Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  Bamonte promised not to release her name without her permission. At her suggestion they agreed, for the time being, to call Pearl Keogh “Ms. X.”

  16.

  The Nurse

  PEARL KEOGH was tiny, overwhelmed by her overcoat, with eyes the color of a muddied sky. She drove herself to Sak’s Restaurant, amidst the sprawl of ranch-house suburbia east of Spokane known as the Valley, and then she looked around for the man whose picture had been in the paper. When she found Tony Bamonte she said, “You’re quite a handsome young guy.”

  They sat in a booth during the lunch hour, the elfin eighty-five-year-old woman and the cop, as the burger train went back and forth. Pearl ordered coffee and kept her coat on. She was a nurse, she explained, and her life had a symmetry that bolstered her belief in divine justice. Sin was like excess weight: the more you put on, the harder it was to lose. But the same thing went for virtue. When she was a girl, going to school with Flathead Indians on the floor of a grand valley shadowed by the Mission Mountains, the Sisters of Providence took care of her. And when she was older, in her sixties and seventies, she nursed some of those same nuns through their dying days.

  Try as she might, Pearl believed that she had not lived a perfect life. Her sense of adventure, her mischievousness, and her pride sometimes led her to do things she later regretted. She loved to flirt. Though married, she sometimes went to Mother’s Kitchen during the bottomed-out days of the Depression, because the men said flattering things, and the cops radiated action. They had pride and a paycheck—two legs at a time when many people couldn’t walk. It was better at Mother’s than going home to empty cupboards and a husband thrown out of work—Hoovered, as they called it. Also, bootleg gin and whiskey were plentiful at the diner, which meant there was always a party of sorts. Pearl didn’t drink, but she confessed to finding some people more interesting after a few shots of hooch. Cops and whiskey and the nurse: after midnight, it was seldom dull at Mother’s Kitchen. She told Bamonte that some of the boys used to call her “ ‘sweetie,’ ‘honey,’ and all that crap.”

  The sheriff turned on his tape recorder. He asked his first questions in a commanding voice, well above his usual soft tones. Pearl told him he didn’t have to talk so loud; her hearing was fine. And he shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming she was some weak old lady. Just a few summers back, she had wrestled a king salmon half her size into the bow of a boat riding the swells of the Pacific off the Washington coast.

  Over the phone, she had mentioned that she used to hang out at Mother’s during the 1930s because her sister, Ruth, worked as a cook and manager there. When Pearl’s late-night shift at Sacred Heart Hospital was over, she usually walked down the hill to Mother’s. Bamonte brought up their earlier conversation as a starting point.

  “You were telling me about the wrappings from the Newport Creamery on this—”

  “Yes.” Pearl jumped right in, hastening back to 1935 and the nights spent with Virgil Burch, Clyde Ralstin, Dan Mangan, and a three-hundred-pound cop named Tiny Stafford. She described Ralstin as the power at Mother’s: “sneaky-eyed … he would never look right at you when he talked to you, and I always feel if you’re gonna talk to somebody at least give ’em an eye once in a while, you know.” Burch, Ralstin’s buddy, the owner of Mother’s was blue-eyed, light-haired, a womanizer who could flatter and scorn with the same sentence. She remembered Mangan as “Danny”—a garrulous sort, always talking up his latest scam. Every cop at Mother’s seemed to have something going on the side.

  “They would complain,” she said. “They didn’t want to arrest anybody, because there was no money to feed them. They had no money. The county was broke.”

  As she talked, plates full of food, picked-over sandwiches, half-eaten salads, and soups gone cold passed by on their way to the garbage. Pearl narrowed her big eyes. “Tony, money was tight.”

  Mother’s Kitchen was an oasis of hot food and fast talk, and it never closed, Pearl said. But she had not contacted Bamonte to talk about her social life a half-century ago.

  “When my sister was cooking there and managing the restaurant for Zada and Virgil, she was very suspicious because he brought butter in without wrappers on it, and she asked and wondered why the wrappers were missing, and he said, well, he just thought it was better to bring the butter in and save her from unwrapping them. Well, she said that was good enough. So then she emptied some garbage one day and she found these wrappers, two or three of them that hadn’t been destroyed. And she looked at them, and then she jumped Virgil about it. Virgil says, ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I bought some butter from them.…’

  “See, after this man was murdered and this talk was going on and around and around about everybody knew who did it and they wouldn’t say nothing about it, she took the wrappers to the sheriff.… Well, he said he would try to look into it and see what was wrong, and she said, ‘I think it merits an investigation, because there’s been too much butter, cream, cottage cheese, and whatever dairy products that they use there has been brought in.’ And she says, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a long time but I can’t do it on my own.’ Well, he says, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ That was it. So, anyway, she got real upset about the whole thing and she left, she said, ‘I can’t work under these conditions.’ ”

  “She quit because of that?”

  “Yes.” Pearl looked straight ahead at Bamonte, unblinking. A lifetime in the outdoors had hardened and cracked her skin. Her hair, which she used to wear in long black curls, was bristly and gray, cut short. The eyes alone carried the intensity of her youth.

  “And Virgil says, ‘Well, to hell with ya! I don’t care. We can get lots of cooks.’ ”

  That was not the end of it, Pearl explained. She kept an on-and-off friendship with Burch. He was attractive, and she found him more charming than she usually cared to admit. A few years after the Conniff killing, Pearl and her husband moved into a house in Spokane that Burch had lived in during the mid-1930s. She remembered the year, 1940, because she had just taken in her brother’s baby, born to a sick mother.

  “We lived in this little house on Jackson Street and it had been Virgil’s before he married Zada. And the funny part of it was, I was cleaning out a cupboard and I found a bunch of Newport wrappers.”

  “You found them yourself?”

  “It was Virgil’s bachelor shack, see, that’s where he stayed before he married Zada, and here I was cleaning all these shelves out and I pulled out these whole bunch of wrappers, Newport butter wrappers.”

  Her memory seemed good, and to Bamonte’s relief, she only answered questions if she seemed to know what she was talking about. Thus, when he asked her about a broad cover-up, and whether she ever saw the Spokane police chief in Mother’s, Pearl answered, “Oh, dear, dear, dear man—it’s awfully hard to remember.”

  He asked Pearl for a precise description of the butter wrappers from the creamery.

  “Well, they were little thin papers that wrapped around the butter, then they were put into cartons to ship. But they didn’t have any cardboard cartons … just thin paper. But it said ‘Newport Creamery,’ and something else … maybe the address, could be, I don’t know. But I do know it said ‘Newport Creamery,’ and they were just white papers with black writing on them. As near as I can remember it was black. And that’s all I know about that.”

  And what had Pearl done with the wrappers?

  “I threw ’em out.”

  She and her sister had already been to Ralph Buckley, the Spokane County sheriff, in 1935 when Ruth found the Newport wrappers. Though Buckley promised to investigate, nothing that she knows of was ever done. Neither of the sisters was ever contacted by a detective.

  The butter wrappers were circumstantial, Bamonte thought, a small bit of evidence. It could be explained. But it was something new; the smallest detail can sometimes break open a case.

  Pearl kept talking, steaming toward “what I came to tell ya about.…”

  A year or so after she found the
wrappers, Pearl moved from Spokane to Portland. In the early 1940s, there was more work than men on either side of the Columbia River. Two dams—one completed near Hood River, the other under construction at Grand Coulee-held the promise of nearly unlimited electricity, for pennies. This spurred heavy industry, shipbuilding near Portland and aluminum smelting up and down the river. Virgil Burch and his wife had also moved to the Portland area, after selling Mother’s Kitchen. They lived across the bridge over the Columbia in the Washington town of Vancouver. One night, Pearl had them over to dinner.

  “I’d cook a big dinner and maybe they’d have a beer or something … and then he’d get to talking about his old days in Spokane and that bragging, see.”

  She remembered virtually every word of the conversation with Burch from that night; nearly fifty years later, it continued to bother her. As a Roman Catholic, Pearl believed she could live her entire life as a moral and honest person but still be condemned to everlasting hell if a singular stain—a mortal sin—were not first removed from her soul. She seemed now to be in a great hurry to free herself of the mark from long ago. The same time as the dinner with Burch, she explained, there had been a robbery in Pearl’s neighborhood in Portland, which prompted a particular conversation.

  “I said, ‘I can’t understand it.’ I said, ‘I thought the robbing days were over.’ And this was when Virgil chimed in.”

  A few beers under his belt, Clyde Ralstin’s best friend could not resist telling about an achievement of his own, in Newport, about seven years earlier—the creamery heist, Pearl recalled. Burch said he had worked as a plumber at the creamery. He told this by way of detailing the craft of a thief.

  “They had this all planned out, see. And he left this latch where he could raise this door up. Well, when they raised this door up, it made a noise. It alerted the watchman. And that’s what he said.”

  Bamonte was astonished. “The watchman being Marshal Conniff?”

  “Yes. That’s who he was.”

  Bamonte jumped up, rubbed his hands. He wanted to hug Pearl. She raised a finger, a wait-for-the-good-part ellipsis.

  “Then Virgil said, he said, ‘Well, I’ll just get the hell out of here.’ That’s exactly the words he said. But Ralstin went clear around and I guess this Conniff probably had a gun. I don’t know, but apparently, the way Virgil thought, this night cop pulled his gun, and Virgil got scared, and Ralstin … just blowed his brains out. That’s the way the story came to me.”

  Here, for the first time, was a living witness—not firsthand, but a witness nonetheless. She was old and shrunken, but she spoke well. Any chance Bamonte had of getting this story in court would depend on the specifics. He pressed her for the fine print.

  “When Virgil told you this story, did he actually see Ralstin shoot the marshal?”

  Pearl held her answer, then shook her head. “I don’t know if he actually seen it, but he was standing beside him when he did it.”

  “He was standing beside him?”

  “He said they were both … He said he thought that Conniff was raising the gun and he said he let him have it ’cause Conniff would have recognized Virgil.”

  “Because he had been in the creamery for two or three days?”

  “Working there, yeah. Virgil.”

  “So he was right beside—?”

  “Yeah. He said they both turned the corner at the same time, because they were gonna go in that door, and when they raised the door, it creaked. And Conniff came around another corner, and he said, uh … somebody said, somebody either hollered ‘Halt’ or ‘Stop,’ and he said when they saw that, there was a little bit of light coming from the yard light or something like that, and he said that they thought that this guy pulled a gun and he said Ralstin said, ‘He’s not going to shoot me. I’ll get him first.’ ”

  “Ralstin said that to Virgil?”

  “Yeah. Said that to Virgil. And Virgil repeated it. Said ‘It was us or him.’ Virgil didn’t give a hoot then, you know. It was all over.”

  Burch also told Pearl about the roadblock, just outside of Spokane, which had gone up shortly after the shooting. Bamonte had heard of the roadblock from the police summaries of interviews with Charley Sonnabend. Without prompting from Bamonte, Pearl had just brought up a key detail that was quite similar to the Sonnabend account. As Burch explained to Pearl, the killers knew that the police would be looking for three suspects, so they had to hide at least one man.

  “Virgil said, ‘By God, I sure thought I was gonna get it.’ He says, ‘I thought my day had come.’ And he was under a tarp in the back of this car and they had that loaded with butter.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “It was an old REO Flying Cloud. You know what they are? A real old one. They didn’t make it more after the thirties, I don’t think.”

  “A four-door?”

  “I believe it was a four-door.”

  “Okay now, who was in the car with him? That was the night Conniff was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “He used to talk about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was with him when he was in the car?”

  “Well, I think that this Logan and Ralstin, the way he talked.”

  Bamonte was pumped, riding the surge that comes with discovery. He repeated some of his earlier questions; he wanted to hear Pearl answer them again.

  “Who did he say did the actual shooting?”

  “He said that Clyde did it. He said, oh, he said Clyde did it. You know.”

  Bamonte returned to the roadblock.

  “Well, he said, he said that they went—that he was in the car when they were stopped. But he said it was either Logan or Ralstin that knew one of the guys that stopped him. And that’s why they went by so easy. But the one guy wanted to search them. And the one guy wouldn’t do it. He said.… ‘You’re clean.’ ”

  “Did he ever mention who the policemen were who stopped him?”

  “No. He said one of them was Ralstin’s buddy. That’s all he said.”

  “That’s all? They let him go? And this was right after the murder?”

  “Yeah. The same night.… Do you know who those guys were that stopped him?” Pearl asked.

  “No. I’m trying to find that out.”

  At Mother’s Kitchen in the first days after the killing, Virgil Burch was “an absolute wreck,” Pearl recalled. When she asked him what was wrong, he snapped at her. “I’m sick,” he said. But he grew stronger every day. Soon it was a joke, banter between him and Ralstin. What seemed particularly odd to Pearl was how open they were about it. “Who’d you kill today, Detective?” Everybody at Mother’s shared in the laugh.

  One cop in particular came to mind. “Did you know Jimmy Manning?” Pearl asked Bamonte.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, I used to walk his beat with him when I would get off work at midnight … I was young and full of life and knew him quite well. And I knew he was married, see.… I’d walk with him maybe five or six blocks and I’d say, ‘Jimmy, I gotta go now, I gotta go.’ And I was married, see.”

  “You were both married?”

  “But I was just being a smart aleck, see. But he thought he had something going.…”

  And she was off with Jimmy Manning for five minutes—dancing at a beer hall, pulling his shirt out of his pants when she was mad at him, daring him to arrest her. Pearl could not talk about Manning without feeling the blend of guilt and pleasure that is the moral imprint of Catholicism. Bamonte had not asked Pearl for any details of her nights with him, but she wanted this story out.

  The sheriff tried to steer her back to his case. “Now, Manning—the same guy who was trying to hustle you—he was telling you all this stuff. What all did he tell you about the murder?”

  “He knew about that gun being thrown over the—the,… whatchacallem.”

  “So he thought it was Ralstin that killed the marshal.”

  “Yes. He knew all about it. Every p
oliceman in town knew about it.”

  “What did he tell you about it?”

  “He said … he just said … ‘Virgil and Ralstin is in this business of stealing and robbing and making a living like that.’ He said, ‘I’m not gonna do nothing about it.’ ”

  Tiny Stafford, the three-hundred-pound patrolman, was another regular at Mother’s. He claimed he was going to do something about Ralstin, Pearl recalled. “He said, ‘There’s gonna be some investigations about this. There’s gonna be somebody that’s not going to be around here very long—you know, talk like that. He was gonna see that this was done. But he never did anything either.”

  “Was he on the take? Was he honest?”

  “I heard he used to go to these sporting houses downtown.… He’d go in there and demand money from them … and take it—you know, for hush money.”

  “Okay now—after they shot Conniff, did they steal the dairy products and then take off, or had they already had some—”

  “They had it loaded.”

  “They already had it loaded?”

  “Yes. And they were trying to go back for more. They didn’t have it all. They only had butter. They had butter but they didn’t have cream. Virgil said, ‘That’s the only thing that didn’t make my day.’ Because, he says, ‘We lost our cream.’ ”

  In recounting the crime over dinner in Portland, Burch laughed throughout, Pearl said—crowing about how “we pulled it off, we got away with it.” One of the few things that still surprised Bamonte, a cop for twenty-three years, was a killer’s lack of remorse. In the Conniff case, the women alone—Pearl, Ruth, and later Mangan’s daughter, Rose—carried the weight of conscience from September 1935.

  “They made light of it,” Pearl said. “To think that a life had been taken. Somebody ought to just bang them one.”

  Bamonte had this trio—Ralstin, Burch, Logan—pictured. He had known people like them in high school in Metaline Falls. He had known them in Vietnam. He had known them on the Spokane police force. He had a simple, old-fashioned word for Ralstin—“bully.” As he listened to Pearl, his stomach tightened and his fist balled; he wanted to tangle with them.