Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

“Well …” Mangan looked east, in the direction of the old brewery home of the Hotel de Gink, and then he looked west, where the river tumbled further down into the valley where dust bowl migrants had taken up refuge. “The captain—Hinton, was his name—the captain called me into the station at the time and gave us this package.”

  “The gun?”

  “It was shaped like a gun. Weighed about what a gun would weigh. Felt like a gun. And Hacker and me … we drove up here.… He said the gun was from Ralstin. That Ralstin was in trouble. Hacker brought out the package and set it on the seat.…”

  “Why would this Captain Hinton call you in?”

  “The captain was very good friends with Ralstin. Hinton was about three or four years older than Clyde.”

  Bamonte wondered if Hinton was alive. Mangan told him he’d died more than twenty years ago.

  The sheriff was struck by how many people inside the Stone Fortress—not just patrolmen but detectives and high-ranking officers—knew something about the killing.

  “Hacker said, ‘Ralstin wanted us to get rid of it,’ ” Mangan said.

  “So who threw it in the river?”

  “Hacker did. He just dropped it.”

  “Where? Show me.”

  Mangan took a half-step toward the rail and looked down. The water was deep and muddy and ragged-topped, collecting itself against a sheer rock face after coming through the falls. Mangan motioned toward the shore, next to the rock face, an unlikely place to bury a weapon. Most people, Bamonte thought, would throw it into the middle of the falls.

  “There.” Mangan lifted a bony finger, squinted. “Right over there.”

  “Did he throw it or drop it?”

  “He dropped it.”

  Mangan seemed very tired, struggling for breath. He needed to sit down somewhere. Bamonte had one more question. Then he would be done with him, and Mangan could go back to the Police Guild and his R and R, or back home with Rose and his scrapbook.

  “Did you know what that gun was used for?” Bamonte asked. “Did you know what you were doing?”

  Mangan’s mouth zippered into a line. He held his jaw tight. Bamonte did not try to rush him.

  “I knew about that murder.…” Mangan said. “And I thought this might have been the murder weapon. But …”

  “And you never told anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody ever asked me about it.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, another story ran in the Spokesman-Review, the second piece by Bill Morlin, the paper’s crime reporter, and the most thorough account yet written on the case. Morlin interviewed Mangan, Bamonte, the present Spokane police chief, and members of the Conniff family, and described an investigation that was now considered the oldest active homicide case in the United States. The headline, on page one, read: 1935 SLAYING PROBE REOPENED. The story, picked up by the Associated Press, ran in papers around the world. In the article, Bamonte was quoted as saying, “Now, the cover-up is over.”

  Within a week, letters and tips started to trickle in to Bamonte’s office in Newport. Among them was a note from a retired New York City police officer—a letter that sent a chill down Bamonte’s spine.

  “You’re starting to sound like the Serpico of the West,” the former cop wrote, referring to the New York detective who blew the whistle on corruption among his fellow officers. He concluded with some advice for Bamonte:

  “You never badmouth a brother.”

  15.

  The Net

  IN THE LOFT of Snake River high country set aside for displaced bands of the Nez Percé Indian tribe, a local police chief read the story in the Spokane paper and then picked up the phone. Keith Hendrick, the top lawman in the reservation town of Lapwai, Idaho, dialed the number of the Pend Oreille sheriff. Then he hung up before anyone could answer, opting to cage his doubts for the time being. Those newspaper guys would print anything to sell a paper; now here was this libel about a Spokane detective from the 1930s labeled as the likely culprit in a half-century-old murder case. The story, without naming Clyde Ralstin, gave enough details to lead Hendrick to believe they were talking about a man he used to know very well—a man who was like a father to him. But the Clyde Ralstin he once knew wasn’t a dirty cop, and he certainly was not the type of person who could ever kill somebody over a few pounds of butter, putting a final bullet in him as he lay mortally wounded. When he left town, more than a decade ago, he was one of the most revered figures on the reservation, a white man who married a young native woman and spent his days trying to uphold the law.

  Several hundred miles east of Spokane, in a Rocky Mountain hamlet, a woman who told Sheriff Bamonte she was afraid to give her name said she knew a fellow—a former Spokane police detective—who once tried to rape her. He was tall, arrogant in a crude way, and rough, matching the description in the paper. She remembered his face, the pointy nose, the motor charge of his voice, and his threat after assaulting her: there wasn’t a thing she could do, because the law couldn’t touch him.

  Nearly two thousand miles to the north, in the mummified Alaskan gold-rush town of Skagway, the name Acie Logan, carried by the wire service story, stirred memories. Could this Acie Logan, this Mississippi con who was supposed to have had a hand in the 1935 shooting, be the same stretch-necked southerner who showed up in the frontier oasis of Skagway just after the war and stayed on for several decades? Mrs. Joseph Shelby, whose husband was an engineer on the railroad that carried timber, food, and minerals over Barstow Pass, remembered Logan as somewhat of a rounder who set up a homestead on a bar stool in one of Skagway’s darkened watering holes. But he was a damn good fireman on the railroad. Nobody ever asked him about his past, even when a son from a distant marriage arrived one day and Acie walked around town boasting about what a great daddy he was.

  In northern California, a retired policeman read the story and also dialed the Pend Oreille sheriff’s office. He told Bamonte he knew a man who fit the suspect’s description, a violent old cuss, always showing off his guns. What’s more, he used to brag about his misdeeds.

  In a trailer park on the eastern fringe of Spokane, Bill Parsons realized during the first week of April that he would not be able to die in peace—not with Dan Mangan telling the world about what had been the best-kept secret of the Spokane Police Department. Now that the institutional safe was open, all the valuables would eventually spill out. Parsons, the former chief, holding to life with the help of his oxygen bottle and shelfful of pills, was so mad he nearly fell out of his breakfast chair. Not only was Mangan blabbing; he didn’t even get it right.

  Bamonte used to say he was just stupid enough to believe in luck and smart enough not to trust it. Casting his net across a gulf of time, the sheriff was finding out that the world was full of people with something to report or something to hide. The trick was separating the swollen consciences from the bad memories.

  * * *

  WITHIN THE WALLS of the Spokane Police Department, discretion still had its place. In a second request, Bamonte had asked for the personnel files on Clyde Ralstin, Dan Mangan, Ed Hinton, Charles Sonnabend, and others. The records were kept underground, in a former missile silo. Weeks later—and only after he castigated the department in the press for its lack of cooperation—information came back to him on all of the men but one: Clyde Ralstin. Spokane police had no record of any such man ever working at the Stone Fortress; the name drew a blank.

  Bamonte was livid. “I’m a cop, trying to solve a murder in my county—what the hell’s going on!” he thundered.

  A month earlier, they had told him not to bother pursuing the case because nobody was alive from that era. Then Dan Mangan appeared, holding the rusted secrets from September 1935. Now, as Bamonte tried to follow a paper trail, he ran into another wall. He produced newspaper clips in which a Detective Clyde Ralstin was mentioned for some deed or another in the line of duty. In addition, he found a picture of the phantom, from an archival yearbook, showing Clyd
e in the uniform of a Spokane police detective, the big nose sloping out from beneath a cap with a badge atop its brim. Please look again, Bamonte asked the department.

  AT HOME in Metaline Falls, the alders were starting to leaf out on the south face of Mount Linton. The ravines in the lower elevations of the Selkirks were full of snowmelt, water coursing down the mountain pleats and filling the Pend Oreille. Tony and Betty talked very little, their lives becoming more detached, their thoughts held close and contained. Over twenty-three years, they had lived through a miscarriage, hospitalized bouts of hepatitis, death threats from liquor-pumped cons, weeks without money, and winter nights so black and cold it was as if all life had been sucked out of the valley. What did they have now? Suspicion and pride, walls and fences.

  They exchanged information about work. Betty was worried for her job, wondering what the true intentions of the potential buyers of the cement plant might be. Work was continuing to slow, orders dropping off, the plant deteriorating. The air-raid siren called just two shifts to work, the seven a.m. and three p.m. rotations, but it was starting to sound like a dirge. Rumors blew in with the spring wind—harsh half-truths about closing the factory and ending the pension obligations to men crippled and diseased in service to cement—and then blew out on a breeze of gray dust.

  Tony noticed other ominous signs in the valley: the resort and cafe that always drew a respectable clientele along the river’s banks in summer was for sale. Tourism was supposed to be the future for the Pend Oreille; if the resort had no confidence in the coming years, what should everyone else think?

  Bamonte wanted just to sit down with Betty and tell her everything: the discoveries from the Stone Fortress, his fears that their marriage—like the town—was dying. But that would involve exposure, showing wounds. What he knew from his father was that emotional concealment equaled strength. He also knew that his father was wrong. But changing a life habit—where do you start?

  He went into his study for another session with the men and women from 1935—just a peek, he told himself, a quick escape. He opened the new batch of information from the civil service archives in the missile silo. Sonnabend had been a model officer, just as everyone said, a big, sturdy cop with a commendable record. Dan Mangan was another story. His personnel file was full of citations and warnings—supervisory descriptions of a far different man than the gimpy old tavern owner who had led him to the bridge a few weeks ago. One letter in particular caught Bamonte’s eye. It was dated May 14, 1946, and addressed to the Spokane police chief.

  Chief:

  At 5:07 a.m. we had a call that a man was beating his wife at 2508 E. Pacific. This is the home of Sgt. Mangan.

  We sent the South Side car and also Sgt. Moulton. In a few minutes after the first call, the second call came, so the Emergency Dr. and I went to the above address.

  Sgt. Mangan had taken his car and left before the car and Moulton arrived.

  I talked a few words to Mrs. Mangan for she was in poor condition to talk. She said Dan came home a few minutes before and she asked him who he had been laying up with and he choked her and beat her head against the wall, and that he was drunk.

  Pat Mangan the girl called the station and she was a witness to the trouble.

  Sgt. Moulton and I looked for Sgt. Mangan for about (1) one hour but could not find him. I think maybe he left for Loon Lake.

  Casualtie has been made.

  Capt. Cox

  Bamonte recognized the reporting officer: Hacker Cox, identified by Mangan as his longtime partner.

  The narrative on Mangan in his personnel file ended a month after he bashed his wife’s head into the wall. The note from June 3, 1946, was addressed to the Police Pension Board.

  Gentlemen:

  I respectfully request that I be retired by reason of physical disability incurred in the line of duty and through no fault or neglect on my part, on certificate of disability from the Pension Board Physician, and Dr. Harvey, his Associate and from the City Physician.

  In accordance with the provisions of Remington’s Revised Statutes of Washington, I request that this retirement be deferred until October 3, 1946, on which date I will have had six months sick leave.

  I was appointed to the Spokane Police Department Jan. 21, 1930 and have served continuously to the present date and now hold the rank of Sergeant at the salary of $226 a month.

  Yours respectfully,

  D.A. Mangan

  Police Sergeant

  Wasn’t that just like the police department, Bamonte thought. Sometimes, he was truly ashamed to be a cop. He loved the discoveries, the adrenaline that comes with a chase, the resolutions, the authority. But he also knew too many people who became cops for the wrong reason, seeing the badge as a license to bully. Mangan’s file was full of the kind of crimes that would land most men in jail. He took payments from bootleggers, burglarized stores, and nearly killed his wife. His reward, after such a distinguished career, was a disability pension and six months of sick-leave pay to get him started. Then he was off to Hungry Horse, where he lived off the thirst of dam builders.

  A basic question about Mangan remained unanswered. What was it that made him now give up the story of tossing the piece in the river? Was he still trying to protect someone—himself, perhaps? A conscience as shriveled as Mangan’s was not so easily self-started.

  The sheriff dialed Rosemary Miller; he needed another session with Mangan. Something more. Shake and scratch and kick and dig. You never know. Wasn’t there something Mangan might still want to talk about—a small detail, a minor fact?

  But Rose had bad news: her father had just suffered another stroke—not a big one, but significant. He was in the hospital, in no shape to talk.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Bamonte tangled with the other Mangan, Spokane’s chief of police, who was mad over an article in the Newport Miner. The weekly newspaper of the Pend Oreille had elevated Bamonte-bashing to the journalistic equivalent of aerobics. But in late April, with their sheriff receiving attention in newspapers around the world, the Miner ran a rare complimentary article about Bamonte, a long piece on the state of the Conniff investigation. When asked why he was spending county time on the case—at fifteen dollars an hour, was the sheriff really giving the taxpayers their due?—he explained that because there was no statute of limitations on murder, he was bound by law to investigate all new evidence.

  “My major concern is to solve this and to put it to rest for the sake of the family,” Bamonte told the paper. “I have never seen a victim of an unsolved tragedy with peace of mind and the Conniff family is no exception. I owe it to our community and the Conniff family to extend our best efforts.”

  One of the main problems, he said, was the Spokane Police Department; they were not fully cooperating. Bamonte said he had tried to lay out the importance of the case to the chief, but the man never bothered to respond directly.

  After the Miner story appeared, Chief Mangan fired off a letter to the paper, saying his department had cooperated as best it could with the sheriff. He said he had assigned Lieutenant Gary Johnson, head of the department’s internal affairs unit, to assist Bamonte, but that the resources of the Spokane Police Department were badly stretched. “Perhaps it is time to remind Sheriff Bamonte that his case is exactly that—a Pend Oreille County case. We certainly could ‘lay out the importance’ of our current Spokane Police caseload, which includes recent unsolved murders, rapes etc.” Pend Oreille County, he wrote, had no murders in 1987, the most recent year for which full crime statistics were available, while Spokane had sixteen.

  Bamonte felt humiliated and hurt when he read the letter. If he was to solve this case, he would have to do it with the largest neighboring police department as an obstruction. Chief Mangan’s tone sounded patronizing. Why all the nastiness and sarcasm?

  Bamonte penned him a private note. “It is interesting that you can take the time to write your negative, misleading and uninformed letter to the newspaper; however, you have been above res
ponding to me personally,” he wrote. “I will not trouble you about this case again and I am truly sorry about your apathy. This appears to be just another slap in the face to the Conniff family from the Spokane Police Department.”

  BY MID-APRIL, the sheriff had yet to receive anything from Spokane police on their former detective Clyde Ralstin. The Conniff investigation, after a burst of fresh information in March and early April, was stalled again. Bamonte added up his case: he had a police report, from an interview with long-dead Charley Sonnabend, in which Ralstin was named as Conniff’s killer. He had the troubling death of Sheriff Elmer Black, falling from a bridge shortly after he tried to reopen the investigation in 1955. He had a near-dead witness, Dan Mangan, who said he and his partner had disposed of a gun a few days after the killing on the instructions of a Spokane police captain, in order to protect Detective Ralstin. It all added up to an intriguing tale. But where was the physical evidence to back the story? The gun? Fingerprints? Blood samples? Or a living suspect—Logan, Ralstin? The case was built on sand.

  But the net was still out there; Bamonte was still trolling. In the third week of April, he snagged another voice from 1935.

  He received a call from a woman who thought she could help solve the case. She had read about the Pend Oreille sheriff in the newspaper and had wanted to call earlier, but her husband said she shouldn’t get involved. She might even be vulnerable to prosecution, as an accomplice. Morally, she felt dirty, and wanted to wash herself of this secret.

  “I know who killed that man Conniff,” the woman told the sheriff over the phone. Her voice was distant, like a scratchy record, yet showed some feistiness and strength. “And I can help you prove it.”

  “When can I meet you?” Bamonte asked, ready to camp on her lawn if necessary.

  “You can’t use my name in the paper. Because my husband, he doesn’t want me to get involved too deep and get my name in the paper. He said it doesn’t look good at my age. He said that a lot of people would say, ‘She’s just an old bag trying to get her name in the paper.’ ”