Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

A few days later, NBC broadcast the segment on the Ralstin case. Clyde’s friends called the sheriff “a jackal” for cooperating with the television crew. How could he deprive Ralstin of peace during his final days? After the broadcast, dozens of tips came into the sheriff’s office. It seemed that American cities were full of people who believed their neighbors could be killers. None of the tips panned out, though.

  Ralstin was so upset by the broadcast that he could not eat. He coughed at night, brooded in the day, and cursed the sheriff for bringing this upon him. He would sit alone in his chair, the window shades closed, the snow piling up outside, sobbing to himself. The days were short, less than eight hours of light, and they seemed so dark to Clyde, like he was in a cave.

  “Why won’t he let me alone?” he said to Marie. “Everybody in that damn police department was crooked! All the way to the top! Why single me out? I don’t deserve this.”

  She wiped the tears away from his eyes. “You’ve got to put this out of your mind, Dad,” she told her husband.

  “I can’t,” he said, weeping like an infant, choking between words. “He’s killing me.”

  She would not let him answer the phone. It could be a reporter, or somebody calling to scold him. Try as Marie did to shield him, her husband was surrounded.

  The internal bleeding became so bad Clyde entered the hospital. One of his veins was cracked, leaking like a hose with a slit. On the nineteenth of January, 1990, one day after Tony and Betty Bamonte filed for divorce, Clyde came down with a severe chill, his body trembling, his hands clammy, his breathing short. He was put under intensive care at the Community Medical Center in Missoula, a town that got its start as a hideout for outlaws on the lam. Four days later, he died—of natural causes, the doctors said. His wife said he never mentioned the Conniff killing in his final hours. After his body was cremated, and the ashes scattered over the Mission Valley, the sheriff of Pend Oreille County said the murder investigation of George Conniff was over, the case closed with the death of the only living suspect.

  Marie thought her husband could have lived another five years if Bamonte had not hung the noose from 1935 around his neck. Clyde’s attorney felt the same way. He said the stress from the sheriff’s investigation had squeezed the last bit of life out of Ralstin. The assertion did not bother Bamonte; some people, he pointed out, dig their own graves.

  EPILOGUE

  MAY 1990

  Commencement

  A FEW MINUTES before the 103rd commencement of Gonzaga University, families gathered for pictures around the most popular landmark on the Jesuit campus: the statue of Bing Crosby. Golf bag at his feet, the bronze Crosby was without his pipe; as usual, somebody had stolen it. He had never been much of a student, preferring to drink and croon under a late moon with his pub band than study history or spar in Latin with the priests. The few people on hand today in Spokane who had actually known Crosby remembered him as something of a screw-off. Of course, it didn’t matter what he did in the 1920s. His years in college were recast in light of what happened to him later—a C student who became a statue.

  The lilacs had opened on the campus grounds, and their scent was intoxicating. You could walk along the Spokane River, take in the perfume of spring, and daydream about the future. But this graduation day, a Saturday in the second week of May, was too cold for final strolls under flowering trees. At ten o’clock, when the band summoned everyone into the basketball auditorium, it was only thirty-nine degrees outside, and raining. Children scratched and fussed inside their new clothes, the boys tugging at clip-on ties, the girls adjusting patent-leather shoes with straps one notch too tight. The gym was packed, a cross-section of the people of the inland Northwest: Indians from British Columbia, cowboys from Montana, wheat farmers from the Palouse, third-generation Spokane families sending another graduate out to work. The procession started, and everyone rose. The graduates came in like a conquering army, all smiles, waving, a serpentine line of blue and black gowns. In the midst of the procession was the sheriff of Pend Oreille County; Bamonte strode in, one among hundreds, and took his seat.

  After the national anthem, Father Bernard J. Coughlin, the school president, went to the podium, on a stage above the sea of caps, and the audience fell quiet. The priest made a few light remarks about a fiftieth-reunion class in attendance—“They’ve been out bar-hopping,” he said. Then he switched to his serious comments. The graduating class of 1990 might well remember, years from now, how much the world had changed in the last few months: the Berlin Wall had come down, heralding the end of communism and the demise of the cold war, and Americans were talking about a peace dividend, a time when people could go through their days without worrying that some diplomatic dustup would lead to world annihilation. More likely, the priest said, what the graduates would carry with them from this ancient Jesuit campus on the river was the Christian ethic—at least, that was his hope. He did not mention religion.

  “The full human being is someone who can commit to something beyond himself,” he said.

  Bamonte looked tired. He had spent the night at an inn next to the river, upstream from Spokane Falls, and he was troubled. Something was missing; his mood did not match his expectations. He had cap and gown and a hole in his stomach. Professor Carey noticed that his student seemed depressed, and he could not understand why. The young man who had flunked his senior year in high school had grown into an adult student who wrote a master’s project that changed a small plank of history. He had shown remarkable intellectual growth, the professor said. He had started his studies with a view of the world that was largely black and white. “Now he’s begun to see something bigger, a truth that goes beyond one or two dimensions.”

  Setting a goal, getting a grade—it seemed simple, by comparison, to so many other things.

  “Respect your own intelligence,” Father Coughlin said, finishing his remarks. “The mind is really all we have to work with.”

  ACROSS TOWN, at the same time Bamonte was going to the podium to receive his master’s degree, another ceremony was under way, a memorial. On the rain-swept plaza in front of Spokane police headquarters, a Salvation Army band shivered, then pressed blue lips to brass, forcing out the first, wobbly notes of “Faith of Our Fathers.” The service, an annual event, was a tribute to every police officer in the state of Washington killed in the line of duty. Their names were engraved in granite on the police steps. At least one name had been missing from all the years of the memorial—that of George Edwin Conniff, the Newport marshal. It was a simple oversight, the police brass said. So today Conniff would be added to the list, along with five others, his name carved into the base of the institution that had allowed the person who most likely killed him to get away with it.

  Seated near the front in folding chairs were the Conniffs, the son and daughters of the marshal, there to see the circle closed. They had mixed feelings. To them, the tribute was just, and fitting, and long overdue; but it felt awkward that this vault of secrets and cover-up, with its black slate roof and its Gothic tower, could now honor the slain marshal.

  An icy drizzle fell from cement skies. The band played “Taps,” and everyone stood in the cold, heads bowed.

  As the music faded away, Donald C. Brockett, the Spokane County prosecutor, began his remarks. A small, ageless man, he looked like Jack Nicholson without the potential for mischief. Next to him was Spokane’s police chief, Terry Mangan, and dozens of uniformed officers.

  “Aren’t we all victims when someone close to us dies?” the prosecutor said. A few heads nodded. George Conniff looked straight at the podium, unblinking, his face hard. Brockett hit all the right notes, talking about duty and order, justice and fair play. To George, it was a blend of solemnity and hypocrisy.

  “The streets would become a jungle,” Brockett concluded, “if everyone carried out their own form of justice.”

  A benediction followed. Then the Salvation Army band played “Amazing Grace.” The ceremony over, the small crowd dispersed. A
fterward, when all the pictures were taken, when the band had packed up its instruments and left, when the dignitaries had gone off to Saturday-afternoon softball games, the Conniffs remained behind on the plaza in front of police headquarters, lingering in the cold rain to spend a few final moments with the memory of their father. They wept.

  IN THE EVENING, Bamonte met his ex-wife for a drink at the inn along the Spokane River. They sat next to a window, his diploma at his side. She was happy for Tony, and her being there made him feel better. They talked about the past, their early days in Spokane. The city was changing, growing for the first time in half a century. The shell of Mother’s Kitchen, which had passed through many hands after Virgil Burch sold it, had just been torn down. Soon, the place where Clyde Ralstin had held court and cut deals would be a parking lot. Nobody marked the occasion. They talked about the future, what would come of Metaline Falls, the little border town where they had spent so much of their life together. As expected, the cement factory closed down, and some residents of the village thought the town might well fold up and return to nature, a valley of larch trees and grizzly bears at the river junction. The high school put on a play about racists, called The Foreigner. Such a production, in the town that gave birth to a group of violent neo-Nazis, was inappropriate, said the mayor: “It’s over. It’s done. Nobody cares. They’ve forgotten about it.” But the teacher who put on the play said it was a necessary reminder. She recalled what Abraham Lincoln said: “We cannot escape history.”

  Bamonte clutched Betty’s hand, recalling the good times they had been through together, and how much hell he had caused her. He was still seeing Linda, and he was in love with Betty—a seeming contradiction that he could not explain. He looked out at the river. She brought up the Conniff memorial, a service that never would have been held had it not been for Tony’s persistence.

  “You made a difference,” she said. “My God, you made a difference!”

  But he had lost the enthusiasm for talking about the history he had changed. He looked at Betty, and then they talked into the night about things that are much harder to recast.

  Darkness came. The Conniffs went home. Graduates went off to parties, families, jobs, and disappointments. The river coursed through the town that hid the secrets of Billy Tipton and Butch Cassidy and Clyde Ralstin.

  In September, Bamonte faced a primary election to keep his job. He ran his usual campaign—a few yard signs, talking to people in cafes and on the street. He worked other cases, including a murder in his county that bore striking similarities to one in Spokane. When Bamonte alerted Spokane police about his findings, they said their case was closed; they had a conviction.

  As the election neared, the Spokane police chief called three press conferences at which he specifically criticized Bamonte. Some reporters were baffled. What was the chief of the biggest police department in the region trying to do? They had never seen one cop bring the press together to ridicule another lawman.

  On primary day, September 18, Sheriff Bamonte lost his job, by thirty-four votes.

  A reporter asked why he had been defeated. He thought he knew the answer, but he kept it to himself. After more than twenty years as a cop, he still did not belong.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Timothy Egan is the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times. His last book, The Good Rain, was published in 1990 and received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Governor’s Writing Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Joni Balter, and their two children.