Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  He also brought to town a door removed from a garage in Priest River, Idaho, a mill town eleven miles east of Newport. A few hours after the shooting of Marshal Conniff, a green sedan had been stolen from the garage. The door to the garage had been covered with grease to deaden the noise of the break-in. Sheriff Black turned the door over to Spokane police, hoping they could lift fingerprints from it. The stolen car had been found in Spokane Sunday morning, abandoned, with a few half-eaten groceries in the backseat. “The theory that the stolen automobile may have been used by the bandits seems good,” the Spokesman-Review reported. “Priest River is only a few miles from Newport and it would have been relatively easy for the thugs to reach the town after the shooting.”

  Black was under tremendous pressure. The sheriff was short and heavy, with a reputation for slow thinking and sloth. He was fifty years old, with wire-rim glasses and a fleshy double chin, a Republican who didn’t like the New Deal trail-building camp in his county and thought the world would return to normal if everybody just worked a little harder and the government minded its own goddamn business. Conniff had been a beloved figure in Newport, as evidenced by the memorial service at the Methodist church. Several hundred people crammed into the church; the room overheated with talk of vengeance. In the northern part of the county, in the mining town of Metaline Falls, members of the Rod and Gun Club talked of organizing a posse. The Conniff killing, coming one month after the Rosalia shooting, fed a fire of vigilantism. Nobody felt safe. Anything of value—a creamery, a bank, a wheat silo—was vulnerable. More than half the people in Pend Oreille County were out of work. Those who could hold on, selling their dairy products through the Newport Creamery, now felt they were under siege. If two men were desperate enough to kill a marshal over butter, what might they do next?

  Elected in 1934, Sheriff Black promised to bring order to an area where beer halls outnumbered churches and 90 percent of the county had never been penetrated by roads, let alone lawmen. His jurisdiction, the last county to be established in Washington, had more than eight hundred thousand acres of forest, and mountain peaks that reached heights of nearly eight thousand feet. With only a few thousand people, Pend Oreille County was broke in 1935; all services had been cut back except the most basic—enforcing the law. Fights with fists or knives were so common among workingmen of the Pend Oreille that the sheriff was seldom called to the scene unless somebody had been seriously wounded. At Kelly’s Tavern, Newport’s most popular bar, patrons in a fighting mood could wrestle with the black bear kept in a cage inside.

  NOBODY IN SPOKANE recognized the pawned pants. After striking out with the tailors, Sheriff Black began searching the transient camp a mile south of Newport. A riverfront Hooverville, the camp was an outdoor version of the Hotel de Gink. Men who had worked as farmhands or built houses during the go-go years of the Roaring Twenties took refuge there, hoping to snag day jobs, scratching together enough money to stay alive. They were paid fifty cents a cord, plus board and free work gloves, to cut and load firewood onto freight trains bound for Spokane. Black had his suspicions about this camp: it could provide easy camouflage for somebody running from the law. But a search of the camp, and a check with a few informants, produced no hint of butter thieves or anybody who had boasted of a recent windfall.

  The shooting had been so quick and precise that Black thought the killers might be convicts. Most thieves, when caught in the act, will merely run off in panic. It’s the rare person who holds his ground after a warning and then guns down an armed lawman. Black set up a dragnet through the mail, firing off letters and telegrams to neighboring police departments. To Seattle police, he mentioned the name of an ex-con who had recently been picked up for shoplifting and was known to have been in Newport. To the sheriff in Ellensburg, a farm town east of Seattle, he wrote a query about three men in custody: “Could you give these young fellows a good working over in regard to their whereabouts on the night of the 14th?”

  An Internal Revenue Service investigator based in Idaho sent a letter to the sheriff in response to Black’s investigation. Suspicious of a convict in his state, the not-quite-literate IRS man wrote: “This bird is at St. Maries now and he is capibel of aney crime u mite name.”

  The tips went nowhere. But Black still had the bullets; with lab results, he hoped to trace them to the murder weapon.

  DETECTIVE RALSTIN’S confidence was infectious. A few days after the killing, Acie Logan was feeling up to snuff again, thanks to Clyde. The ex-con had disappeared on Sunday, but by midweek he was back at Mother’s Kitchen. Nobody had seen Clyde, either, for a couple of days, but then he showed his face at Mother’s. Virgil Burch still seemed edgy. Logan, who’d known Burch ever since they’d tried to scratch riches from an old mine in Montana years earlier, wanted to discuss a new project. The butter from the Newport Creamery had moved faster than anybody had expected. Cached at Clyde’s ranch and at Mother’s, it was rewrapped and distributed to buyers around the area.

  The creamery robberies were bringing in a couple hundred dollars a pop. Logan was also trying to move cigarettes and shoes, stolen from boxcars during the month of September. But nothing else was as easy as butter. He knew of a creamery in Stevensville, about four hours’ drive east of Spokane, in the mountains of western Montana. It was a big one, a distribution center for dairy products from farmers in the isolated valleys of the Bitterroot Mountains. Logan had a friend from his days in the Idaho State Penitentiary, a short, curly-haired man named Warden Spinks who was twenty-seven, nine years younger than Logan. Spinks had helped Logan break into the boxcars to steal shoes. Now Logan enlisted him for the creamery burglaries.

  Bringing Spinks in was fine with Clyde and Virgil. The Newport Creamery robbery had been just a little too much excitement for Burch. He could not get over how unfazed the big detective seemed by all the heat that followed the Newport killing. Clyde loved to ride an adrenal surge. But it was only smart to put some distance between the procurement end of the operation and the payoff.

  During the next two weeks, Logan and Spinks, at times aided by a third man, brought in more than a ton of butter to Spokane. They made several quick trips to Montana, to Stevensville, and to another creamery on the Montana-Idaho border, breaking into the buildings in the middle of the night and then fleeing with a fully loaded truck. They were stalled only by the shortage of creameries. The robberies, of course, only heightened the butter crunch in the inland Northwest, thereby driving up prices for the product that Burch and Ralstin were starting to monopolize.

  The drought held on as September faded. October was the hottest and driest on record in Spokane. And with each day that passed after the killing, Ralstin and Burch let their guard down a bit more. As Clyde said from the start, they would walk away from one of the biggest crimes in the inland Northwest. Sitting at the bar of Mother’s Kitchen in early October, Pearl Keogh heard the two friends talking about the killing. Not really talking—laughing. They developed a routine, which worked to soothe Virgil’s nerves. When Clyde would stroll into Mother’s Kitchen, Virgil would say, “Who’d you kill today, Detective?”

  “Can’t remember,” Ralstin would answer.

  They had the best-tuned ears into both sides of the law. Clyde kept up with the progress of the Conniff investigation through his fellow officers at the Stone Fortress, so he was always a step ahead of the latest speculation. Sheriff Black, in Pend Oreille County, wasn’t anything to worry about. Let the fat little lawman bring in his greased doors and pawned pants. The trousers, in particular, brought a howl to the gang at Mother’s Kitchen.

  It was only when a Spokane policeman started to check one end of the case, an accidental discovery, that Clyde went on full alert. Clyde was troubled by the bullets that had been recovered; they could be traced to the murder weapon.

  During the first days of October, nearly three weeks after the killing, Clyde walked into Mother’s Kitchen and saw that Burch’s face had gone flat. His parrot, having chipped away at much of the
bar, was now on the ceiling, working over the wooden molding.

  “Clyde!” Burch motioned the detective to come behind the bar. “They got Logan.”

  “You sure?”

  “Logan, Spinks, and two women. They picked ’em up this morning.”

  “Who picked ’em up?”

  “Your own people. Here in town.”

  7.

  Stone Fortress

  BURCH THOUGHT it might be time to disappear, to fold the operation and head for a hideout somewhere in the Bitterroot Mountains or the Salmon River drainage. In early October, Dutch Schultz, the gangster whose racketeering empire reached its peak during Prohibition, was gunned down by a rival after returning from the restroom in a New Jersey tavern; Greta Garbo opened as the tragic heroine in the film Anna Karenina; and the National Geographic Society sent an exploratory party up the distant reaches of the Salmon River in central Idaho. New York’s most famous racketeer and the enigmatic beauty Garbo were well known to most Americans, but parts of the Pacific Northwest remained unnavigated and unseen. It was into the mountains above the chasm of the River of No Return that Ralstin and Burch went to hunt elk and bighorn sheep and black bears. In the alpine country at the waistband of Idaho, a person could disappear, and only those who knew the country could ever hope to return.

  Ralstin held firm: he told Burch, the former cattle rustler, that they didn’t need the cover of wilderness—not yet, so long as they had the protection of Ralstin’s bag of other men’s secrets. When he nearly killed his son-in-law on that November night in 1934, beating and kicking him until blood poured out his ear onto the street, and then escaped arrest and prosecution, or even minor reprimand at the department, Ralstin proved to his rivals in the Stone Fortress what he had long boasted of at Mother’s Kitchen: the law did not apply to him. At Mother’s, Pearl Keogh heard Clyde’s boast: “I am the law.”

  Acie Logan and Warden Spinks were picked up because they were acting stupid, Ralstin explained; it shouldn’t be contagious. The two ex-cons had been sitting in a dust-coated sedan in downtown Spokane, in between creamery heists, snuggling up to a pair of young women. Logan was feeling rich, having brought in nearly two tons of butter in the previous thirty days. On the black market, the butter was fetching nearly fifty cents a pound—the highest price anyone had ever seen. Logan and Spinks and the two women were just easing into a full night when their car was spotted by Detective Charles Sonnabend, a Spokane police veteran, somewhat of a loner on the force. Checking the license plate, he found the car was listed as having been stolen in Montana.

  The two butter thieves and their dates got out of the car and walked into the World Hotel, where they had been staying. Sonnabend and his partner followed. Once inside the hotel, Logan and Spinks were arrested. The detective found two loaded pistols in the room: a .32 and a .38. Now, Sonnabend thought he was on to something bigger than a pair of car thieves. He slapped Logan around, grilling him about the weapons. The guns alone made the tattooed ex-con a parole violator, guaranteeing a return to jail. With the stolen car, he could be facing a long lockup. But Logan kept quiet, as did Spinks. The two women said they were just out for a good time. They were arrested for vagrancy.

  Searching the stolen car, Sonnabend found butter wrappers from a creamery in Stevensville. When he opened the trunk, there was the unmistakable whiff of bacon—another black-market specialty of the gang from Mother’s Kitchen. There were also dozens of new shoes.

  Charley Sonnabend, a rounded, lumpen man who liked to work with his hands, had been on the Conniff case, in a peripheral way, from the beginning. It was he who found the car that had been stolen from Priest River around the time of the shooting—a find that later proved to be a false lead. Sonnabend was known as a good detective, somewhat slow and deliberative, who approached each case like a new house: the foundation had to be solid or the walls would not stand. His face was puffy and his jowls were loose, the exposed flesh of a 280-pound body just over six feet tall. Although he was now a short-timer, with only a few years to go before retirement, his work pace did not slow with age. Some of his friends considered him too stubborn for his own good, a hard-ass; he did not back down from a fight. Because he was never around when the handouts and envelopes from bootleggers came to the Stone Fortress, many of the other officers did not trust him. One detective had gone so far as to tell Charley Sonnabend to watch his step: A fellow who wouldn’t go along was no good to anybody. They were all brothers. Sonnabend shrugged and went about his work. Threats came and went. He knew what real danger was all about, for he had once been in a shootout and had stood motionless, firing his gun while bullets zipped by him.

  When Logan and Spinks and the two women were brought into the Stone Fortress, paraded through police headquarters on the ground floor, and then taken upstairs in an elevator to jail, a great fuss and commotion was made over them. A long night of interrogation produced enough material about the butter burglaries so that by morning the police announced they had found the creamery thieves—and possibly nabbed Conniff’s killer as well. A shift captain told the press that Logan and Spinks had taken a thousand pounds of butter from a single creamery, in western Montana; the police weren’t sure what had become of the stolen creamery goods. They also said the two men had taken two hundred pounds of ham and bacon, which they had sold in Spokane for sixty-four dollars.

  Inside the Stone Fortress, everyone wanted to have a lick at the cop killers. As vowed by hundreds of officers throughout the inland Northwest, nobody was going to kill a policeman and get away with it. The Spokesman-Review ran pictures of Logan and Spinks, puffy-eyed and battered, staring out in befuddled despair. Their mug shots appeared under a headline that read: SUSPECTED OF NEWPORT MURDER KNOWLEDGE. The story said Spokane police believed the two men “[knew] something about the murder of George Conniff, night marshal at Newport.” The two loaded guns that had been found in the World Hotel were sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where, the papers said, J. Edgar Hoover himself would help solve the crime of the century in the wilderness county south of the Canadian border. The FBI was going to do a ballistics comparison with bullets taken from the marshal’s body.

  Logan looked particularly promising, and not just because of the guns-and-butter evidence. When he was arrested, he was a fugitive, wanted for state and federal parole violations. All along, Sheriff Black of Pend Oreille County had said they were looking for a con, because only someone desperate, someone with the career criminal’s disregard for human life, would gun a man down over a few hundred pounds of food. As he lay dying, Conniff had whispered that one of the shooters was tall, well over six feet, and the other was smaller, about five foot seven—the exact height of Acie Logan.

  The son of a Mississippi sharecropper, Logan had quit school after the fourth grade and left home as a teenager. A stint in the army ended in the barracks at Fort Leavenworth, where he did twenty-three months on a desertion charge. He wandered all over the West, testing the laws of every state he visited. In the Washington town of Snohomish, he was convicted of having sex with a little girl, a felony for which he served a year in jail. In Idaho, he did two and a half years in the state prison for bootlegging. In Louisiana, he did time for beating a man up. In Spokane, a year before the Conniff killing, he was arrested for vagrancy and spent ten days in the city jail. Only over the last year, when he fell in with Burch and Ralstin at Mother’s Kitchen, did his luck begin to change. The money was good. Burch lined him up with plenty of women, even though the waitresses at Mother’s found him a hard man to like, a lizard-faced con with a stare that seemed to stretch to the Great Plains. He was thirty-six years old when Sonnabend picked him up at the World Hotel.

  Logan did not expect to be sent to Walla Walla for butter crimes or to hang for the Conniff killing. In fact, he did not expect to be spending much more time on the top floor of the Stone Fortress under the fist-aided questioning of Charley Sonnabend. The detective was sure he had the Conniff killer in his hands; all that was neede
d to make the case was a little added persuasion. But Logan would not talk. He kept bringing up the name of Detective Ralstin—his buddy, Clyde.

  “Get a hold of Clyde,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Just get him.”

  Any minute, Logan expected, the king of the Stone Fortress, the master of Mother’s Kitchen, would stroll into jail and get this cop off his back.

  “Wait till Clyde shows up,” he told the detective.

  AT MOTHER’S KITCHEN, Ralstin was trying to soothe his partner. Burch wavered from spontaneous confidence to whiny panic, depending on his proximity to Clyde. Logan knew everything, of course; and loyalty was not one of his character traits. If he talked to Sonnabend, everybody else could fall. But Ralstin did not seem worried. He ordered Burch to get rid of all the butter from the storage cooler at Clyde’s ranch and at Mother’s Kitchen. Take a loss, dump it, just get rid of it, he told his friend. Then he and Burch set out to contact all the members of the fence, a loose network of go-betweens and petty thieves who had helped them sell butter on the black market.

  Then Clyde went to the Stone Fortress, not to see Logan but to see what his colleagues had on Logan. Sonnabend told him that Logan had wanted to see him.

  Ralstin laughed. Fucking con. Clyde said he’d busted Logan’s head once. A loser, no doubt about it. But he couldn’t imagine what Logan wanted of him. Sonnabend said Logan was part of a gang of butter thieves who were using Spokane as their base. Somebody other than Logan—the detective didn’t know who—was the mastermind. Logan wasn’t being very cooperative. Sonnabend expected to make his case as soon as the FBI came back with the gun report, and then the skinny loser from Mississippi was going to hang for the Conniff killing.