Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  “Do you have a picture of Virgil?”

  “I could have gotten a picture of him.”

  “Where?”

  “From Helen. But she’s dead now. You see, they went to Missoula and he got into a mess over there and she divorced him.”

  “Is Virgil dead now?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s been dead quite a while.”

  “And Logan’s dead?”

  “Is he?” She wasn’t sure what had become of Logan.

  Ralstin, of course, was the one Bamonte really wanted. The last time Pearl had seen him was about 1937, two years after the killing. He came into Mother’s Kitchen and said goodbye. He was off to South America, he said, with a new bride, Dorothy, one of the waitresses. They were going to make a killing in the frontier of South America, where a man could still carve out his personal fiefdom with nothing but a rifle and strong will.

  “He came into the restaurant and said, ‘I’m not a policeman anymore.’ He said, ‘There’s gonna be some of those SOBs over there pay for this,’ only he used the full word—I won’t say it.”

  Bamonte asked Pearl if there was anything else she wanted to bring up. She said no, she had covered most everything she could remember from those days. The sheriff closed his notebook, turned off his tape recorder, and thanked her.

  “It’s not you who should be thanking me but me who should be thanking you.”

  “Why’s that, Pearl?”

  For fifty-four years she had tried to tell the story to somebody, but nobody had ever listened with enough interest to want to do anything about it. So Pearl and her sister had kept the story to themselves; they were never able to find a comfortable place to lodge the secret.

  “What year were you born, Pearl?”

  “1905.”

  “1905?”

  “You want to see my driver’s license?”

  “No.”

  Pearl put on her scarf, buttoned the top of her coat, and disappeared out the door and back to wherever she had come from, somewhere in the folds of time. She seemed to walk with a lightness of foot, as if a plaster cast had just been removed from her leg. Bamonte was jubilant; he felt more powerful than at almost any other time as sheriff. The lift came from bringing history alive, of being able to change things after they were already set and gone.

  Before she left, Pearl gave the sheriff a picture of herself when she was twenty-nine—a dark-eyed beauty in a white dress, cut short and daring, with wavy, shoulder-length hair and a coy half-smile. The woman in the snapshot was full of possibilities; her eyes said as much. She had lived an entire life since Mother’s Kitchen, of course, but it did not seem that way to Bamonte. He had just spent the lunch hour with the Pearl Keogh of 1935.

  17.

  Home

  THE RAINS CAME and sluiced away what little snow was still stuck in the shadowed draws of the Selkirks. Driving home, Bamonte had seldom seen the river so enraged, or the landscape so weepy. The Pend Oreille was inflated with runoff and mud, and it careened through the canyon below Metaline Falls, tearing out the graveled sides of the riverbank with it. Even the little carpets of civilization on either side of the river seemed to be slipping, pulled toward the river. The golf course, which should have been spruced up by now, looked seedy and overgrown; it had sprouted a For Sale sign since the sheriff last noticed. Plywood billboards, their sandwich layers peeled open by moisture, advertised firewood—cut, dried, and delivered for forty-nine dollars a cord. As Bamonte crossed the bridge into town, he saw a bright poster outside a tavern: Welcome, Canadians. And on Main Street, two of the town’s three cafes were also on the block.

  Whatever confidence people in the valley had maintained about keeping Metaline Falls alive was gone with the sale of the cement factory. As expected, the LeFarge Corporation had purchased the plant from Heidelberger Zement. It might as well have bought a corpse. The new owners gave notice that layoffs would soon begin; and the factory—once the cornerstone of the town’s big dreams—went into a “shutdown mode,” as the managers called it. The worst suspicions of the cynics were borne out: the purchase appeared to be a ploy by an international company to buy and bury a potential competitor.

  Already, Pend Oreille County was one of the most depressed areas in the West, with one in four people out of work. When mining went bust in the late 1970s, and then timber prices crashed with the recession of the early 1980s, the Pend Oreille took a gut punch and never recovered. The railroad, with its lone spur from Metaline Falls to the outside world, was abandoned. A big paper mill opened in the late 1980s, providing two hundred jobs; but other than that, there was no real stable source of income for the people of the Pend Oreille.

  All around, Bamonte saw omens in things he never used to notice. Gray frosting from the cement factory, made thick and viscous by the rains, oozed down street gutters. The plant would likely close within a year, and then crumble and wither over time; but its legacy, a dusting similar to the leaden rain that fell over eastern Washington after Mount Saint Helens blew up in 1980, could remain in the hair of Metaline Falls for decades. The airborne effluent never used to bother Bamonte, but it looked ugly now.

  The revelations from Pearl Keogh had sent Bamonte’s spirits soaring—and then he fell into despair. How to prove what Pearl and Dan Mangan had told him? The net was still out there, but the returns were diminishing.

  In the Pend Oreille, the sheriff’s obsession with an ancient murder case brought the cranks to the front again. “Doesn’t Pend Oreille County have other crimes its sheriff could be tending to?” one man wrote to the Spokesman-Review. “Is he really earning his $30,000 a year?” wrote another. “Or is he wasting tax dollars?” “Bamonte is making a fool of Pend Oreille County,” a third letter writer asserted.

  There were always people in the county taking potshots at him; being a target came with the turf. During low moments, Bamonte took the complaints personally. He was incapable of enjoying personal triumphs, because he sensed disaster in the shadows. A gift of good fortune, a glimmer of happiness—these were to be distrusted. Better to force your own breaks.

  From his father, he had learned to cast a cold eye on luck. Unlike a load of silver or a pile of fresh-cut cedar, luck was not something that could be brought forth by sheer force, and therefore it was unreliable. He thought of Bull Bamonte often on these days when the sky lost its color and the forest held the clouds close to the ground. He would look in the direction of Mount Linton, the mine shaft where he had scattered his father’s ashes, and recall the awful slog in a freezing rain to his graveyard. Lost in thought, he had stepped off the faint trail and stumbled into a tangle of wet brush. When darkness came and fresh snow covered the way back, he was still traipsing around with his father’s ashes, trying to find the cursed mine shaft that had been the old man’s final earthly passion. At last, he put the powdered remains to rest. But he had never made peace. He couldn’t let him go. As Tony tried to make his way down the mountain to Metaline Falls, he was confused and wet and angry. Why hadn’t his father said something before he died—a hint of love, a confession of affection? Why had his mother been such a flirt and a cheat, acting like a whore, driving Bull to a tortured life in one-room cabins and abandoned dance halls? After his father’s death, Bamonte never reconciled with his mother, though that is apparently what she wanted. In her son’s eyes, what she had done was unforgivable: sleeping with other men, breaking up the family. She had chippied, he said, and the consequences were still being felt. Late in her life, she had wanted to be a grandmother to the boy born to Betty, but Tony wouldn’t let her in the house for long. They would talk for twenty minutes and then he would start to feel the old revulsion. She married seven times after divorcing Bull, and died without her son’s forgiveness.

  At home on the third floor of his brick building, as Bamonte tried to talk with Betty, he sounded like his father and felt like his mother. Betty wanted to take a vacation with Tony, a few days, maybe even a week, somewhere far removed from the Pend Oreille. In hi
s nearly twelve years as sheriff, he had taken off only five days. Seven-day work weeks were his norm. “We need some time together,” she told him.

  “I don’t have any time. There’s too much going on.”

  “Is there something new with the Conniff case?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I have to read about it in the newspaper?”

  “Nothing. There’s a few leads.”

  “I feel like you’re shutting me out, Tony.”

  “I’m not trying to. I’m just … busy. Worried about everything. The shit’s starting to pile on. I don’t know where to go with the case anymore.”

  “You came home late last night.”

  “You knew about that. Every Thursday …”

  “What’s special about Thursday?”

  Bamonte had not been sleeping well; he looked gaunt and frayed. He came to bed late and never seemed to close his eyes. He was replaying 1935—over and over and over. And he was troubled by a pull toward a waitress he had met in Spokane. Their coming together had the force of gravity, inevitable. The woman had children of her own, including a boy who was sick with a life-threatening disease. Tony liked her because her voice was soft and she listened to all the old complaints without acting like she had heard them before. She was a friend, that’s all, he told himself. But the friends grew closer, and didn’t speak about what was happening. Before long, he was going out of his way to see her.

  BAMONTE WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the first floor and put some wood in the lava-rock fireplace. The place seemed oversized and damp, wearing its years. Then he retreated to a cozier place—eight by twelve inches above a typewriter keyboard, wherein lived the story of Pend Oreille County’s sheriffs, the world he had re-created from scratch. The master’s thesis was all but finished, more than five hundred pages. Sitting in a pile next to him, this progeny looked bulky and commanding. It was a wonderful monument, making the sheriff feel a bit of immortality; his words would outlast him. All that remained was the chapter in the middle: the life and death of Marshal George Conniff.

  The prosecutor of Pend Oreille County, Tom Metzger, also awaited the completion of Bamonte’s findings. The press had asked Metzger what he would do if Bamonte turned up a suspect. Metzger, in his mid-thirties, affable and relaxed in the pace of the Pend Oreille, answered that he would do what the law demanded: if the sheriff produced enough evidence and a living suspect, he would consider filing charges. After Metzger’s first statements, the sheriff told his prosecutor he not only hoped to crack the Conniff case but held out hopes of finding the killer and bringing him to justice in the Pend Oreille.

  “Tony’s doing a hell of a job,” Metzger said. “Hell of a job. This case would seem impossible to resolve. But he’s the most tenacious person I know.”

  And then, in private, the prosecutor had to chuckle. Only Bamonte, the obstinate son of a buck who had gone after the Forest Service, the Justice Department, and the neo-Nazis, among his many longshot crusades, could expect—in all earnestness—to solve a 1935 murder case. He wanted to tell the sheriff to drop it.

  “If you take the legally admissible evidence, there is virtually nothing at this point,” Metzger said. “Tony may well resolve this to the satisfaction of the Conniff family, but beyond that, I don’t know.”

  What had started with police reports—of Sonnabend recounting Acie Logan’s confession—blossomed with Dan Mangan’s story of dumping the gun. Pearl Keogh had placed Newport Creamery wrappers in Mother’s Kitchen just after the robbery. From Virgil Burch, she had heard an account of the actual shooting, and her description of the roadblock mirrored the Sonnabend-Logan version. Burch may have trimmed the story to his favor, but the details matched Logan’s confession from 1935. Logan, Mangan, and now Pearl Keogh all had named Clyde Ralstin as the shooter. For his graduate thesis, Bamonte was prepared to believe as much. He saw Clyde as a brute with a badge, the worst kind of cop. Again, Bamonte’s fist would ball up when he thought about him, because Ralstin was the embodiment of all the big, arrogant lawmen he’d known in his quarter-century as a cop—those people who smashed wine bottles in the rear pockets of homeless men and kicked around handcuffed suspects in the elevator. He wanted to face him—not some old man but Clyde, the king of Mother’s Kitchen, the strutting detective who bragged that nobody could touch him.

  The emergence of Pearl Keogh had given the case a new direction. Just after talking to Pearl, Bamonte set out to find any trace of Logan, Burch, or Ralstin. Maybe one of them would rat out the other. Spokane County had no death certificate for any of the three members of the creamery-robbing gang. Logan’s paper trail disappeared after he was released in 1938 from the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island. Ralstin, as far as the archives division of the Spokane Police Department was concerned, was a complete phantom. It had no record of his serving as policeman, even though there were dozens of stories in Spokane newspapers of the 1930s that mentioned Detective Ralstin.

  The old papers also revealed a sketchy narrative of Burch’s troubles in the months after Logan went to prison and Ralstin was demoted to patrol. In January 1936, a story in the Spokane Chronicle told of Burch’s arrest on a charge of trying to influence a government witness. The FBI said that Burch had contacted Eddie Langenbach, who was going to testify about the creamery robberies, and offered him five hundred dollars not to talk. Langenbach was part of the loose network used by Clyde and Virgil to fence the stolen dairy products. Arrested a few weeks earlier, he pled guilty to interstate theft charges, and then fingered Burch and Ralstin. The detective was never arrested; Burch was left to take the fall for the creamery gang. At the trial, Langenbach lost his memory on the witness stand, and Burch was found not guilty.

  Bamonte tried an electronic search. A computer check of all the western states still showed no record of Ralstin or Logan, but something came up on Burch—a report of his death. He had been living in Missoula, not far from the old hideout he used to share with Clyde, and close to the place where he’d been arrested for cattle rustling in the 1920s. In 1970, he was helping an old friend build a house not far from Missoula. Burch knew where his best buddy could buy a shower stall—cheap—from a wholesale connection in Seattle. He said they should go to Seattle together, an eight-hour drive, and bring the stall home in Virgil’s pickup. The friend declined, so Virgil went alone. Shortly after he arrived in Seattle, he suffered a massive heart attack that killed him. He was sixty-eight years old. The friend he died trying to help was Clyde Ralstin. But there was no trace of what became of Clyde.

  After learning about Burch, Bamonte started to interview cops from the 1930s, hoping one of the old boys might know something more than Mangan had told him. A surprising number of them were still alive, living on police pensions in overstuffed homes in and around Spokane. Some of the men, in their eighties, still listened to the police radio all day, reading Louis L’Amour stories with one ear tuned to the static and cackle of calls over the two-way. Bamonte went through his list, one man at time. He was chiseling away at the cement seal of the Cop Code, using guilt as a tool. There were two retired police chiefs he wanted to see: Clyde Phelps, living somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula, and Bill Parsons, said to be housed in a mobile-home park north of Spokane. But first, he built from the ground up, shaking recollections from retired patrolmen, the lifetime grunts. Some of the men were amused by the sheriff who never slept; did he really think he was going to get the Spokane Police Department to admit they had covered up a murder, and a cop killing at that? Most of the retired patrolmen remembered Ralstin as a tough and boastful giant; to a man, they recalled that he left town under some sort of scandal. But that was as far as it went.

  Memory was selective, and if a lie could lodge itself long enough to become a fact, faulty. Conscience was more accurate. What the Conniff investigation had proved to Bamonte thus far was that most people could not outlive their pasts. The worst deeds of a lifetime could be buried or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable; but more of
ten than not, they came back—the revenge of truth.

  In his darkened room on a damp night in Metaline Falls, Bamonte heard the voices of killers trying to rationalize their deed, and he also heard the hauntings from his own past. What could possibly make Clyde Ralstin think he could kill a man and then live an entire life without facing justice? Bamonte asked himself the same question, in a slightly different form: could he repeat the sins of his mother, and follow the same pattern of neglect as Bull Bamonte had done, without his own life falling apart? The query answered itself in the project he was staring at; the past, this place he had taken refuge in, was a manacle.

  EARLY MORNING, Bamonte was still at his desk. The room was cold, and he shivered. His home, a building that used to be one of the more elegant creations in Metaline Falls, seemed damp and crumbling. Until this spring, Bamonte never thought twice about the town’s hoary slogan, passed on by the company managers who ran the hamlet: that one day Metaline Falls would be all bustle and gloss, a brawny city in the valley of the Pend Oreille. Now he was thinking of getting out, trying to sell the building; there was no future in a grit-coated brick stack across the way from a fast-dying cement factory, no future in Metaline Falls. If he could get twenty thousand dollars for the place, he would consider himself lucky.

  Bamonte was due at work in an hour. Except for editing polish, the thesis was now done. His writing legs were wobbly; for every sentence that had made it onto the paper, three went to the dump. He wondered if Professor Carey, and his fellow graduate students, would laugh at his finished project. He was sure they were sketching out bigger themes, while he kicked around something that belonged in the fruit cellar, wrapped in cobwebs. He had tried so hard to stay with the class, doing extra papers, asking about books that were not required. Still, he believed there was a good chance the professor would flunk him. He decided to close out the chapter on Marshal Conniff with some questions left unanswered. After all, the idea behind the project was not to solve long-dormant crimes but to produce a history of law enforcement in Pend Oreille County. The student ended his story of George Conniff with a discussion of the gun, a reflection, subconscious or otherwise, of the hole in the sheriff’s case. What Bamonte the investigator really needed was physical evidence—something solid to place on the table. Bamonte the student reached his own conclusions.