by Timothy Egan
Still, Bamonte wondered, as he had the night before, if maybe he was pushing too hard. Years ago, the sheriff had risked his job defending a person who was wrongfully arrested by Bamonte’s own deputies and convicted by a jury of the very people who kept Bamonte in office. Among cops in the inland Northwest, Bamonte’s reputation was that of a contrarian, the outsider who had to wear a V-neck instead of a crew, who wouldn’t so much as accept a cup of coffee from a friendly merchant. Some of his critics said he was soft on criminals, willing to give a guy a break when none was deserved. So his tracking of Ralstin was not the reflex motion of a cop who assumed all suspects were guilty until proven otherwise. He felt strongly about Ralstin. In his gut, there was no doubt.
AT HOME, when Bamonte walked inside, he was tired, his back muscles knotted and tense from the long drive. He knew immediately that something was wrong. Betty would not touch him. Arms folded, she pinned him down with her eyes.
“What is it, hon?” Tony asked.
She could not bring out the words she had rehearsed. When she tried to talk, tears came forth. Betty had gone to bed in grief, cried most of the night, and awoke feeling like she had slept in a mud puddle. Now, she took several slow breaths.
“I know …” she said, trembling, trying to find the courage, “… why you’ve been gone on Thursday nights.”
“I told you—”
“Don’t … lie … to … me,” she said. “Don’t, Tony!”
He sat down.
“Who’s Linda?” she said.
“Linda?”
“Yes. Linda.”
“A friend.”
“And …?”
“She’s a friend. She … has some problems. We’ve been talking a lot.”
“And you love her?”
“Why do you say that?”
“And she loves you?”
“What are you—”
“Don’t … lie … to … me! I found the message on your desk. ‘Linda loves Tony.’ ”
He was sinking. He didn’t feel caught; he felt weak, and spineless, and miserable, and full of self-hatred. He was no better than his mother, quibbling and lying about the silver miners parading through as Bull worked underground.
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Betty. Please.”
“Did you?”
At that instant, Betty knew they were through. It no longer mattered what the explanation was; the deed was done and confirmed. She was overwhelmed by tears, and he started to cry as well. Partners for twenty-three years, lovers for all but the last few months, they could do nothing now but weep at the collapse of their marriage, a union that had been sealed in years of mutual pain. The skinny kid just back from Vietnam and the waitress had vowed to live with each other for life. A few years into their marriage, they both had been stricken with hepatitis, but Tony had refused medical help. He took yellow roses to his wife’s bedside, fell asleep with his head on her stomach. When he could walk no more, he entered the hospital, and then went twenty-one days without food. Betty recovered, but Tony continued to decline. His weight fell from 160 pounds to 120, and his fever held on for days. When at last he pulled out of it, they were joined by something stronger than their wedding vows: a shared defiance of death. From then on, the Bamontes felt they could whip anything. Bouts of near-bankruptcy, the harassment of the Newport newspaper, a crushing miscarriage—they remained strong.
She looked up, eyes clouded and puffy. “You betrayed me, Tony.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
He did. Yes, he did. And couldn’t Betty understand? Remember: his mother had betrayed the family when Tony was five, and he never forgot, or forgave. He was a victim for life. Which made it all the more tragic that he could repeat the very type of transgression that broke up the family.
“I’m … sorry,” he said. “It’s me. It’s all my fault.” When he started to see Linda, he did it almost without thought, following urges, floating with a current. Never did he foresee this moment when his wife would stare at him with the same barbed look he had fired at his mother.
“I can’t explain. You know me. I get … so I feel like a failure. I was looking for something, and … with the stress of the Conniff case—”
“The Conniff case?” The mere mention of Tony’s midlife obsession angered Betty. Shut out of the recent discoveries, Betty realized in the last few days that the recent moments of great good fortune probably had gone to Linda.
Betty did not doubt that Clyde Ralstin had killed George Conniff. Initially skeptical, she became convinced of Ralstin’s guilt after going over the research which Tony had piled up downstairs. But his guilt or innocence was of secondary concern to her. What she had come to believe in the last few months was that Tony and Ralstin were very much alike. Her husband—compulsive, tough, a loner, stubborn—and the Conniff killer shared more than a Spokane police background.
Betty saw her husband, like Clyde Ralstin, as a victim of his past. And when it caught up with him, he refused to recognize it.
She had one bag already packed. Moving through a closet, she started to stuff another. “I’m leaving, Tony.”
He was stunned. Yet he could not bring himself to stop her, or even try to touch her. All he could do was watch her slow-motion exit out of his life.
HUNGRY AND RESTLESS, Bamonte could not eat or sleep. He went outside for a walk. Metaline Falls seemed emptier and more abandoned than ever, the factory wheezing its last breaths, the streets empty. Though it was still early, only a few lights distinguished the village from the shroud of dark that engulfed the valley. Bamonte walked toward the river, unthinking, following an internal compass. At the edge of town, he dropped down a hill, then followed a muddy and deep-rutted road to a point where it disappeared. In a small clearing he found the cabin built in haste by Bull Bamonte nearly forty-five years before. His father’s ashes were across the river on a flank of Mount Linton, but his ghost resided here, in the one-room log pile where Tony used to sleep on a cot, listening to Bull’s labored breath. This was the home they had lived in before moving to the Red Rooster dance hall. When Bull dragged his broken body down from the mine shaft in time for dinner with Tony, he checked his gloom at the threshold. They were going to make it, he told Tony, because he worked hard, relentlessly, and life owed him a break. The mine would produce—it had to—and then Bull would have more time to spend with his boy.
Heavy with runoff, the Pend Oreille rushed through the canyon, just below the cabin—a sound so familiar it carried Bamonte back to the days when he lived in the hut. He could hear his father again, his lungs kicking up mining dust, straining for every breath. He always feared the stuttered breathing would end, without warning, and he would be left by himself. He felt that way now—deserted. With Betty’s departure, the family was gone, and he alone remained in Metaline Falls. It wasn’t likely that Tony’s son would stay in town. The boy and his father were so far apart; and that was his fault as well, Tony felt.
Abandoned long ago, the cabin smelled of rat shit and mildew; its roof sagged and leaked, and its walls were shredded of the chink that kept drafts at bay. Bull used to hang venison outside; inside, he kept his collection of Great Books and his Sunday clothes. Now the cabin was such a foul, decaying rot that even the kids from the village would not play inside it. Like the town of Metaline Falls, it was dying; and going down with it, he felt on this black night, was Tony Bamonte himself.
21.
Character Colors
IN LATE SPRING the rains stopped falling and the huckleberry bushes leafed out suddenly in the lower flanks of the mountains. A few weeks into May, the Pend Oreille receded and cleared up, free of silt, and the Spokane River also shrank and returned to its seasonal color. By June, the ground was dry enough that hay fields needed irrigation water to keep from browning. The first big fire of the season came early, started by a lightning strike, and flames jumped across the pine boughs of the big trees until th
e winds died down. Throughout the Pend Oreille country, people had the summer of 1989 figured out even before it formally arrived—it was going to be miserable hot, a skin cracker, well into fall.
Across the state of Washington, on the north coast of the Olympic Peninsula, a former Spokane police chief was telling Bamonte about another dry season, 1935, when the pine forests were aflame and the city was full of smoke. A few Indians still kept stick homes in the river valley that year, the old man told the sheriff, competing for space with migrants pouring in from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Kansas, and parched pockets of the Midwest. “You couldn’t look down the street without seeing a fight,” said Clyde E. Phelps. The great army of Civilian Conservation Corps workers, uniformed and hungry, made a lot of people in Spokane uncomfortable.
Of course, a fight is what Phelps, a cop for most of his working life, and his interviewer, Sheriff Bamonte, would likely see first when they looked down the street.
Phelps was eighty-six years old, an appliance-sized man with a generous spillover around the middle and a mouse-colored Colonel Sanders beard growing from his chin. His upper body was enormous, the shoulders broad as framing timbers. Bamonte, on his day off, was in Phelps’s living room, in the peninsula town of Sequim, looking for character references on Clyde Ralstin. His prosecutor had lost interest in the case. His few remaining sources at the Spokane Police Department said he could expect nothing to come from headquarters. Candidates for Bamonte’s job, including several from his own office, were plotting strategy to beat the sheriff in the next election. But while he was losing support in his county, he was gaining a trio of admirers in the Conniffs. The sheriff had not backed down from his promise to follow every lead until he came to a cliff. With Betty gone, Bamonte spent nights, weekends, and his days off chasing tips and going over scraps of evidence. He knew every word of every document by heart. But maybe he had missed something. Maybe he hadn’t asked the right question. Maybe a conscience had yet to spill.
Phelps had a strong memory and good credentials, but he was guarded with details. He went to work for the Spokane Police Department in 1929, five months before the October crash of the stock market, and retired in 1957, serving his last eight years as chief of police. In the early days, he patrolled the Hotel de Gink, the old brewery, where he could usually count on finding somebody passed out from sucking too much applejack, or dead from a blast of wood alcohol. He was enlisted for riot duty when a mob of CCC workers shed their uniforms and shovels and vented a bit of steam in the city. Federal troops from Fort George Wright on the bluff above the Spokane River were also called in to keep order against the New Deal workers.
“We had to knock ’em down first and then talk sense to ’em after they were on the ground,” said Phelps. “They were mostly blacks, those CCC workers, from Harlem or someplace, or immigrants. They just didn’t get along with the town.”
Hearing about a cop’s duty in 1935, Bamonte winced. They were basically bagmen for bootleggers, and enforcers of the status quo. His father, the vagabond Italian who arrived in the inland Northwest during the Depression, might have been one of those whose scalps were bruised by the batons of Spokane’s finest. ’Most everything Phelps told the sheriff about police work of half-a-century ago seemed foreign to Bamonte; it made him wonder about the kind of people attracted to his profession.
Warming up to Bamonte, the former chief explained about a policy of tolerance for bootlegging, gambling, and whoring. “Spokane was wide-open back then,” said Phelps. “One place was called Chink Alley, and that’s where the gambling was. Close by were the cathouses and all the private clubs, where you could get liquor by the glass. Every now and then some cleanup-minded commissioner would come into office and we’d have to do something, but then things went back to normal, as usual.”
With the tolerance policy came payoffs to police officers. “That’s just how the system worked,” said Phelps. “People always took money.”
Bamonte asked if any police officers reported the patrolmen who were on the take.
Phelps looked at him like he was dim. “You said you were in the department when?”
“Nineteen sixty-six to seventy-three.”
“Go to college?”
“Afterward, yeah. Once I was already on the force.”
“Working on a … master’s degree, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s where you came up with some of this stuff about Clyde Ralstin?”
“Yes.”
Phelps said he wouldn’t hire college graduates when he was chief of police. Wouldn’t do it now. “It’s my opinion that higher education is not important to police work.” A cop does need an education, he said, but not one from a classroom.
“You never—I mean never—would turn on a fellow officer,” he said. What was needed in law enforcement, he said, was “horse sense.” And horse strength to back it up.
“Nowadays, you got so many restraints, so many people going around concerned about hurting somebody’s feelings or stomping on their rights, that a cop can’t do his job. Back then, we had authority. You don’t have any authority now—not as a cop or a supervisor. In all the years I worked as a policeman, I never once had a kid talk back to me. Never once. Bet you can’t say the same.”
Bamonte said nothing, for he had been the kind of police officer who was always getting in trouble for doing exactly what Phelps deplored. The main rap against Bamonte when he was a rookie on the Spokane Police Department was that he talked back too much.
The sheriff went through his list of characters from the 1930s. Phelps knew them all.
“Logan? Hell, yes, I remember Acie Logan. I booked him and fingerprinted him when we brought him in for … what was it?”
“Robbery? Burglary? The creamery thefts?”
“Whatever. He was your basic con.”
“What about Mangan? Dan Mangan?”
Phelps shook his head. “He was a goddamn thief.”
“How do you know?”
“All you had to do was watch him. We worked the same beat a few times. He told me about this little candy store at the State Theatre that he was stealing from. Said if you put your hand in just right, the door would pop open. He could also open a slot machine quicker than you could close your mouth. Another time, he burglarized a butcher shop, and I remember seeing him leaving the station house with a turkey neck hanging down to his feet. He worked with another guy, Hacker Cox, most of the time. Cox and Mangan were quite a pair. When Cox died, I know somebody who went to his funeral just to make sure he was dead.”
“Bill Parsons. You remember him?”
Parsons, the rookie in 1935, rose to become chief of police, like Phelps, but he had not made much of an impression on the older man. “Barely remember him,” Phelps said.
“Clyde Ralstin. You remember him, though?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“I read about what you said in the papers, Sheriff.”
“Yes?”
“I think you got Clyde all wrong.”
“How’s that?”
“He was a skookum man, Clyde Ralstin. A skookum man.”
Bamonte wasn’t sure how to take the characterization. “Skookum” was a bit of Chinook Indian jargon: in one part of the Northwest, it meant “evil spirit”; in another part, “strong and excellent man.” Somebody could be a skookum man and possess both qualities.
Phelps remembered Clyde as large-framed like himself, good-looking, tough. Beyond that, the former police chief did not volunteer much about his former colleague.
“Do you remember the Conniff killing?” Bamonte asked.
“The marshal?”
“Yes. Shot September 14, 1935—”
“I know what you’re talking about. That’s your case. That’s the story in the papers.”
“Well? What do you know? What do you remember, Mr. Phelps?”
Phelps didn�
��t say a word for a few minutes, and then he looked the sheriff in the eye.
“I have a lapse in memory on that one. And that’s the truth.”
BACK IN METALINE FALLS, the house was empty, Betty’s drawers flung open. It was hot and stuffy upstairs, the stale air trapped inside the brick walls. Bamonte felt alone and dispirited. Without his wife, the big, fortified building was something of a prison. Bamonte had hoped she might appear, and then he would tell her that never again would he seek somebody else. They would start another quarter-century together, and this time—he had the speech rehearsed—he would learn from his mistakes. There would be less work, fewer obsessions to keep him up all night, more time with the love of his life. She would forgive him, they would romp around on the brass bed, and then he would tell her all about the trip to Sequim, and ask for her advice. Just like old times.
He opened the windows and looked around for something to eat. Phelps had proved to be nearly useless on the killing, a big disappointment. But he left Bamonte with one intriguing tip.
“You go back and check Ralstin’s records, just take a look at them, and you might find something,” Phelps had said. “I’m not saying he wasn’t a skookum man, because he was. But there was something he was tied up in back then. I can’t remember exactly what. You take a look.”
The trouble was, Ralstin’s personnel file had disappeared, or so the Spokane Police Department had reported in April. Had it vanished with Clyde, at the same time he left the department? Or did it get thrown out in the move from the Stone Fortress to the new police headquarters across the river? Or did somebody deliberately bury it, one old friend doing a favor for another?
KEITH HENDRICK was surprised to hear that his mentor, the pillar of Lapwai, Idaho, had hired an attorney and refused to talk with Bamonte. He had predicted that Ralstin would sit down with the sheriff and clear it all up, one cop to another. Surely, the old man had some answers.
“And his attorney says if I try to talk to him, ask him about the shooting, the stress might be enough to kill him,” Bamonte said over the phone.
