a silence that is the bond of his profession. Never, never, never had he spoken a word.

  Confined by the limits of his collapsing body, Parsons longed for company, a few fellows who Knew What It Was Really Like. He used to go down to the Police Guild lounge for a snort and a
memory blast. But, over time, most of the faces were unfamiliar, the common ground faded. Jerie asked some of the old boys from the station to visit her husband—“Just give the chief an hour of your time”—but few people came around to the trailer park on the fringe of town. It seemed obvious, though it took some time for him to believe it, that perhaps his popularity was entirely dependent on the uniform he had worn half his life. Now, he was so lonely it sometimes felt like physical pain, a powerful ache. In baggy clothes, no longer chief, Bill Parsons sat through his last year as a bored and pained bystander.

  A few months shy of his eightieth birthday, nothing seemed to work but his conscience, the nag. Jerie held him, a frame of soft skin and weak bones. The prettiest man in the police department still had his eagle’s crown. He closed his eyes and fell back to 1935, when he was a rookie patrolman, natty in blue and tight collar, a .38 strapped to his side, polished boots, with a regular salary and a degree of respect few men could command during the darkest days of a time when everything seemed to have fallen apart, a low, dishonest decade, as the poet W. H. Auden had called it. In whispered words and broken cadences, he started telling Jerie about that other September fifty-four years earlier, and the truth about a story that was just now starting to emerge.

  THE MAN who had stirred Parsons, lighting fires under the dead and the near-dead, lived alone in a decaying three-story brick building—a former office, his home—about seventy-five miles north of Spokane, in the border hamlet of Metaline Falls. Anthony G. Bamonte had spent the last year thinking about September 1935. He was reasonably sure that he knew what Parsons, and much of the Spokane Police Department, had been trying to hide for more than half a century. A few questions remained, though, to keep him awake. Bamonte was forty-seven years old, trying to rebuild a life pained by a pending divorce and the political pressures of his job. More and more, he retreated into obscure books and yellowed newspapers from sensational times. His world was falling apart, his wife gone, his boy estranged from him, his job in jeopardy; but when he worked the past, everything he touched came to life.

  Bamonte was pursuing a master’s degree at Gonzaga University, the old Jesuit college that was built on the banks of the Spokane River at a time when most of the people who lived near its shores were native Spokane or Coeur d’Alene Indians. A logger’s son, raised in canvas tents and backwoods cabins without plumbing or electricity, Bamonte had a passion for history, perhaps because the stories of rough-edged men wrenching a living from a land so recently undraped from its glacial period were not that far removed from his own early years in the inland Northwest. Bamonte could look at a meadow above the Pend Oreille Valley, a country where he built fifteen log homes, and he would see a tribe of Kalispel Indians gathered to spear salmon and swap pelts with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The past was not dead, he believed, and the dead were not powerless.

  When he enrolled in the master of organizational leadership program at Gonzaga, his thesis idea seemed unique to the professors. He wanted to do a history of all the sheriffs in Pend Oreille County (pronounced “Pond-O-Ray,” the name was a legacy of French-Canadian fur trappers, a reference to the shell ornaments, pendants d’oreille, worn in the ears of the natives) and the major crimes of their times. Except for his tour in Vietnam in the early 1960s and a few years in Spokane, home for Tony Bamonte had always been the Pend Oreille, where nine thousand people live in a county half the size of Connecticut. The land is crowded with tall pines wrapped in jigsaw pieces of red bark, holding to the rumpled spine of the Selkirk Mountains. Grizzly bears, among the last of the biggest land mammals left on the continent, still roam the woods, occasionally tearing up gardens or chasing farm animals. Although the Coeur d’Alenes, the Spokanes, the Nez Percés, the Kalispels, and visiting Blackfeet and Crows hunted elk and pulled chinook salmon from waterfalls, the human presence is recent, and negligible. Washington’s only significant populations of moose, caribou, and wolves live in the county. What they have in the Pend Oreille is a vastness where time is never forced. The valley was not settled by whites until the mid-1890s, when a sawmill was stitched to the banks of the river on the Washington-Idaho border. A hard town of loggers, miners, saloonkeepers, and chow merchants formed around the mill.

  In the early stages of Bamonte’s graduate research, one particular case—the crime of the century in the wilderness county, some called it—was a chapter full of holes. So little was known about it that Bamonte wondered how he, an amateur historian, wrestling with words, unsure of his academic ability, could explain this lapse to his professors. At one time Bamonte thought he might have to write around it. But then something extraordinary happened, a convergence of conscience and coincidence: the lost years came to life. The archives, police records, and newspaper clippings told nothing more than the usual details of blood, grief, and mystery. What Bamonte found was a living time capsule; he broke into it, and was now in the process of rearranging the pieces.

  From his home in the Pend Oreille, he phoned Parsons and explained what he was looking for. “Just hoping you can help me out with a few details about what happened in 1935, Bill—”

  The older man cut him off; he knew all about Bamonte and the case that had become his obsession. “I wondered why you didn’t call earlier,” Parsons said, speaking in a halting and whispery voice. Bamonte could hear the strained breaths, the sucking of oxygen. “You come by,” Parsons said. “I’ll be here.”

  SET IN A GRAND BREACH sliced through the basalt layers of the upper Columbia Plateau, Spokane was a town of cumbrous secrets, where the jazz artist Billy Tipton lived most of her adult life disguised as a man, and the worst rapist in the city’s history turned out to be the son of a leading citizen, the managing editor of the afternoon newspaper. Butch Cassidy, leader of the Hole in the Wall Gang, is said to have spent the last third of his life there, living off the earnings of his nineteenth-century bank robberies as a quiet citizen with an impeccably neat lawn. Though historians had maintained that Cassidy died in a Bolivian shootout in 1909, his sister, Lula Parker Betenson, said in a deathbed interview in 1970 that her outlaw brother lived on in Spokane until 1937. “The law thought he was dead and he was happy to leave it that way,” she said. “He made us promise not to tell anyone that he was alive. It was the family secret. He died peacefully in Spokane.”

  From the outside, Spokane looked as orderly as mathematics and just as sedate—a well-groomed town on a tight leash. City leaders referred to their town as the center of the “Inland Empire.” But the city’s worst critics, natives who left and swore never to return, sometimes referred to it, in a swipe at the century-old booster slogan, as the hub of the “Ingrown Empire,” a reservoir of buried personal histories.

  There are millennia-old glaciers in the North Cascades, to the west, that move faster than the pace of change in Spokane; and that was just fine with Parsons and thousands of other citizens who lived all of their lives in the biggest city between Minneapolis and Seattle. Spokane offered the security of a routine as reliable as the dawn. From 1929 until the mid-1980s, the city was essentially frozen. Outsiders—from the radical labor unions whose members staged free-speech marathons to the defeated Indian tribes from Montana and Idaho who held occasional rallies in town—were dealt with quickly and violently. During the early part of Bill Parsons’s career, crime was tolerated so long as it was the right kind of crime. Bootlegging. Cathouses. Gambling. Wife-beating. Gun-running. No harm there. Like other cities in the American West, Spokane was built virtually overnight on the wealth of abundant natural resources. And when the silver veins dried up or didn’t bring enough money to pay for the cost of transporting men underground, and the market for white pine from Idaho and wheat grown in the rolling hills of the nearby Palouse collapsed along with the rest of the economy in the 1930s, Spokane reverted to its frontier roots. Breadlines brought out the devil. For all but the most serious of crimes, the law was nothing more than what a given police officer said it was.

  Thinking about those
first days now, Parsons would have preferred to dwell on the small triumphs: a shootout that he walked away from, a winning footrace with a fleeing felon, a burglary ring cracked. He focused instead on a flick in a lifetime, knowing very well that this one asterisk, unearthed by Bamonte, could well define him in the years to come.

  When Bamonte arrived at Parsons’s house, he found a man as thin as broth, pale and gaunt, attached to an oxygen machine. Jerie told the visitor that her husband was dying of emphysema. Parsons peered through thick black glasses, blinked as if startled by a headlight, and extended a hand. He said a few words, but his voice was so weak that Bamonte had to move his ear next to Parsons’s face to hear him. Now that the interrogator was in his home, Parsons seemed relieved. He wondered how this younger man could possibly understand the Depression, a time when you could not trust tomorrow.

  “You’re making a lot of trouble for everybody,” he said.

  “I just have a few questions, Bill,” Bamonte said. “Trying to get to the bottom of this thing.”

  Parsons told his visitor about police work in 1935. The job wasn’t about law enforcement, it was about survival. An honest policeman during the Depression was a loser and a loner. Parsons knew, because he started out as one.

  “What kind of stuff are we talking about?” Bamonte asked.

  Parsons took several pulls from his tank, removed the black glasses, wiped his eyes. “Burglary,” he answered. Also, theft. The officers, men in uniform, stole food, turkeys, radios, small change, jugs of oil, he said. Try feeding a family on twenty-seven dollars a week during the Depression. Even when the money was better, a sergeant’s salary plus perks, who could keep the peace without keeping a piece for himself?

  “Robbery.” They took from people they didn’t like, with impunity.

  Bribery was common.