Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  13.

  Men With Badges

  WITH AN ENLARGED HEART, a stump leg, and narrowed arteries, Dan Mangan’s body was a wreck that he dragged around the house and parked, for most of his waking hours, in front of a television set. The frame of the old man, held together by bolts below one knee and powered by a battery pack for the heart, was the least of his baggage. A few years shy of his ninetieth birthday, Mangan lived with his youngest daughter, Rosemary Miller, in a well-kept rambler in Spokane. He told the doctors that all he needed to stay alive were R and R and cigars, but the joke was feeble, a tired line he should have left behind when he sold his tavern in Hungry Horse. He needed much more than Canadian whiskey and stogies, and his daughter, who had grown up hating him, gave it to him. But it was care at a cost. Rose would let him stay in her home, drink his beer and an occasional blast of bourbon, carouse with his seventy-six-year-old girlfriend once a week. But he had to abide by her house rules, the most important of which was that he listen when she talked. In the early evenings, they would each crack open a beer and Rose would start in on him.

  In her living room were pictures of her mother, Dan Mangan’s ex-wife, the former Joan Helen Sinclair. The photos were haunting, for they showed Helen at her best, barely a hundred pounds, lithe and striking—before the bruises, welts, and scars of his fist reshaped her face, before the poverty and pain gave her a set of eyes that stared out at the world with trepidation, as if peering from behind a fence. During the mean years of the Depression, the family of six lived in a four-bedroom house in east Spokane, not far from the shanties of Hillyard. Mangan’s police salary was more than enough to pay the eight-dollar-a-month mortgage, but he still missed payments, and went days without bringing home a scrap of food. He spent his earnings at Albert Commellini’s, buying rounds of bootleg liquor and romancing women he had met through Clyde Ralstin. For Rosemary’s First Communion at Saint Ann’s, she wore undergarments sewn together from muslin sacks discarded by the Sperry Flour Mill. The mill’s logo showed through the dress, so that Rose’s First Communion picture looked like an advertisement for Sperry Flour.

  When Mangan finally consented to a divorce, after the police found Helen half-dead on the floor of her house, battered and bleeding, in 1946, he took with him the life insurance money from a son who’d been killed in the war. Helen moved the family to the white pine country of Idaho, and she went to work as a clerk in the Potlatch Mill. She lived, as best she could, for her children, and maintained a faith in God, as interpreted by the Irish Catholic ministry of the inland Northwest. She loved to sketch and paint and write poetry; but as she aged, she lost her talents, one by one—robbed by Alzheimer’s disease. In her last years, living with Rose, she could barely remember her name. She died in 1985.

  Now, four years later, Helen’s former husband sat in the den where she had spent her final days, his big, knobby hands clasped around a beer bottle, surrounded by her pencil sketches of Jesus. And then the oversized Irishman, who was once so mighty he pulled runaway houses from a river in Montana during a flood, and later rented them out, would get another dose of his toxic past. He preferred talking about Hungry Horse, where he had set up a bar on a pair of two-by-sixes planked over sawhorses in the boomtown that sprouted around the federal dam on the Flathead River. For forty years he held court at the Dam Town Tavern. He could outlift, outdrink, outbrag, outfuck, and—he used to think—outlive anything.

  But Rose did not take him into her house to hear old boys’ stories. He would reminisce about the time his picture was displayed on the front page after he captured a particularly dangerous felon—Alfred the Hunchback, a killer of two women, the papers said—and she would reply with a more painful truth: he was one of the crookedest cops west of Chicago.

  For most of her life, Rose hated her father. It was only during the last years, when he was crippled, that she occasionally felt sorry for him. At Rose’s house, the old wife-beater, womanizer, animal killer, and deal maker was like a dependent child. Once a month, she took him down to the Police Guild for the regular gathering of retired Spokane cops. He ordered his R and R and sniffed around, looking for familiar faces, muttering to himself. He didn’t know a soul. Occasionally, when Rose would introduce her father, somebody would say, “Mangan? Sergeant Mangan? I thought he was dead!”

  “No such luck,” she would reply.

  After a few drinks, Mangan’s small eyes would cloud up behind the thick, wire-rim glasses and he’d say something about wanting to talk to a detective.

  “What for?” Rose would ask.

  “Got something I need to talk about.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Can’t. It’s something a detective needs to hear. Something I gotta do.”

  “Then you want me to call a detective?”

  “No, no. You … I’ll do it on my own time.”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Something I got to do.”

  Rose, the old man’s conscience, would shake her head; she was finally starting to chip away at the black heart of her father. Or maybe he was just trying to get her to ease up on him.

  IF BAMONTE was going to reopen an old murder case, he would need more than a hunch developed through his master’s degree project and a sheaf of police reports burnished with age. There was no statute of limitations on homicide, so he had adequate legal justification. The murder was committed in his county—no jurisdictional problem. But his resources, in the vast Pend Oreille, were stretched. And there were his critics to contend with, the citizen-taxpayers, who howled any time the sheriff assumed the role of whim chaser and provocateur of the status quo. In the history of Pend Oreille County, seven killings remained unsolved. Why go after this one? A fresh investigation, using the information from Sonnabend’s 1950s tale, could tarnish the names of people long dead, smudge institutions, and break a few links in the fraternal chain that held policemen together. But if the victim’s family, the aging children of Marshal Conniff, were clamoring for justice, that could help his cause.

  After meeting with the Conniffs, Bamonte asked each of them to write him a note about his or her feelings and offer suggestions on whether he should proceed.

  On the way back to Spokane, the Newport marshal’s three children decided that the distant possibility of achieving justice was worth the pain of reviving bad memories. A week later, Bamonte received two letters from the family.

  “Always, after the death of our Father, there was the question of who would have done such a thing to us,” George wrote. “Was the man someone we knew? Was he from somewhere else? At first, you believe there will be answers, then you only hope. As the years pass, you face the reality that there will never be the finality of knowing the answers to the questions that are always there.”

  Bamonte set the letter down; this aging voice of outrage was more than enough motivation to reopen the case. George Conniff wanted finality. If nothing else, Bamonte would try to help the Conniffs spend their last years free of doubt. And the sheriff was haunted by something Olive had said, when she wondered why her neighbor, Sheriff Holmes, a longtime friend, never told her what he knew. The implied thought was: cops treat each other like family, sharing vital secrets, and everyone else gets the filtered facts and official shrug. Whether the Conniffs would come to trust him or not, Bamonte heard the last cry of the slain marshal.

  “You are the voice of the dead,” he told his deputies whenever they investigated a murder. And sometimes, in reaction, his subordinates would look at each other, then throw their eyes to the sky. Right—voice of the dead. I hear one coming in now on the radio.

  “There is a lot of emotion,” George Conniff wrote, and continued:

  You’re forced to think about a very hard time in your life and your own wounds, after fifty-four years, can still hurt. Despite that pain, it is better to know than not to know.

  People who had close personal ties to the family heard the confession and yet chose not to tell us. The questions now for us are: Why w
eren’t we told in 1957 when the confession took place? Could anyone involved with the crime or coverup still be alive?

  There are no feelings of hate or revenge but there is the thought that somehow honesty and truth do prevail. Our Father stood tall and died for these very things.

  Olive wrote the other letter, a shorter one than her brother’s. What came through was her faith in the power of conscience:

  My first reaction after hearing this information was of shock. The facts had been known for so many years and the family was never given any knowledge of the findings. I had always felt there would be a death bed confession some time. It would seem this information was not to be made public. One of those with knowledge of the confession was considered to be a personal friend and could have contacted the family.

  For a time, after the tragedy, our thoughts were not so much along the lines of who had done this to us as about our mother. Nothing could change what had happened. We tried to avoid the subject but later realized she really needed and wanted to talk about it. Mother was a brave lady and loved our Dad very much. He was one of the best. She never found real happiness again.

  Not long after Dad’s murder, we learned the investigation had come to a dead end.

  We very much appreciate the fact that this information has been revealed to us. Had it not been for Sheriff Bamonte, we may never have known. Sheriff Bamonte has been very helpful. Needless to say, even after fifty-four years, the tragedy is very real.

  DURING THE LAST DAYS of winter, a chinook blew up from the south, warm and feisty, melting the snow that covered the Pend Oreille Valley. The white of winter storms always brought out the dark by-product of the cement factory in Metaline Falls, a heavy soot that splayed against the ground like spots on a dalmatian. With the wind, the ugly snow swooshed away, leaving metallic-colored pools of slush in the streets of the hamlet. The factory sirens still called in three shifts a day to process limestone and shale into cement dust. But there was much talk in Metaline Falls that the plant, which had been the life-blood of the community for eighty years, might close. A French conglomerate, the LeFarge Corporation, was negotiating to buy the factory from the German manufacturing firm, Heidelberger Zement, that had owned it since 1977. At one point, the plant had turned out half a million tons of dry cement a year, material that was used in the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River and the Hungry Horse Dam on the Flathead River in Montana. But now the European owners were not showing any signs that they wanted to return the plant to its glory years. They were letting things go into disrepair, laying off workers, ignoring sales requests. Some plant workers said the prospective buyers had no intention of actually producing anything or trying to keep the town alive. The speculation around the village built at the confluence of the Pend Oreille River and Sullivan Creek was that LeFarge, in keeping with the corporate climate of the 1980s, wanted to purchase the plant from Heidelberger and then kill it—for the sole reason of knocking out an international competitor.

  In late afternoon, Bamonte arrived at his home in Metaline Falls, a three-story brick building erected in 1928. Across the street, one way, was the high school, Bamonte’s alma mater, where the kids used to tease him about his clothes. The school was a grand brick design by the architect Kirkland Cutter that rose in 1914, when Metaline Falls was young and cocky. Cutter had created the Davenport Hotel and the Spokane Club, two celebrated historical fixtures in eastern Washington; but his work in Metaline Falls seemed destined to fall with the ages. The factory also was within steps of Bamonte’s door, its ashen towers rising from behind a wire fence. Bamonte had tried to keep up the appearance of his red brick building, sanding and varnishing the deep-colored wood trim, making cabinets and alcoves, laying carpet, replacing old plumbing with new. But it was a losing struggle. The place was cavernous; paint peeled from the high ceilings of rooms that he never had time to attend; the faucets in a neglected extra bathroom were rusted. Like Metaline Falls itself, Bamonte’s home resisted change, wearing the same face it had worn for more than fifty years, the only difference being the accumulated layers of gray from the factory.

  He called out for Betty, then realized she was not yet home from the cement plant, where she worked as clerk. His son was also gone. Most days, Tony didn’t know whether to hit or hug the boy. A year earlier, Tony was at the sheriff’s department’s annual picnic when a call came over the radio at headquarters that somebody had been spotted in Bamonte’s car, brandishing a gun. Sheriff’s vehicles raced to the scene, the deputies fearing that their boss was in mortal danger. They found his teenage son with a BB gun, playing with a friend. The prank was still a sore spot. Through the fall and into the winter, the boy and his father seldom spoke other than to exchange basic information. Bamonte was repeating the habits of his father, the silence and the distance. In turn, his son was developing Tony’s dark doubts, picking up his father’s debilitating insecurity.

  Tony and Betty had been fighting over the usual things—money problems, his long hours, his moods. A trip west to Seattle, six hours in the car each way, had only heightened the rancor. He felt awful about the scrapes, but instead of talking about it, he worked harder, longer, going deeper into the past, spending more time with the people from 1935 who had suddenly become such a big part of his life.

  With nightfall, temperatures dropped in the mountain valley, and the slush turned to black ice. Bamonte went to his study and put a piece of sheriff’s department stationery in the typewriter. He addressed a letter to Terry Mangan, Spokane’s chief of police (who was not related to the old man who lived with his daughter in the Spokane rambler). Mangan had come to Spokane from Bellingham, in northwest Washington, promising to make the Spokane Police Department one of the best mid-sized units in the country—a formidable task. In the early 1980s, when parts of Spokane were under siege by a serial rapist, the leading detective on the case advised women, if they were attacked, to “lie back and enjoy it.”

  With Elmer Black and Charley Sonnabend both dead, Bamonte felt it only logical that his formal investigation begin in the Spokane Police Department—his old haunt, the palace of secrets. In typing the first words of his letter, Bamonte left the realm of academia and upgraded the Conniff project to official business.

  He made copies of the police summaries of the Sonnabend interviews and included these in his letter, for reference. He also enclosed the Conniffs’ notes. He wrote:

  Dear Terry:

  Will you please review the enclosures? There appears to be strong probable cause to believe the marshal of Newport, who was murdered in 1935, may have been killed by a Spokane police officer.

  It appears that at least one other Spokane policeman knew about Roston’s involvement and covered for him.

  On March 3, 1955, Detective Sonnabend from the Spokane Police Department came forward with knowledge of a confession from one of his accomplices. It appears that he knew of this information for over 15 years, but did not attempt to push it until his health started to deteriorate. This was never followed up, and in fact, he was refused permission to work on this case.

  When I first was hired by the Spokane Police Department, I remember hearing about Roston, his ranch and crooked ways.

  This was in 1966. I also remember some of the graft during my earlier years.

  This case has the markings of politics and cover-up. During this entire time, none of this knowledge was ever shared with the Conniff family. It is also very interesting that Sheriff Black, the sheriff at the time of the Conniff murder, became dizzy and fell 45 feet to his death from the interstate bridge in 1955, just 3 months after Detective Sonnabend was attempting to bring light to this murder.

  It may be possible for some of the suspects to still be alive. Could there be an old man out there somewhere with a dirty conscience?

  Let me know what you think and if any of your old records still exist.

  Sincerely,

  Anthony Bamonte, Sheriff

  Pend Oreille County

  A week w
ent by, and Bamonte heard nothing from Spokane; then another week. This was unusual: it was police courtesy to respond promptly when another agency asked for help. Bamonte called the department and asked for the chief. He was given an assistant, who told him that the chief had not been happy to receive the letter from the sheriff in the wilderness county. For one thing, there were several implicit allegations in his letter—of cover-up and corruption that continued, through institutional memory, to the present day. The chief was offended at the very thought. Sure, cops from the old days were dirty—untrained, uneducated, driven by anemic salaries. But Terry Mangan, only the second chief ever to attend college, a former priest, had a master’s degree. To become a Spokane policeman today required passing a civil service test and two months at the police academy, which included sessions on constitutional rights. Just what was Bamonte getting at with this suggestion that there could be “an old man out there somewhere with a dirty conscience”?

  * * *

  IN THE ARCHIVES of the Spokane Police Department there was plenty of information about Bamonte. He was hired by the department not long after he returned from Vietnam, where he’d served on forty-two combat missions. The war disgusted him. When he came home, he initially retreated to the woods around Metaline Falls, a half-world away from the hot breath of the tropics. As always, there was very little work in elemental Pend Oreille. The land was rich in beauty and little else: tamarack trees with needles that turned gold before they died, low clouds filtering through the Selkirks at first light, the smell of alfalfa after a cutting. In 1966, after he took a civil service exam and passed fourth from the top out of ninety applicants, Bamonte began an eight-year stint with the department. He wore the same badge and whispered in the same halls as Sonnabend, Mangan, Ralstin. When he started in patrol, a sapling-framed cop chasing burglars and drunks in the railroad district of Hillyard, only one name from the circle that shared a Depression-era secret was still on the payroll. Bill Parsons, a rookie in 1935, was chief of police in 1966.