Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Like Parsons, Bamonte learned about police work by throwing his body against the usual adversaries. Rookie-year scuffles left him with a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and a succession of shiners. The first time he fired his gun, in pursuit of a burglar, he hit a window, two cars, a phone booth, and a house. The burglar was never touched.

  The older cops showed him the way they treated the alcoholics who lived near the railroad tracks downtown. They would find one with a bottle in his back pocket, then whack his ass with the billy club. The glass would shatter; the wino would howl. Another trick was to lead a drunk up to a police call box, then open the metal door in his face, drawing blood and knocking him to the ground.

  Vagrancy was still the all-purpose crime it had been in the 1930s. “If a guy looks at you wrong, arrest him for vagrancy,” Bamonte was told again and again during his first year on the job. Free meals were available at certain restaurants, though Mother’s Kitchen was no longer a popular hangout. A bottle or two could be had at Christmas.

  From an old county coroner named Doc Jones, now dead, Bamonte was introduced to another departmental tradition—stealing from the dead. He arrived one day, alone, at the house of a man who had passed away. Doc Jones came a few minutes later, made a routine inspection of the body, looked around at the man’s possessions, then at Bamonte: “I’ll take half, you take half.” The dead man had no close relatives. The two civil servants could lift a couple of items, and who would ever know? Bamonte balked. Back at the station, he told a colleague, saying he wanted to turn in the coroner. Doc Jones? He’s harmless. Besides, the rookie didn’t want to get anybody in trouble, did he? Make waves?

  Another routine, dating back to the days of Hacker Cox, was the elevator assault. Between the first floor and jail, the boys at the Spokane Police Department would bloody a suspect’s face, poke a kidney, or bruise a knee. It was great fun, and nobody ever bothered them. When Bamonte asked if this could lead to trouble, he was told cops were immune; it would always come down to their word against the suspect’s. Any time an officer used excessive force, be it gun, club, or fist, the rule of thumb among Spokane police was to minimize it later in the police report—don’t even bring it up unless there were witnesses or bullet wounds. A magic pencil, a little creative writing, could go a long way.

  After work, Bamonte shied away from the patrolmen’s boys’ club. Instead, he took night classes at Whitworth College and socialized with a few friends, mostly younger cops. He bucked some of the more rigid rules. The department insisted that everyone wear crew-neck T-shirts, and he wore V-necked, which drew him a reprimand. He liked to play practical jokes, but he had no tolerance for cutting corners in the field.

  When in 1966, he fell for a striking, electric-eyed waitress at Sambo’s Restaurant named Betty, his approach was in character. Not yet twenty-one, Betty was waiting in her car for somebody to buy her beer after getting off work one night. From behind her came police lights and a siren. She steeled herself for an interrogation, but Officer Bamonte, who had noticed her in the restaurant, had only a single question: how about a date next week?

  Three months later, they were married. He brought her flowers in the afternoons and inspired her with his ambition; he said he wanted to be a detective, the best cop in the world. In his weaker moments, he let her in on shards of what he had seen in Vietnam—the old men shot in the head, the strafing of children—and he shared the doubts and fears of his youth.

  Bull Bamonte died the same year Tony was married. The son seemed lost without his father. At the funeral, he threw himself onto the casket, sobbing without restraint, trying to squeeze some last bit of life from the outdoor warrior who had brought him up in dance halls and one-room cabins and canvas tents. For months after the funeral, Tony would retreat to a room, close the door, and not say anything. His father left him with a set of Great Books, the classics, and Tony took to the collected wisdom from the ages as if he were harboring a lost twin.

  Five years into the job, Bamonte was working as a motorcycle cop, dressed head to toe in black leather. On a bright Saturday in October 1971, he was patrolling downtown Spokane when a call came over the radio—a gunman had just robbed the credit office of a department store. A few seconds later came another call—a woman had been shot and killed in the robbery. Bamonte raced up to the store, jumped off his bike, and sprinted inside.

  “That’s him!” a customer shouted, pointing to a man in the stairway who was fleeing with a wastebasket. “He shot the lady upstairs!”

  Bamonte raised his pistol and ordered the man to stop. When the suspect drew his revolver in response, Bamonte fired a single shot, which hit the man dead-center between his eyes, shattering a pair of sunglasses. Bamonte’s partner, Ron Graves, rushed in behind him. He saw the man lying on the floor, a bullet in his forehead, a waste-basket by his side, and shouted: “Jesus Christ, Tony! You shot the fucking janitor!”

  If so, the janitor was sweeping up more than dirt; $8,300 in cash was found in the basket. The injured man, brain-damaged, lived to stand trial and plead guilty. A prosecutor’s inquiry found that Bamonte was justified in the shooting—a life-threatening situation because the suspect had raised his gun. After the shooting, the department switched over to hollow-point bullets, which shatter on impact, usually assuring a kill.

  Having fired his weapon at somebody gave Bamonte a certain status inside police headquarters. The old-timers, who had shunned the younger cop, began to share some of their own stories of the days of instant justice, when an officer had more freedom to enforce the law, when might made right and no lawyer or prosecutor or journalist could say otherwise. It was then that Bamonte first heard the name of Detective Clyde Ralstin. Although Ralstin was long gone from the force, he was still a legend to some at the Stone Fortress—a man to be admired, the biggest and toughest cop from the old days, a maverick detective who worked by his own code and left under his own terms.

  A few traces from the Ralstin years—the protective internal code, the petty corruptions, the grab bag of the property room, the handouts of booze and small change—remained. Bamonte was a hard-nose, and when he continued to resist the temptations of the fraternity, he was an outsider once again. When he left the force in 1974, some of the older men in uniform said “Good riddance.”

  IN LATE MARCH, nearly four weeks after Bamonte wrote his letter to the Spokane police chief, he got a response. The official reaction was negative and curt: “We can find no employment records of any of these people, and most of the principles [sic] involved in this are dead anyhow.”

  14.

  A Stirring

  AT HOME in his daughter’s rambler, Dan Mangan sometimes would open the photo album, looking for back-door relief from the pain that accompanied the last days of his life. For an hour or more at a time, he left his bent and broken body and returned to those days when his back was straight and his fist was unchipped and he walked through the Stone Fortress with a proprietary swagger. He looked at pictures from the newspaper, half-dissolved clips showing Mangan inside a new police car in 1938, or the front-page photo of him after he captured Alfred the Hunchback. He pulled out pictures from hunting trips—smiling drunks, Spokane’s Irish Mafia on holiday. He stared at the young man in uniform, his high forehead, resolute gaze, and then he would start to cry. On more than one occasion, he fell asleep with his face still wet with tears.

  In the final week of March, a second story about Bamonte’s master’s degree appeared in Spokane’s morning newspaper. This piece told how the project had gone from academic curiosity to a renewed investigation. The headline read: FAMILY FINALLY LEARNS DETAILS OF ’35 MURDER. The story centered on the Conniffs, and their surprise at hearing about police involvement in the killing of their father. It detailed Sonnabend’s attempt to unburden himself, the memos Bamonte had found from 1955 and 1957, and the search for a Sergeant Mangrin and a Clyde Roston. But the story said the new investigation, only a few weeks old, was already running into dead ends. “It apparently wi
ll go nowhere because all those involved are dead,” the story said. “Investigators say they can’t locate personnel records confirming when or if the detective suspected of involvement in the Conniff murder worked for the Spokane police department.”

  The day the article appeared, Rosemary Miller received a call at home from an old acquaintance, a widow of a Spokane policeman. “Rose, did you see that name in the paper today, a Sergeant Mangrin?”

  “I don’t remember much about it,” Rosemary said. “Why?”

  “That’s your dad they’re talking about,” she said. “ ‘Mangrin’—they mean Mangan. That’s your dad.”

  Rose hung up and went to see her father, who was asleep. When he awoke, she gave him the paper. He read through the story, slowly, then again. The color drained from his face, and his eyes went off in the distance. He said nothing for several minutes.

  When he spoke, his voice was like a gavel on a judge’s bench. “Hell, I know all about that,” he said.

  “You what?” Her face flushed, Rose moved closer to her father. She was angry, close to losing her temper.

  The old man did not back off. “I said I know all about that.”

  “Look at me!” Rose demanded. “What exactly do you know?”

  “I know who did it.”

  “God damn you!” Rose could barely control herself. She always knew her father was a collection of mildewed secrets, but this was a new low. “You mean to tell me you’ve known about this killing for fifty-four years and you never told anybody?”

  “Well … yes. That’s what I wanted to talk to a detective about.”

  “I’m calling the police. We’re going to march right down there and you’re going to tell them everything you—”

  “No.… I … we’ve got to be careful.”

  “Careful! This poor family …” She picked up the paper, checked the name. “The Conniffs. They’ve gone their entire life without knowing who killed their father. Think of the pain you’ve caused them.”

  “I didn’t mean … It just …”

  “It just what?”

  “It just never came up.”

  “You owe this Conniff family the truth. I’m calling the police chief, and the sheriff from Pend Oreille County.”

  “No!”

  Mangan rose, defiant, and walked away. He slammed the door behind him and did not say a word to his daughter for the rest of the evening.

  The next morning, when he came forth from his room, the bluster was gone, and he was a tired old man again with a stump leg and a worn heart.

  “Call them,” he said.

  THE RECKONING came a few days later, in early April, on an afternoon when the air was warm with the promise of new life and all the gravel-flecked snow had disappeared from the streets. Rose drove her father to the Police Guild Building, not far from the Stone Fortress, which was now an office and retail building. The Spokane Police Department had moved across the river, to the courthouse and jail complex beneath a Gothic tower. Mangan and Rose were soon joined by Lieutenant Gary Johnson, of the Spokane police internal affairs office. When Bamonte arrived, he put a twenty-dollar bill on the table and invited everyone to have a drink. Mangan ordered a shot of R and R, his usual medication, and sat back. He wore his prosthesis for the occasion, but it itched.

  At first, Mangan seemed suspicious of Bamonte. Nobody had ever questioned him about the events of September 1935. What exactly was Bamonte after? Why now? What was he going to do with the information? Was there a risk of self-incrimination?

  Mangan’s defensiveness raised a question in Bamonte’s mind: just who, after all these years, was he trying to protect? But even if Mangan’s motives were murky, the sheriff was happy, after having been told by an assistant Spokane police chief that everybody from the old era was dead, to have found a single witness. When the rejection letter came back, Bamonte promised the Conniffs that he would not let up. He said he would scratch and kick and harangue and stumble on, trying to find a nugget of living memory in the dirt that had been piled over the crime. Then Mangan appeared, and it validated his optimism.

  “Sometimes, it pays to not know any better,” he said to the Conniffs.

  He and Mangan talked about police work, the grunt’s task of banging heads. Mangan took Bamonte back to 1932, his first year on the force, when Spokane was on a roll, and silver from the Idaho mines had helped to pump up the banks and build the big mansions on the South Hill. In the valley, bootleggers ran nearly a hundred operations, slaking the thirst of miners, loggers, and itinerant fruit pickers. A patrolman’s arsenal included tear gas and sawed-off shotguns—and not for the war against the bootleggers. There was no such war during Prohibition, as far as Mangan knew. The heavy weaponry was for labor strife, used against Marxist woodworkers and the various rabble-rousing free-speechers who were always trying to organize timber beasts and miners.

  Mangan was slow to talk, answering Bamonte’s questions with little elaboration. When he was asked if he knew about corruption, he replied matter-of-factly, “Hell, yes. There was graft and corruption all around. Everybody was dirty.”

  “Everybody? Who? How ’bout a few names, Dan?”

  Mangan sipped his R and R, quiet again.

  Bamonte thought he might be embarrassed—or afraid—of letting his daughter hear the truth. “Let’s go into the other room, where we can talk privately,” Bamonte said.

  The internal affairs officer, the sheriff, and Mangan went behind a closed door. Bamonte picked up where he’d left off.

  Mangan remained reticent; each sentence had to be dragged from him. “I got envelopes,” he said.

  “What kind of envelopes?”

  “Envelopes with money inside. Ten-dollar bills. They came in the mail, or somebody would drop ’em off.”

  “What were they for?”

  “For looking the other way.”

  “Who else got ’em?”

  “Everybody I knew. That’s the way we did things.”

  “What about Charley Sonnabend. Was he dirty?”

  “Sonnabend?” Mangan rubbed his chin. “Big guy. Detective, I think.…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sonnabend was a pretty nice guy. He was honest.”

  Bamonte brought up some of the names from Sonnabend’s report. Acie Logan, the tattooed con from Mississippi.

  “I remember Logan,” Mangan said. “He was always at Mother’s Kitchen.”

  “Mother’s?”

  “On Riverside. A diner. Logan was there with Ralstin”—

  That was the first time Bamonte had heard the name spoken since his days at the Spokane Police Department. It was “Ralstin” not “Roston” as the old summary had indicated.

  —“and I knew Ralstin pretty good,” Mangan said.

  “How good?”

  “We chippied a little bit. I knew his wife, before they got divorced.” Mangan allowed himself a half-smile, remembering the women from the Mother’s Kitchen circle, cheating on Helen, a night with Ralstin’s wife.

  Bamonte steered him back to the detective.

  “Ralstin was into something,” Mangan said. “He was involved in the creamery burglaries and he was peddling.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It was common knowledge.”

  “Was he involved in the Newport Creamery burglary?”

  Mangan fell into silence again. If he was thinking of the days when a ten-dollar bill was all it took to own a policeman and butter was sold on the black market as a moonlighting scheme, he did not let on.

  “What do you remember about the Conniff killing?” Bamonte asked.

  “I think Ralstin …” He did not finish his sentence; it was as if the story, buried for so long, was incapable of coming forth.

  “Hacker came out and said he had a package that Ralstin gave him that he wanted to get rid of …” Mangan said quickly, then trailed off, leaving his sentence on the table like a hot wire dropped in a driveway after a storm.

  “Hacke
r?” Bamonte and Johnson were confused. Mangan explained about William Harrison Cox, his partner during the 1930s, and the nickname that paid tribute to Cox’s skills inside an elevator. He had died years ago.

  “Hacker brought out the package and set it on the seat. It was shaped like a pistol. We took it to the Post Street Bridge and dropped it off the bridge.”

  Was Mangan talking about the missing murder weapon? Bamonte followed up with a series of questions on the pistol, but Mangan’s responses were muted, confused. He had temporarily lost his memory—or regained his loyalty.

  Bamonte stood, motioning the retired cop to get up with him. “C’mon, Dan. Let’s go for a ride.”

  “A ride? Whereabouts?”

  “To the river.”

  Paraded through the Police Guild, accompanied by two active lawmen, Mangan looked a bit sheepish in front of his daughter and the handful of old-timers who gathered for drinks in the early evening. They whispered as Mangan walked by, and the word “snitch” passed a few lips.

  THE MIST from Spokane Falls rose nearly a hundred feet, dampening the cement rails of the Post Street Bridge. Snowmelt pouring into the river had swollen the city’s most prominent landmark; the water crashed through its basalt gorge with much noise and froth. For years, the river was an open sewer, carrying the industrial and human waste of the metropolis built on either side of its banks and toxic shavings from the mining operations of Idaho. In 1935, the year that Officer Dan Mangan stood above the falls with another officer, the river was ranked as the foulest waterway in Washington. The city no longer dumped its garbage into the Spokane, but the river covered more than a century of secrets and bad habits. Now Mangan was there with Bamonte to talk about a single disposed piece.

  “Why did they choose you and Cox to get rid of the gun?” Bamonte asked him.