Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  It was bad enough that he wasn’t being paid what he thought he was worth; now Ralstin had to deal with hostile politicians and prosecutors. The year had begun with a city council investigation of police graft. They didn’t find anything on Clyde; he was too well insulated by his personal stockpile of other men’s secrets, the politicians and lawyers and police captains whose liquor came from the bootleggers who counted Detective Ralstin as a close friend. But the constant corruption probes were a headache. Clyde was tired of it all; he wanted a windfall.

  Logan, the veteran con, had his own sketch of the big time. Everybody in the joint had a plan; mostly it was just talk, word stuffings to fill a day. But finally, in 1935, somebody had pulled it off: a con’s dream had come true. Big time was the Weyerhaeuser kidnapping, a crime that was hatched in Spokane. A pair of low-level cons, William “Swede” Dainard and Harmon Waley, and Harmon’s bride, Margaret, were killing time in a Spokane apartment when Margaret read something in the newspaper about the Weyerhaeusers. The family, one of the wealthiest in the nation, had millions of acres of private timberland in the Northwest and enough money to fill bathtubs with twenty-dollar bills. The cons drove to Tacoma, where the family lived in regal splendor among the small circle of timber barons. In the light of mid-afternoon, Harmon and the Swede kidnapped nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser while he was on his way home from school. They took the boy to logged-over stump lands east of Seattle, blindfolded him, and dumped him into a deep pit, three feet wide and six feet long, covered with tin. A ransom note was mailed to Philip Weyerhaeuser, the father. Though he tried to keep it secret, word of the kidnapping leaked out; after flashing around the country, it became one of the biggest stories of the year. George spent several days in the pit; then he was removed, locked in the trunk of the kidnappers’ Ford coupe, and driven 280 miles east to Spokane. There he was chained inside a closet in an apartment. After the $200,000 ransom was delivered, George was driven back across the state and released. Waley and his wife went to Salt Lake City, where they were arrested after Margaret tried to buy a pair of stockings with a bill whose number had been recorded. The Swede got away. He was traced to Butte, Montana, but slipped through a police dragnet. As of September, he and his $100,000 share of the kidnapping loot were still missing.

  Black-market butter would not make Logan, Burch, and Ralstin rich on the scale that the Swede had pulled off, but it brought in plenty of money—enough, at least, to fuel the next dream.

  Just after 9:30 p.m., the car backed into an alley entrance to the Newport Creamery. It was dark, and nobody was there. Piece of cake, just like Burch had predicted. The lock popped, the door opened, and there it was—hundreds of pounds of fresh butter, cartons of cottage cheese, and containers of cream. They stacked enough to load up the trunk and part of the floor in the back. Spokane was an hour south, giving them enough time to get the dairy products into storage before they would spoil.

  Just as the door was closing, the squeak of hinges and the sound of footsteps on gravel attracted Marshal Conniff. He moved closer to the creamery, a single-story, cinder-block building, and shined his flashlight. “Who’s there?”

  The burglars were in the dark; the marshal was under a light.

  As Conniff edged forward, he saw the car, the stacks of butter, cream, and cottage cheese. When he reached for his pistol, a gun was pulled on him. The night air, full of smoke and heat, now had gunfire—at least four shots from the butter thieves.

  One bullet passed through the marshal’s left wrist.

  Another shot hit his right arm and lodged against a bone in the shoulder.

  A third bullet ripped through his groin and shattered his hip, knocking him down.

  As he lay bleeding on the gravel floor of the alley, a final shot pierced his heart, tearing open an inch-and-a-half-long gash, then penetrated his right lung.

  The gunmen entered the car and sped away. Across the street, two boys who heard the shooting ran toward the creamery. The mayor of Newport, who lived nearby, also rushed to the crime scene. One bullet had entered his house. They found the marshal in shock, still clutching his flashlight, gagging on blood, his gun beside him. There was no blood near the creamery door. The butter thieves had escaped unscathed.

  GEORGE CONNIFF lived for another ten hours, awake for most of it, conscious that his life was draining away. He never got a good look at the people who shot him—just two men with guns, he said. One of them was a big guy, well over six feet tall. The other man was smaller. Never saw a face. As his wife and three children gathered around him, he told his boy, George junior, to look after his mother.

  Throughout the night and into the dawn of Sunday morning he lay on a bed in Newport, pain overwhelming his body. Just after sunrise, when the whistle of the Diamond Match sawmill summoned the morning shift to work across the Pend Oreille, Conniff was loaded into an ambulance to be taken to a bigger hospital in Spokane. He cried out as they carried him into the car; his body was on fire, the wounds open flames. The ride to Spokane was torture, a jangling, jarring route, Conniff’s body leaking pus and blood; the fever pushed ever higher. Alma stayed with him, but he couldn’t force any words out to his wife. By the time the car arrived at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Spokane, George Conniff was dead.

  The creamery had lost several hundred pounds of grade-A butter, and the slender book of local history, a record of the white man’s brief attachment to the Pend Oreille country, was given a new chapter. During the second week of the driest September in memory, a little boy named Harold Chase drowned in the river, the Indian dipnet fishermen at Kettle Falls said the salmon run was the worst they had ever seen, and the Newport night marshal was killed by butter thieves. On Monday morning it rained.

  6.

  The Search

  WITHIN AN HOUR of the shooting, the roads leading into Spokane, south of Newport, were barricaded. There were only two real escape points for the butter thieves: they could race down the paved road toward Spokane, then blend into the city, or they could try their luck in the woods of Idaho, east across the Pend Oreille River in the other direction, perhaps sit it out and wait for things to cool down. Only a few, familiar faces passed through the Idaho border. At the other blockade, the entrance to Spokane, a steady stream of cars came into the city; each was stopped and inspected by two officers.

  Nothing angered a lawman, even a corrupt one, more than the shooting of a cop. Life was a war; the bad guys could gain the upper hand, or retreat, but if they took out a foot soldier in uniform, somebody from the other side had to die. As news of the shooting spread, police from all over the inland Northwest volunteered to help track and find whoever had murdered Marshal Conniff. Hard times had brought a surge of lawlessness to the West: robberies, rapes, assaults, drunkenness, burglary—the new America was frightening. But even then, homicide was rare. In all of 1934, not a single killing happened in Spokane. The previous year there had been only two murders. Now, not quite nine months into 1935, two cops had been shot—the town marshal of Rosalia, south of Spokane, and Marshal Conniff in the village to the north. Bursts of anger and outrage came from the Spokane mayor, the chief of police, the sheriff, the United States marshal, and the county prosecutor. They would spare no expense, in manpower or resources, to find the killers. This was not the Old West, they thundered, but a civilized area, the richest empire in the Western Hemisphere.

  On Monday morning, September 16, Bill Parsons joined several other Spokane police officers in a search for the marshal’s killers. At roll call, the basic plan was outlined: they would surround the city and move in toward the center, squeezing the dirt out. Eventually, they would find the cop killer. Officer Dan Mangan led a patrol of men out to Hillyard, the rail yards east of town, where hundreds of homeless people camped. They were told not to return unless they came back with a suspect.

  The transient village, Spokane’s biggest Hooverville, exuded a stench of campfires, garbage, and clothes worn for weeks without washing. Everybody smelled of fire, the c
hildren especially. They were used to being kicked around, the farmer families who picked hops and apples or cut wood by day and then returned to the camps at night. But they had rarely seen anything like the ferocity of this search, aided by billy clubs. Mangan swatted heads and kicked rib cages. The tall, bespectacled cop was on a tear.

  “Anybody here see two guys show up in a car last night?”

  No, sir.

  “Butter? How ’bout it? You bindle stiffs seen a load of butter moving around here?”

  Butter? Nobody in this gulch of despair had seen butter for months, and if they had, word would have spread. Folks in the camp were living off brown apples and potato soup. They boiled water in tin cans and cleaned what they could in the river. Butter? No, sir. Not in this heat wave. It wouldn’t keep any longer than a Popsicle on pavement.

  Then it was on to the boxcars. The officers went through the cars one by one, looking for the hiding, sniveling bastards who had gunned the marshal down and then put a final bullet into him as he lay on the ground. Seven rail lines came into Spokane from all directions, bringing in silver, wheat, timber, apples. But the most common cargo of 1935 was the broken men and women from the dry lands of the West and the Plains. Searching the boxcars, the patrolmen found tiny, urine-fouled homes in darkened corners. How could people live like this? This town was going down the toilet.

  Empty-handed, the police search team headed for the Hotel de Gink. Perhaps the killers were trying to blend in with the rest of the Okie trash, as they called the inhabitants of the former brewery. They searched rooms where hollow-eyed men awoke to the light of another hot day and a Monday-morning hangover. The Gink smelled worse than the boxcars. People had made small fires in their rooms to cook. The cots were yellowed and flat, stained by moonshine and lovemaking. An Italian immigrant was found with a gun; they slapped him around and chained him to a post while they looked for other suspects. There was plenty of hooch in most rooms of the Hotel de Gink; plenty of gambling slips from the Chinese lottery game. But no butter. “The Indian did it!” one man said in desperation. “Yes,” a friend seconded, “check the Indian!” The officers rousted an alcoholic native, red-eyed, mumbling when they woke him. He was chained next to the Italian. By day’s end, the search had produced a handful of warm bodies: a smart-mouth, a troublemaker, a goddamn Okie with an attitude, the Italian, the Indian. There was nothing to tie any of them to the robbery of the Newport Creamery or the killing of Marshal Conniff. But it was enough to get the officers back into the station without a tongue-lashing from the shift captain.

  VIRGIL BURCH had showed up at Mother’s Kitchen early Sunday morning, just before dawn. He looked terrible, nervous and frayed. Pearl Keogh was still there, waiting for Ruth to get off work. She had never seen Virgil so tense. When she asked him what was up, he yelled at her to keep quiet. A few police officers, the usual contingent of uniformed stool-dwellers, were still at the diner. Burch went to a back room, and when he reappeared nearly an hour later his face was pale. He paced behind the bar, walked around the restaurant, undistracted by the familiar banter.

  Just after dawn, Detective Ralstin appeared, a sight better than the sun. He looked clean and well kept, his green eyes clear, and never more commanding. Virgil rushed over to him, but Clyde made a motion with his hand, like a master slowing down his overanxious pup. Clyde flashed a grin at Pearl, ordered coffee.

  “You heard about the shooting?” Pearl asked him. Even before it hit the papers, the cops who spent most of their shift at Mother’s Kitchen had spread the word.

  “What do you hear?” Clyde asked, his voice as slow as crank-case oil.

  “The marshal,” she said. “Somebody gunned down the Newport marshal last night. Shot him in the back.”

  Clyde stared at Pearl, an interrogatory hold with his eyes. At six foot three, he was a full head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the nurse from Montana. “And …?”

  “That’s all I heard,” she said.

  Clyde sat down, holding back a smile. He looked up at Virgil and winked. “Relax,” he told his buddy.

  “So they shot the marshal?” he said to Pearl, flashing his teeth, showing his dimples. “In the back, you say?”

  “That’s what the boys are saying.”

  “Shouldn’t ever turn your back to anybody.”

  Now Virgil eased up a bit. Clyde was so commanding. “Shouldn’t ever turn your back to anybody,” he echoed.

  “What kind of smokepole he use?” Clyde asked.

  “Smokepole?” Pearl asked.

  “A rifle? Forty-five? What?”

  “Didn’t hear.”

  Clyde sipped his coffee, checked his watch, and turned to Virgil. “I’m going out of town for a few days,” he said.

  “I’m going with you,” Virgil said.

  “No, you’re not. It wouldn’t look good.”

  “You can’t leave me here, Clyde.”

  Ralstin told Burch to calm his nerves and settle his heart. He would be gone for only a day or so—just enough to establish his whereabouts this weekend. His brother Chub had a place down by the Snake River in the traditional home of the Nez Percé Indians, not far from where Ralstin was raised. If anybody asked, Clyde was hunting with Chub. Gone the whole weekend.

  He didn’t want to be away from Dorothy, the waitress at Mother’s, for too long. Now in the process of shedding his wife, Clyde had been sampling some of Virgil’s talent, as he called it: the redhead from Idaho … the blonde with the big lips. And now he was moving closer to Dorothy.

  “What if somebody comes to see me?” Virgil asked. “Starts asking questions?”

  “Nobody’s gonna ask you any questions, Virgil.”

  Clyde whispered something in his ear. Virgil seemed to relax. Clyde always made him feel good. Nothing could touch him as long as the big detective was around.

  On his way out the door, Clyde tipped his fedora to a pair of uniforms sitting in a booth. He slowed to wink at Pearl. When she looked away, his face turned hard, an instant threat. Pearl was afraid, but she tried not to show it. Clyde squeezed Pearl’s arm and motioned toward her sister. She had three kids to support, right?

  Yes, Ruth had three little ones at home.

  And no husband?

  He was in the sanitarium, under treatment for tuberculosis.

  “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to those kids,” Clyde said to Pearl.

  “My God, no! Clyde Ralstin, what on earth are you talking about?”

  He loosened his grip, smiled. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

  THE DOCTORS removed three bullets from the body of George Conniff. A fourth slug, which had passed through the marshal, was found in the side of the creamery building. Two of the bullets had soft-nosed casings and two were harder, made of steel. They all looked as if they came from a .32-caliber pistol. It was possible that all four were fired from the same gun, since it was not unusual to load a single weapon with both steel and lead casings. In any event, the bullets were placed in evidence, with the intention of sending them to the crime lab for precise analysis on what sort of gun had fired them.

  George Conniff was buried on Tuesday afternoon, September 17, at the Greenwood Cemetery in Spokane. The funeral procession was led by a motorcycle brigade from the Spokane Police Department. The sky was full of clouds, and light rain fell on the mourners at the cemetery. Alma Conniff, left now without a home or a husband, was helped by her three children. She had no idea what she might do to survive this hard year of 1935, no idea where to go, even. The house had burned down, and now George was dead. In Newport, merchants suspended business for one hour in the afternoon to commemorate their slain marshal. Everybody said it wasn’t fair. Conniff had worked so hard. He was a good man, honest, who’d hit a patch of bad luck and had been trying so hard to put himself back together. He was building the log cabin, the new family home, and he was going to take things a bit easier. Conniff had very few enemies, even after his years as police chief in Sandpoint. He was good with
people, fair. He understood that mean times made people do things they wouldn’t normally do. But killing a man over butter? What animal would stoop so low?

  When members of the Conniff family asked Elmer Black, the sheriff of Pend Oreille County, about the progress of the investigation, he assured them that the killers would soon be found. Police from eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia were checking all the railroad depots, the major roads, the hobo camps, the Hoovervilles, the jails, the bars, the union halls, the fire camps. The four bullet casings were on their way to a lab for forensic analysis. Before long, the sheriff expected, he’d know exactly what kind of gun had been used, and its year and make. Already a few leads were starting to trickle in. The killers would screw up, he told the family—they always did. Something would leak out; somebody would make a wrong move. Nobody killed a cop and got away with it.

  * * *

  ARRIVING IN SPOKANE three days after the shooting, Black told reporters he was visiting tailors to check on a promising clue. Somebody had pawned a pair of fine wool, handmade trousers in Newport on Saturday night, an hour or so before the killing. Why would anyone sell his own pants, Elmer Black theorized, if he weren’t planning to leave town quick or if he weren’t desperate for money? Although an identification tag had been ripped out, most likely the pants belonged to one of the killers, he said. So Sheriff Black made the rounds of tailors in Spokane, pawned pants in hand, trying to find someone who could remember them.