Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  The river’s course was first altered by humans in the mid-1880s, when the south channel was dammed to make a pond for a sawmill. By 1890, the ten-year-old city had a hydroelectric plant just below the wood planks of the first Post Street Bridge. During the next four decades, the river’s wild character was forever changed. The swift flow was used to power electricity for silver mines in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains and to run the streetcars in Spokane. Riverbeds that had been untouched by sunlight were suddenly exposed, and banks that had not felt the overlap of water since the retreat of the last ice age were buried anew. Lakes were formed with backwater, and orchards and vegetables flourished with irrigation water. The salmon were killed off after Washington Water Power constructed a dam in 1906 at the site of an ancient Indian fishing village.

  Standing above the river, Officer Mangan wanted only to bury a weapon and be gone. He wound up and tossed the bundle into the falls, watching the package descend until it hit the foam of the regrouping water. The falls were lit up by lights below, so even at night Mangan could see that the bundle he had been told to dispose of had gone to the floor of the Spokane River.

  He turned and got back into the police car, where Parsons had watched the whole thing.

  “What the hell did you throw in there?” the rookie asked him.

  Mangan said nothing, and they drove off. Mangan whistled, staring straight ahead.

  Again, Parsons asked him what he had done.

  “We threw a gun in the river,” he said.

  “We?”

  “Yeah. You and me.”

  ACIE LOGAN remained in police custody for three more weeks and then was released to federal authorities, who allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of interstate theft. He was already in violation of parole and would have faced a much longer sentence as a habitual criminal if he had not pled. In November, he and Warden Spinks told a federal judge that they had stolen forty-two pairs of shoes from a train car. The judge sentenced Logan to four years at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Puget Sound. Spinks was given three and a half years. They were never heard from or seen again in Spokane.

  The same day Logan was sentenced, Officer Bill Parsons was taken off probation. He would stay on the police force for thirty-five years, retiring in 1970 as the chief of police.

  Dan Mangan, his partner for a single night on the Post Street Bridge, stayed on the force until 1946, when he was forced to resign after he attacked his wife, nearly killing her with his fists and feet. When fellow policemen arrived at the Mangan home after being summoned by neighbors, they found Helen Mangan on the floor. She had been choked and punched and kicked by Sergeant Mangan, who was drunk at the time. In a police report Helen Mangan was quoted as saying, “I asked him who he had been laying up with, and he hit me. He knocked me down and I don’t know what all happened.” She said her son had jumped atop his father. “If it wasn’t for the kids, he would have killed me.” Mangan was never prosecuted. He moved to Hungry Horse, Montana, where he opened a bar—the Dam Town Tavern. For years, his annual Fourth of July party in Hungry Horse was the best-attended social event among members of the Spokane Police Department.

  Virgil Burch continued with Mother’s Kitchen for a few more months, though the volume of food moving through his all-night diner declined considerably. In late January 1936, Burch was arrested and charged with attempting to bribe a government witness. He had tried to pay $500 to one of the butter gang members to keep him from testifying. “Of all the beefs I’ve had with the law, this is the bummest,” Burch said at the time.

  In February, Burch was acquitted. The prosecution’s case fell apart when its witnesses lost their memories and their tongues. Burch sold Mother’s Kitchen, married another woman, and moved to Portland, Oregon.

  A few days after the gun was thrown in the river, a small story appeared deep inside in the Spokesman-Review: POLICE OFFICER GETS DEMOTION. The story said that Clyde Ralstin had been relieved of his duties as a detective and assigned to the ranks of uniformed patrolman, on night duty. “The action was said to be the result, in part, of recent indiscretions of the officer, including tipping off information in an important case,” the story said. Before he started his new duty as a beat cop, Ralstin was suspended for six days. A few months later, in early March 1936, Ralstin was given a much greater suspension—four months, for actions described by Chief Martin as “infractions which cannot be tolerated.” The story did not elaborate.

  A year later, Ralstin resigned from the police department. He said to his stepdaughter, Ruby, that he was leaving town and did not know if he would ever see her again. He deserted his wife, Monnie, and told friends he was off to find his fortune in South America with Dorothy, the waitress he’d met at Mother’s Kitchen. They would be far from the drudgery of police work in a town that couldn’t afford to pay its best marksman and its toughest cop any more than forty-two dollars a week. At the time of his resignation, while turning in his police gear, he reported that his .32-caliber pistol was missing.

  The murder of Marshal Conniff remained unsolved. Eventually, the case was forgotten, a distant killing from a dishonest decade. The Spokane River returned to normal in the late 1930s, rainfall and snowmelt filling mountain creeks; and a thick vein of water once again coursed through the center of the biggest city in the inland Northwest, a town that was back on track with the business of empire-building.

  THREE

  PSYCHIC DUEL

  1989

  9.

  The Student

  THE STUDENT had sandy hair, the skin of his southern Italian ancestors, and the type of muscled forearms and chest that a weightlifter could never create in a body shop. A lifetime of outdoor work—cutting trees and skinning logs, clawing inside mine shafts, and pouring concrete—had given Anthony Bamonte a look of lean utility. He was forty-six years old when Professor Michael Carey at Gonzaga University’s Graduate School of Professional Studies in Spokane asked him for some elaboration on his master’s thesis. Sitting in a basement classroom in Colville, a timber town seventy-five miles north of Spokane, where the Jesuits ran an off-campus program, Bamonte seemed ready to spring from his chair. The pace of academia, the slow whittling of ideas to a fine point, was a poor fit for a physical man. Bamonte answered in his usual tone, a voice barely above a whisper, Clint Eastwood without the snarl. The other students—a couple of wheat farmers, a pastor’s wife, a small-town newspaperman, a teacher, two sawmill workers, a city manager—took notice; they were never sure what might come out of Bamonte. One day he might bring a crude weapon to class or pictures of autopsies; another day he would arrive with news from his latest interview inside a jail cell. During class discussions, he would sit quietly, then toss an odd thought or a jarring anecdote into the usual discourse on how to use computer-drawn pie charts to enhance a career.

  His idea was to do a history of Pend Oreille County. Not the story of settlers breaking the back of the wilderness and tacking the rough carpet of civilization to the sod; in the Pend Oreille, where fewer than ten thousand people shared a million acres of mostly roadless forest land with grizzly bears, mountain lions, and the last wild caribou herd left in the United States outside of Alaska, that story was obvious and still unfolding. No, Bamonte was after a peculiar history, a study of law and order in Pend Oreille County. He wanted to dredge up all the major crimes in his county, solved and unsolved, to see if most bullies ever got caught, if victims found justice, if mistakes of the past meant anything to succeeding generations. And he wanted help from the ages, a few lessons from a near century of awful behavior, something he could use to get him through the middle years of his own life.

  He would not be relying on footnoted tomes or museum archives for most of his raw material, he explained. With little choice, the information had to come from marginally literate men whose job it had been to record the pained facts of assault, rape, robbery, incest, theft, arson, murder. The police reports (there were stacks of them from the last eight decades, stored in odd
locations throughout the county) seldom voiced an opinion on what the observer had seen. Just the facts, often misspelled: Bartender shot in dispute over six-pack.… Prosecutor wounded in ambush attempt.… Convict tries to cut head open by scissors.

  Pend Oreille County had been in existence for seventy-eight years (it was the last county formed in Washington State) when Bamonte began to research his thesis, sifting through a compilation of pokes and stabs, kicks and gunshots, accidents and acts of God. The bare facts, loosely assembled by chronology, were full of storytelling holes; the motives, and in some cases the culprits, were left out. The open mysteries alone could keep a researcher—or a cop—busy for a lifetime. But it was not Bamonte’s intent to solve ancient crimes or discern human motivation beyond the obvious.

  The life story of one county, in its raw form, came to him like this: 40 homicides (7 of them unsolved), 130 drownings, 87 fatal industrial accidents, 153 fatal auto accidents, 71 suicides. From this short stack of misery, Bamonte would seek to earn a master’s degree in organizational leadership.

  “A compelling idea,” Professor Carey told his student. “But it must be something more than a basic history.”

  “Oh, it will be,” Bamonte replied, trying to sound confident, although he doubted his ability to finish such an undertaking. Never a good student, forced to repeat his senior year in high school, Bamonte became interested in academics well into his adult life. And then he was insatiate. “You don’t think this is a dumb idea or anything, do you?”

  No, the professor assured him, it was not dumb. Odd, perhaps.

  Rather than focus on a single pattern of misdeeds, Bamonte’s approach was to examine history through each of the eleven sheriffs of the county—a life and crimes of the Pend Oreille as seen through the enforcers of legal conduct. History is usually written by the victors; in this case, it would be written by a grunt in a ceaseless war.

  “Every crisis ends in resolution, good or bad,” the professor said. “Those who learn from it move on to something higher. Those who don’t are stuck. Tell us if they learned anything. Why did some sheriffs succeed and some fail?”

  Bamonte promised coherence in the chronology. He would seek to pass on some wisdom from how the eleven sheriffs dealt with local government. For example, was there a pattern to first sheriff Ben Gardiner’s fight with the county over a livery fee—the twelve hundred dollars a year it cost taxpayers to feed the department’s horses—and a more recent complaint by a sheriff—who parked all the police vehicles until his budget controllers agreed to release more money for gas?

  The thesis would begin with Gardiner, who was born in 1866 and never had a first name until “Ben” was bestowed on him later in life, and end with the eleventh and current sheriff—Tony Bamonte himself, a Democrat, serving his third term as chief lawman of Pend Oreille County. There was an inherent conflict in writing about himself, but Bamonte hoped that the last chapter of his thesis would serve as a demonstration of what the latest of the county sheriffs had learned from the others. It was also an unusual writing technique for an academic project: after pages of passive, third-person storytelling, the narrator would come alive in the last pages.

  WHEN BETTY BAMONTE called her husband to bed, the student looked at the clock—well past midnight—and said he wasn’t ready yet. She rolled over and tried to sleep. They lived on the third floor of an old brick building in the atrophied mining town of Metaline Falls, eight miles south of the Canadian border, forty miles north of Newport, eighty-seven miles from Spokane. Betty was small, attractive, with hair the color of polished oak. Easy to laugh and slow to anger, she was a calm counterweight to her impulsive husband. Tony adored her; she was the only person who came close to understanding him, he felt. But of late, their life together was full of tension. Tony blamed himself for most of it—his fits of despair, his lack of self-esteem, a job that demanded all his time and held him up as a target for the ills of Pend Oreille County. He challenged every bully, whether it was a tavern tough or an arrogant bureaucracy, and took it personally when he lost. The county newspaper was constantly attacking him for trying to shake up the old ways. He saw the master’s degree as an escape from those pressures, a challenge of bringing order to musty chaos, without the usual obstructions.

  “Just a few more minutes,” he called out, but Betty was asleep, and he was elsewhere, thinking the curse of historians: what might have been. Working on a thesis was certainly easier than working out a lifetime of personal problems.

  “As I studied each sheriff,” he wrote, “I discovered their paths of anguish.”

  The night shrinking, he tried to add another few paragraphs. The words came slowly, sometimes stopped at the gate by his own doubt. Writing was so hard. Would the other students laugh at him, the wilderness cop with the backwoods history? Was he really up to a project of this size? Did he have anything to say? And if he flunked, then what? A retreat back to the old self-paralysis of ten years ago?

  He returned to the introduction, thinking about what tied together the ghosts he was pursuing. He wrote: “The history of mankind through the world has been filled with tragedy and violence.”

  A cop’s view of the world, no doubt. Nothing about triumphs over ignorance, or scientific breakthroughs that freed generations from disease and early death. By professional background and personal experience, Bamonte took a glum view of things. His life, several years into middle age, had been soaked in hard times, much of it his own doing. As he tried to sketch the first words of his thesis, what came forth were the faces of victims. He loved losers, underdogs. From 1911 to the present, they changed very little; the old stories were not much different than the life he lived every day among the people of the Pend Oreille. The victims had a timeless, even generic quality. The faces had bruises and tears; they dripped blood and they hid themselves in shame. Bamonte had been to their homes, riverfront A-frames without electricity or phone lines. He had been a messenger, delivering news of a dead child found snagged to a log in the river. He had been called out of bed in the middle of the night by a shrieking voice over the phone, begging the sheriff to come save a life; and when he arrived at a cabin where wood stove smoke blended with the smell of pot and beer, the caller’s face was puffy and red and she said it was too late—the abusive husband, the bully, was gone.

  Early on in the research, Bamonte realized that he could not detach himself from this history he intended to write. He realized this while following the travails of a particular country doctor in old clippings of the Newport Miner—a weekly, the only newspaper in the county. When he came to a story about the doctor’s untimely death, he grieved, feeling as if he had known the man himself.

  Bamonte went to bed. In a few hours, the morning light would slip through the fortress of mountains around Metaline Falls, and it would be time to drive the forty miles south to Newport, headquarters of the sheriff’s department. Bamonte pulled the covers up to his neck, snuggled with Betty, but did not sleep. Fresh ideas excited him. Insight into his character was an even more powerful stimulant. As Bamonte saw it—though he certainly didn’t mention this to Professor Carey—the master’s degree was also a chance to save himself from his own worst instincts. By studying the private anguish of the ten men who preceded him, he hoped to find some hints on how to hold himself together; so the last chapter of the thesis would indeed be built upon the mistakes of the previous ten. History as shrink.

  What troubled him most, in the final year of the 1980s, were his self-doubts. Though he was a handsome man, wiry, with long legs and blue eyes that lit his face, he did not swagger with the confidence of those who know they are good-looking. He walked as if on ice. Though he was a generous man, using his precious free time to help somebody fix a septic tank or fight a bureaucratic edict in a county where the federal government owned most of the land, he was always afraid that he was being used or set up. Though he was a smart man, able to juggle three thoughts at once, to make leaps of logic that impressed his prosecutors and his
professors, he could not shake the recurring image he had of himself as a rube, the kid in hand-me-down clothes who flunked his senior year in high school.

  HE WAS a tiny boy when his mother left him and moved to Hawaii with a musician and his father was sent to jail. He remembered the strange men who used to come to the house in Wallace, Idaho, when Louis Bamonte was off working in the mines. Tony was born in Wallace in 1942—in the same hospital where a miner’s wife gave birth to Lana Turner. He lived his first years in a town with two dozen whorehouses, set in a valley where more silver was yanked from the ground than in any other place on earth. The skies were ever dark with factory smoke, and the streets were thick with coal dust. Only when the wind was blowing could the top of a six-hundred-foot smelter smokestack be seen. They called the Coeur d’Alene River drainage on the western side of the Bitterroots the Silver Valley, but its dominant color was a gray that covered faces and streets and houses and trees. In the afternoons, Lucille Bamonte baked cakes, and when Tony asked for bites, she shooed him away. The goodies were not for Tony and his brother and sister but for the men who came to visit their mother. A honey blonde with blue eyes, Lucille was considered by some men to be the prettiest woman in the panhandle of northern Idaho. In a valley where smelter toxins killed all the nearby forests and poisoned the river, and a haze of poison air hung over the drafty company shacks, a beauty such as Lucille Bamonte stood out like a rose in pavement. Deep inside the mine shafts, air vents often failed or supports crumbled. Because death was common, Silver Valley miners’ jobs were sometimes more like combat than earning a living.