Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  This was the third account Bamonte had heard of the roadblock. The first had come from the Sonnabend memo, the second was from Pearl Keogh, who said Virgil Burch had bragged that Logan, Clyde, and he—under a tarp in the back—had breezed through a roadblock set up by Spokane police.

  Parsons’s story differed significantly from Mangan’s on the question of who actually disposed of the gun. Mangan had pinned it on Cox, his long-dead former partner. Parsons was sure Mangan had it wrong. The image he held—the rookie watching the veteran dump a pistol in a murder case—was clear.

  “Why do you think Mangan is not telling the truth right now?” Bamonte asked.

  “Mangan’s getting pretty feeble-minded,” he said.

  If the sheriff was ever to get these old cops in court, he needed to have their stories converge. Somebody was lying. They would have to decide who. Bamonte explained his dilemma to Parsons. The chief said nothing. Bamonte left him with a choice: do nothing, or help out the law.

  A few days later, Bamonte called Rosemary Miller, Dan Mangan’s daughter. She wasn’t surprised that her father might have misled Bamonte about a key detail. His whole life had been a dodge from responsibility. So, he was lying to protect himself, putting the sin on a dead man while painting himself as a passive participant. What else was new?

  Was it possible, Bamonte wondered, to get the old boys together? As it turned out, Jerie Parsons had called with the same request; in recent days, her husband had started talking about the case, sharing details with his wife. He wanted to make up for his role in a crime he had concealed for half a century. He wanted to help the sheriff—“to settle it,” as he said.

  * * *

  MOST PEOPLE check into the Regency Plaza knowing it will likely be the last place they will ever call home. Sprawling over a plateau that used to hold bunchgrass and fields of camas bulbs, it has a vaguely colonial look, with its white columns and faded brick facade. But the Plaza is new, and its facade came from a factory. Faces, pale from too many days indoors, stare out windows that look at the parking lot and beyond, at the bald top of Mount Spokane. The Plaza is surrounded by warehouse shopping outlets and new apartments, a dormitory for the dying amidst the urgency of young adults busy with their first years away from home.

  Dan Mangan was waiting for the chief on a couch in the sitting room just off the Plaza’s entrance doors. He wore the prosthesis, and it itched, as usual. Parsons arrived, with his wife, and sat down next to Mangan. Jerie joined Rosemary Miller on a couch. No pleasantries were exchanged. The chief didn’t like Mangan; never cared for him. The two men were drawn together now by the events of a single shift. It was only when Parsons came to shed himself of the event he shared with Mangan that he found company—that of a man he considered a liar and a thief. And so for this one afternoon in the last days of his life, Bill Parsons did not feel the loneliness.

  “Dad,” Rose said in a very loud voice, “you remember Bill Parsons?”

  Mangan leaned over and whispered something into the other man’s ear. Neither woman heard what was said. Then the soft voices fell away and the two old men looked at each other in silence, slowly gathering memories, forcing themselves to think of a time they had tried to forget.

  “Who did throw that gun off the bridge?” Mangan asked abruptly.

  “You did,” Parsons replied. “I was your partner that afternoon. It was you and me that got called in to get rid of the gun. And it was you—” he coughed, raised a finger, and pointed at Mangan—“who threw that gun in the river.”

  He started another sentence, but couldn’t force the words out with his deflated lungs. He took a long pull of oxygen.

  “The hell!” Mangan replied, a burst of acknowledgment. He searched the couch for the eyes of his daughter. “I’ll be damned.”

  Parsons motioned for Jerie. It was done. The record was clear. She helped him up, and they walked down the corridor of the Regency Plaza to a restroom.

  Rose went up to her father. She wanted to be sure. “Dad … do you realize what you just said?”

  She had never seen her father, the brute, so broken and helpless, an eighty-six-year-old man shorn of a major deception. He started crying.

  “Yeah,” he said to Rosemary. “I realize.”

  “Can you actually say to yourself that you did it?” she asked him.

  “Yes. I can.”

  PARSONS AND MANGAN never spoke again. Mangan suffered another stroke, which left him unable to talk. Parsons died one month later, in his wife’s arms. The funeral drew a large crowd of policemen, in uniform.

  THE MEETING at the Regency Plaza probably helped both men more than it helped Bamonte. Yes, they got their stories straight. But Bamonte was still without the one person, or detail, he needed to convince his prosecutor that a ninety-year-old man should be dragged over the mountains to face a crime from 1935. He was running out of time, and the bank of potential witnesses was empty. It was down to Bamonte and Ralstin, the accuser and the accused.

  Bamonte did not have any strong desire to see Ralstin in jail. In practical terms, a life sentence for a man his age could amount to no more than a few months. Clyde had lived a life since the killing. What would it accomplish to take away his last days on earth and put him behind bars? The medical expenses alone would be enough of a drain on Pend Oreille County’s paltry finances to make incarceration unpopular. Justice would have to be extracted in some fashion other than the courts and jail. There had to be some way to take from Ralstin what Ralstin had taken from others.

  Since Clyde had refused to answer any questions from Bamonte, the sheriff thought of using a surrogate. Bill Morlin, the Spokane newspaperman, came to mind. The reporter was already thinking of paying a visit to Ralstin’s house when Bamonte suggested it. Morlin would get a story, Bamonte would get a few more answers.

  Ten days after Bamonte found the gun, Morlin arrived in Saint Ignatius, camera and notebook in hand, and knocked on the door at 365 First Avenue. A woman in her early sixties answered the door. His strategy was to be low-key and homey, a neighborly visit. Morlin’s twelve-year-old boy, Jeff, was waiting for him in the car. The reporter introduced himself—“just came by to say hello, that’s all.”

  “We’re not talking to reporters.”

  “I know, I know,” Morlin replied. “My boy and I—that’s him in the car, Jeff—we were in the neighborhood. Just wanted to say hi.”

  Peeking inside the house, Morlin saw an old framed picture of a younger Clyde Ralstin and his bride, Marie.

  “Nice picture,” he said. “Would you mind if I took a picture of it myself? Just for the record, you know. We want something that shows you at your best.”

  “Well … I guess.”

  “Is Clyde around?”

  “He’s inside. You can’t disturb him. He’s not feeling well. The stress of all this is … killing him.”

  “I understand. He’s quite an energetic guy, from everything I’ve heard. Built a house not far from here?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed the picture back to Mrs. Ralstin. Looked inside again.

  “Uh … would you like to meet my son, Jeff? Yeah? Hold on a minute.” He called out for his boy. “Jeeeeeff!”

  Jeff emerged from the car, holding his skateboard.

  “Meet Mrs. Clyde Ralstin, son. This is Jeff.”

  They exchanged polite words. Mrs. Ralstin would not let the reporter and his son go any further.

  “Guess I better be going now,” Morlin said. “Nice meeting you.” He turned, walked away, then stopped halfway.

  “Say, would you mind if I just shake your husband’s hand?”

  “Shake his hand?”

  “Before I leave, I’d just like to shake his hand.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt anything.… But don’t you get him riled up. He has a terrible heart problem.”

  Morlin followed her past the threshold, into a small house stuffed with guns and animal skins and knickknacks from nearly 160 combined years of liv
ing. In a corner, embedded in a chair, was a chalk-faced man, shoeless, with sunken cheeks and clamshell ears. He had on a string tie, suspenders, and he clutched his willow cane. Morlin introduced himself.

  “I’m from Spokane,” he said. “Just wanted to say hi.” His notebook, and small portable tape recorder, were concealed. Ralstin said he had a lot of friends in Spokane. Morlin let him ramble for a few minutes. On the advice of his attorney, Ralstin had turned down all interview requests from reporters. Clyde said he had nothing to say about the Conniff case.

  “I understand,” Morlin said. “But you know what the sheriff says.…” He went through Bamonte’s accusations in rapid-fire bursts, trying to goad Ralstin into responding. Ralstin snapped a few answers back—Clyde speaks!—and Morlin had his story.

  “Let me just turn this on for a second, so I don’t misquote you,” he said, showing the tape recorder.

  Ralstin talked for about eight minutes. Then Morlin asked him if he could step out into the daylight for a picture. Just one shot. Clutching his cane, snarling in defiance, Ralstin moved slowly to his doorstep and faced the world.

  THE REPORTER’S STORY ran on page one of the September 4 edition of the Spokesman-Review, under the headline EX-OFFICER DENIES ROLE IN MURDER.

  Not only did Ralstin deny killing Conniff, but he said he could not remember the crime and had never been to the town of Newport.

  “It’s all hogwash,” he said. “This whole thing is just hearsay from guys that stray from the truth so easy.”

  On a few points he was adamant. “The Lord and I know that I never was ever in that town of Newport, that I never set foot there,” he said.

  Why did he leave the police department?

  “I had woman trouble,” Ralstin explained. The Conniff killing, and the shooting of the fifteen-year-old boy, had nothing to do with his resignation. “The pay was so low it was pitiful,” he said.

  But he could not deny his friendship with Burch and Logan, a pair of cons, whose roles in the Conniff killing and the creamery heists seemed beyond doubt, detailed in the public record, newspaper accounts, police reports.

  “They criticize me mainly for, they say, hobnobbing with crooks. How do they think I found out who all these crooks were that I sent to the penitentiary?”

  He would not be more specific. Then he repeated an earlier statement. “I never set foot in that town, and the Lord knows it,” he said. “Twixt him and I, why, I’m not worried too much about it.”

  While the interview produced no jackpot for Bamonte, the sheriff was encouraged, and found several useful bits in Morlin’s account. For one thing, Ralstin’s answers showed him to be a liar. Woman trouble? By his own boasts, as well as the accounts of those who knew him well, Ralstin was an incurable skirt chaser. But there was no evidence that his resignation, three months after he shot the kid, a month after he missed days of work without explanation, had anything to do with his philandering. Couldn’t remember the Conniff case? That claim also jarred with the facts: he was suspended for six days without pay, directly after the Conniff killing, for leaking information about the murder investigation to his cronies at Mother’s Kitchen. Then he was demoted from detective to a lowly foot patrolman. Two career-busting actions because of his role in the killing—and he couldn’t remember the case? As for his claim that he’d never set foot in Newport, three men who knew him well had said otherwise. There was a whorehouse just across the Idaho border in Priest River—a favorite destination of Clyde’s, his friends said. The most direct way to Priest River, from Spokane, was through Newport. Finally, he said he hung out with crooks as a way to send them to the penitentiary.

  If so he certainly never acted against his buddy Virgil Burch, a man with a lengthy criminal record, or Acie Logan, a career convict. When both men were arrested for stealing and fencing creamery products, it wasn’t Clyde Ralstin who came forth to testify. In fact, Ralstin was nearly charged along with them. What protected him was his own leverage within the department.

  “… HAPPY BIRTHDAY, dear Cliiiiiiyde … Happy birthday to you!”

  The Saint Ignatius Senior Center filled with applause, a sound that spilled out the door. The guest of honor acknowledged the crowd with a wave of his hand, and then most everyone went back to talking, laughing, and sharing stories. But amid the good cheer was an undercurrent of harsh gossip and whispered innuendos.

  “He knows that I know,” Bamonte had said, and so, now, did a lot of other people.

  Some guests came to the party not to fete Clyde Ralstin but to judge him, to look him in the eyes and see for themselves if he had the face of a killer, to try and size up the man who had lived many lives, and every day of the twentieth century. The spy from the Post Street bridge, Ralstin’s buddy since 1929, could taste the poison in the air. He told Clyde he never should have talked to that reporter, Morlin. “That’s the worst mistake you made,” he said. “You shouldn’t have told him anything, Clyde.”

  At least one longtime friend of Ralstin’s had made up his mind after reading Clyde’s comments in the newspaper. Keith Hendrick, the Lapwai police chief, had been at Ralstin’s eightieth birthday party, and he was invited to his ninetieth. But he did not show up. Hendrick’s doubts about his mentor had been growing all summer. He was particularly bothered that Ralstin—“a cop to his dying day,” he always called him—would not talk to Bamonte. It looked like he was hiding something. Still, he wasn’t sure one way or the other until Clyde told Morlin he could not even remember the Conniff case. “I don’t buy that,” Hendrick said. “Clyde has a mind like a steel trap. He wouldn’t say something like that unless he was lying.”

  Something else had helped to turn Hendrick. Clyde had come back to the Nez Percé country late that summer. He visited a few relatives, old friends, and his brother Chub. Later, when a visitor asked Chub about the killing, he conceded that Clyde may have helped organize the creamery robbery, but he could not have been the one who shot Conniff because he was pheasant hunting with him in the fields around Lapwai. A check of the 1935 records showed that the season for shooting pheasant in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon did not begin until October—at least two weeks after the killing. That Chub, in his last days, would cover for his brother with a story that wouldn’t hold up did not surprise Hendrick. Blood, of course, was thicker than loyalty to the law.

  But what bothered Hendrick more than that was that Clyde never came to see him. “He couldn’t face me,” the chief said. “If he was innocent, he would have come and talked to me, and told me his story.”

  So while Hendrick, Mangan, Parsons, Pearl Keogh, the Conniffs, and Bamonte were not at the party, their collective presence was felt in the senior center at Saint Ignatius. Under the big sky of Montana, Clyde Ralstin was without shelter from his past.

  “That sheriff is killing him,” said Marie. “Why doesn’t he just let him alone? Why? Why?”

  Despite his outward appearance of vigor, Ralstin was dying, the internal bleeding worse than ever, the joints inflamed, the stomach, most of which was ulcerated and then cut out in surgery, tight and queasy. He was in pain all day, and, more recently, at night as well. No longer could he take refuge in sleep; the sheriff had robbed him of this last hideout.

  In his day, Ralstin could break bodies and intimidate those around him. He could live by his own laws. He was enforcer and judge. Over time, he could hide in the folds of the Bitterroot Mountains, or blend among relatives in the high plateau above the Snake River, or tuck himself into the crease of the Mission Valley. But the land could no longer swallow people in the last days of the twentieth century, and its great bounty was disappearing. In 1989, only a single sockeye salmon returned to spawn in the upper reaches of the Salmon River, in the Nez Percé country over which Ralstin once ruled. The land kicked back more than it took in; a rusted pistol was more likely to come from a river than a fish that had spawned there for more than ten thousand years.

  OVER THE AUTUMN, Bamonte worked on the finishing touches of his master�
��s thesis. He was alone, his marriage heading toward dissolution in court, his son living in an apartment. He wanted to finish his small history of the Pend Oreille, and then put the graduate project to rest. But he was full of doubt, as usual, about whether his five hundred pages on crime and punishment in the wilderness of northeastern Washington added up to anything worthwhile. Would the professor laugh at the final product, poke fun at his writing, ridicule his thesis? At the same time, a television producer from an NBC network show on crime “Unsolved Mysteries,” contacted him. He wanted to do a piece on the Conniff case. At first, Bamonte wasn’t sure. But then he saw it as a chance to throw the net out one last time, and to send another psychic blast across the mountains at Clyde.

  In December, with the ground covered with snow and the edge of the Spokane River iced up, Bamonte went to Gonzaga University to orally present his master’s thesis to Professor Carey and four students. It was not a give-and-take academic session; instead, Bamonte told a story. In the eye blink of time since Pend Oreille had been a county, people had been murdered for silver and for butter, for a few hundred dollars, over wives and pickup trucks, in fits of rage and patterns of cool calculation. The men charged with tracking down those killers were not great detectives or skilled investigators; they were somebody’s neighbor, a George Conniff or an Elmer Black, who had been handed a badge and a gun and told to seek justice. Sometimes, as in the Conniff case, the bad guys wore a uniform.

  Carey was impressed by Bamonte’s passion and his sincerity. “He truly believes,” Carey said later, “that a policeman should be somebody special, that they should live up to something like a code of chivalry. What he found out, of course, was that policemen have a feudal loyalty to each other.”

  The professor gave the sheriff high marks for his thesis; listening to Bamonte’s presentation was one of the most fascinating experiences he has had as a teacher. He urged his student to avoid bitterness, to learn from his project, to expand his world view.