Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  What Bamonte knew of Clyde Ralstin began in the late 1920s and ended in 1937, when he left Spokane. Now, after hearing about the second half of Clyde’s life from Hendrick, Bamonte formed another picture of the man, more ambiguous. The Clyde Ralstin of Lapwai, Idaho, didn’t seem to be the bootlegger, the career breaker, the womanizer, the boaster and tyrant, the corrupt and cynical police detective described by Pearl Keogh and Dan Mangan and Charley Sonnabend. Here was a First Citizen. From what Hendrick told him, the sheriff had little doubt that Ralstin would cooperate with him.

  “I suspect he’ll sit down and tell you anything he knows about this,” Hendrick told the sheriff.

  “Why hasn’t he contacted me by now?”

  “Don’t know. But I’ll tell you something else—he’s a law-and-order man, Clyde. First and foremost he’s a cop. That’s what he stands for—the law.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you calling with this,” Bamonte told him.

  Hendrick said he nearly didn’t call. For several nights, he had been unable to sleep, debating between keeping quiet and helping a fellow cop. He tried to let it go, to forget about it. What particularly bothered him, he said, was reading about the Conniff family and their years in the dark. It wasn’t right.

  “One last thing, Sheriff. If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone where this came from.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Clyde’s just like a father to me in many ways, like I said.”

  THE NEWS that Clyde Ralstin was still alive made Bamonte swell. He felt like doing back flips. It was the goddamnedest, butt-luckiest kind of break. A few days after he closed the book, as a student, on the Conniff case, the story had risen from the dead. Again. Clyde Ralstin seemed to have rolled away a tombstone and crawled out from the grave. Bamonte couldn’t help feeling like the power behind the resurrection. But he also felt a deadweight of responsibility, not only for stirring up all the old stories, remaking the image of a man who, by all recent accounts, was a fine human being, but because Bamonte alone now carried the load of history from those who had shared something of Ralstin’s past. Charley Sonnabend had unburdened himself; Dan Mangan was free of the anvil he’d dragged around for half a century; so was Pearl Keogh. Chief Hendrick had just shed his share of the guilt. Burch was dead. Logan had disappeared. The pressure was on Bamonte, as the carrier of the story—and, of course, on Clyde Ralstin. What remained was for the two of them to have it out. If the facts warranted it, he planned to arrest the man, to bring him back to Pend Oreille County to stand trial for the night of September 14, 1935.

  The sheriff wanted to call Betty. His good fortune, the breakthrough call from Chief Hendrick, was her good fortune, and she deserved to share it. He wanted her to be the first to know. He couldn’t reach her by phone; she was somewhere between work and home. Then he started driving toward Spokane, thinking of his new friend. When he saw Linda and told her, she was overjoyed. She kissed him. They went to dinner, then back to her place, where they talked into the night. For a while it was wonderful—a new person, someone who made him feel better about the pressure. Toward midnight, amid the sweat and the thrill, he saw images of his mother in the Idaho mining town, showing a stranger her bedroom. He feared that he was becoming the part of her that he hated most.

  SAINT IGNATIUS, in western Montana, was inside the Flathead Indian Reservation, so Bamonte’s first official contact was with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They had nothing on Clyde Willis Ralstin, or a Mrs. Ralstin, or any children, in their files and computers. Next, he cabled the sheriff’s office for Lake County, which includes Saint Ignatius. All they had was some basic information from a car registration, listing Ralstin as six feet tall, weighing 175 pounds, with green eyes. Bamonte wondered if he had shrunk.

  The undersheriff in Lake County, Mike Walrod, gave Bamonte a description of the old man that matched, in character outline, what Hendrick had said: Clyde Ralstin was a hell of a man, a Rotary pinup, loved by those who knew and worked with him. Had a bit of a temper. Known as somebody you shouldn’t tangle with. Loved guns. Yes, he was still alive. The undersheriff couldn’t imagine that he might be mixed up with some fossilized murder case involving police corruption.

  Bamonte said he wanted to come see Clyde, talk about the case. He asked Walrod for help, and to keep quiet. It was an old investigator’s tool, to question somebody before he has a chance to build a shed of lies. But it probably was too late for a surprise interview, the sheriff’s deputy told Bamonte. He suspected that Clyde had been following the stories in the Spokane newspaper and knew everything that had been reported in the press, including Mangan’s account of dumping the gun in the river on behalf of Ralstin.

  No matter. If Ralstin was starting to feel the rippled pressure from the years, the voices and secrets from the Depression, the screams of Marshal Conniff as he lay dying in the alley behind the Newport Creamery, it was long overdue.

  Bill Morlin, the reporter from the Spokesman-Review who had written several stories about the case, heard Bamonte was on his way to Montana to interview a suspect in the oldest active homicide investigation in the country. Bamonte knew Morlin well, liked him, and trusted that he wouldn’t print anything that would jeopardize the case. Closing in on Ralstin, Bamonte decided to send another wave over the mountains to Montana. Without naming Ralstin, Bamonte made a public appeal, through Morlin’s next story in the Spokesman-Review, to those human qualities that had worked best for him in the Conniff case. He continued to believe that conscience was the best weapon.

  “For the benefit of the suspect’s soul and conscience, and for his children and the Conniff children, I am hopeful he will come forward and talk about his knowledge,” Bamonte said.

  19.

  In Big Sky Country

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE his forty-seventh birthday, on a warm morning in mid-spring, Bamonte drove east, crossing the Coeur d’Alene Mountains into the old silver mining country of his father, cresting the Bitterroot Range near the Idaho-Montana border, and then following the Clark Fork into a broad valley north of Missoula. He approached the Flathead Indian Reservation just as the sun left his rearview mirror. All his life he had lived with cloud-humbling mountains, waterfalls that bounced from the heavens, and forests of great size and age; but the Mission Valley was something else. When the glaciers shrank and disappeared from all but the highest nooks of western Montana, they left behind a lake, the largest natural body of fresh water in the American West, that covers the northern part of this breach between the Rockies and Bitterroots. Aquamarine, Flathead Lake holds the color and character of the big sky overhead. Even at its present size of two hundred square miles, the lake is a puddle compared with what it once was. The old lake bed is level like a prairie, yet forested with clusters of pine, cedar, and fir. Cottonwoods shade the trout streams; black bears and grizzlies clamber over a vast habitat; elk and pronghorn stuff themselves in grassy meadows; and hundreds of buffalo roam throughout the nineteen thousand acres of the National Bison Range, bordering the Jocko and Flathead rivers.

  If there is a more isolated big valley in the lower forty-eight states, it has yet to be found. The Rocky Mountains reveal themselves here as the scaffolding of creation, all exposed geology and millennial tiers of construction, one uplifted layer sitting atop another. As Bamonte drove the downslope of State Highway 200, passing through the towns of Thompson Falls, Plains, Paradise, Perma, Dixon, Ravalli, and entering Saint Ignatius, he was struck by the curtain of earth to the east, a subrange of the Rockies known as the Mission Range. The mountain wall was green and forested at the base, burnt-red and rusted in the middle, and eagle-capped along the summits with snow from the last seven months. To the north is Glacier National Park; south of that is the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The Continental Divide follows a winding pattern through this part of the Rockies, the eastern side falling off abruptly to the treeless plains, where Blackfoot Indians still live on a windswept reservation, the west side draining into th
e Pacific and the land of people who spoke the Salish dialect and fished for salmon.

  When Jesuit missionaries first entered the area in the 1840s, members of the Pend Oreille tribe told them their land was called Sineleman, meaning “Place of Encirclement,” where tribes from throughout the inland Northwest gathered to trade and barter. Surrounded by humpbacks of granite and basalt that rise nearly two vertical miles, the valley is protected from the worst storms that gather over Montana for much of the cold season.

  The most prominent human landmark in Saint Ignatius is the mission, established in 1854 and named for Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. The first version of the church was built of whipsawed lumber and held together by wooden pins. Forty years later, the priests finished their arched masterpiece, built, with Indian labor, of stone and a million red bricks the color of sunset. Brother Joseph Carignano spent most of his adult life on his back inside the church, painting fifty-eight murals on the ceilings and walls, finishing the last picture around 1920. The church draws tourists to Saint Ignatius, a town of 877 people, which might not otherwise attract outside visitors. Well-traveled Catholic clerics says their outpost in western Montana is one of the five most beautiful churches in the world, a house of worship made all the more stunning by its setting, alone against the mountains, an inspirational chip off the granite block of the Mission Range. The priests intended Saint Ignatius to be a spiritual fortress; just as the mountains protected the valley, the church was supposed to be a shelter from the harsher impulses of humanity. In the spirit of that design, Brother Carignano’s murals depict scenes of great optimism instead of the usual Gothic gloom or graphic illustrations of the consequence of sin.

  Pearl Keogh grew up in Saint Ignatius, raised in a mission school for Indians and whites, which the Sisters of Providence ran. When Bamonte told her that he had traced Clyde Ralstin to her girlhood home, Pearl detected the hand of God scripting a final and fitting act to both of their lives. She wanted to travel to Saint Ignatius by herself and confront Ralstin with September 1935. But Bamonte advised her against that; he promised to tell Pearl everything upon his return.

  In Saint Ignatius, which the locals call Mission, there is a clear dividing line between the white and Indian sections of town. Members of the Flathead (or Salish), Pend d’Oreille (upper Kalispel), and Kootenai live near the church. Ralstin managed an apartment complex in the poor part of town, leasing the units out to Indians. He was not well liked by his tenants, who feared his flash temper. To be a few days late on a rent payment was enough to prompt an eviction threat from Ralstin. A few small businesses operate in the summer, selling dolls made of bear’s hair, and moccasins with traditional beadwork. The whites live in what some residents jokingly call the silk stocking district, in wood-framed houses, well kept, some with metal roofs to speed the melting of heavy snows. The general store in this neighborhood sells vials of scented cover for hunters—“guaranteed 100 percent elk urine.” At the local hangout, the Malt Shop, everybody knows everybody else’s business and stool assignment. Although the original Flathead Reservation comprised 1.2 million acres, it has long since been opened up to homesteading, allotment sales, and leasing to non-Indians. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation now own less than half of the land promised them by the Hell Gate Treaty of 1855.

  Bamonte found Clyde Ralstin’s house in the white part of town at 365 First Avenue, a small, single-story home with a green tin roof and white siding. Next to the front door was a wooden sign inscribed “The Ralstins.” Though the grass was still brown, newly unveiled from winter snow cover, the yard was neat and the hedges trimmed, reflecting the pride and the routine of its owner. The fruit trees in this neighborhood had yet to flower; their skeletal claws clacked against each other in the wind. Firewood was cut and stacked nearby. Bamonte drove by the house but did not stop his car.

  When he checked in with the Lake County sheriff’s department—a common courtesy when a cop from one jurisdiction is investigating someone in another county—a deputy told him that within an hour of his arrival, Ralstin knew he was in town. Clyde had friends. Bamonte smiled and pulled up a seat. Scenting and circling was part of the ritual of the hunt. He had traced Ralstin from a bootlegger’s hangout in Spokane to a valley that seemed to be at the end of the earth.

  RALSTIN SHARED the little white house on First Avenue with his wife, Marie. They socialized mainly with non-Indians, retired people who talked about hunting, fishing, the weather, and fixing things up. On occasion, the Ralstins would go to dinner at the Indian cultural center, on the other side of town; in Saint Ignatius, there was consent that the food was far better at the tribal center than anywhere else in the valley.

  When the first news story came out of Spokane, Clyde had suspected Bamonte would eventually catch up with him. And with each new article, he cursed the sheriff from Pend Oreille County. Bamonte became a distant nag, lingering out of view. Oflate, Ralstin’s breathing was erratic, and sometimes he would wake up coughing and pained. He told friends he had not slept well since the graduate student’s project came to light in February. In that regard, he and Bamonte were alike.

  When Marie and Clyde sat at breakfast, Ralstin would offer a prayer, repeated every morning since the Conniff story broke. “Lord, get this off my back,” said Clyde, his head bowed. “Please, Lord, make this go away.” But the circle only closed tighter; the pressure increased with each new piece of information trickling into Montana from Spokane.

  “Dad,” his wife had asked him a few days before Bamonte arrived in Saint Ignatius, “what’s this all about?”

  “It’s hogwash,” he replied. And in angrier moments, he called it “bullshit,” professing bewilderment that his life had taken such a strange turn. He told Marie that Bamonte must have thought he was dead; otherwise, he never would have stirred up so much trouble.

  There was very little mystery to the Clyde Ralstin of 1989. He had come to Montana from Lapwai, riding into town on his reputation as a law-and-order man with fifty years of experience. He remodeled and managed his apartment complex, built a house outside Saint Ignatius, sold it, then moved into the little frame home on First. Most days, Clyde went for a long, slow walk, using his hand-carved willow cane for balance. To his neighbors, he was the sweetest octogenarian this side of the Divide. He respected his fellow citizens and he feared God. He was ever helpful. He was a fine storyteller. He had suffered from a peptic ulcer, and gout, and had a type of heart disease typical for a man his age; but overall, he was considered, by friends and by his doctor, to be a strong, well-preserved man. One thing he could not be, his neighbors were convinced, was a killer. To think that Clyde Willis Ralstin, the very embodiment of the self-reliant westerner, the pains and changes of the twentieth century etched in his face, this former judge, a longtime lawman, head of security at Hanford, kind and gentle neighbor, had once been a bootlegger of butter, and had fired four shots into the body of a small-town marshal—including a final, killing blast when Conniff was down—was a preposterous notion. As Clyde walked through town, offering advice on fixing a truck or finishing a chore, he was accorded respect, the kind people want in their late years, the simple acknowledgment of a life well lived.

  The Lake County sheriff’s deputy told Bamonte that he had stirred up a nest of trouble in the Ralstin home with his investigation of the 1935 killing.

  “Imagine people will be mad at Clyde,” said Bamonte.

  “More likely mad at you.”

  “Me?”

  “For bringing it up.”

  At the Lily of the Valley flower shop, Clyde was known as a romantic, one of the best customers. About once a week, he’d come into the shop in the afternoon and buy a bouquet for Marie. The ladies who sold him his flowers did not care what was in his past. A person had a right to be forgiven and to move on with his life. “Even if he did kill that marshal,” said one of the store’s owners, “it’s so long ago, who cares? Are they gonna hound the man to
his grave? I mean, that’s not fair.”

  In the Tepee Tavern, where a schooner of Coors costs less than a dollar, Clyde was a hero. Among regulars at the Tepee, some hoped it was true that Ralstin had killed Conniff. “If he did it, and got away with it, more power to him,” said one patron. “There’s something to be said for a man who can pull it off, then live the rest of his life as a righteous man.”

  A few doors away from the Ralstin house lived Olive Wehr, a columnist for the weekly Mission Valley News. Olive was the same age as Clyde, a few months shy of her ninetieth birthday, and she spent her days in a big house full of books and western antiques, with a large garden outside and a fenced-in quarter-acre of grass. She had written four books; one of them, God’s Forgotten Garden, a volume of poetry about runaway girls, won a Mark Twain Award for Literary Excellence in 1947. Olive Wehr still banged out her column, “The Saint Ignatius Grapevine,” every week in the local paper. What got her back up was when somebody dared to call her contribution a gossip column. Gossip was a form of torture, cruel and whispered. Olive dealt in facts, writing about grandchildren who came to town for a visit, comings and goings of her fellow townsfolk, who was sick and who was well. There was a line that she would not cross. She had yet to write a thing about her neighbor, because she did not consider the rumors coming out of Spokane to be worth repeating in print. Nor had she talked about the killing with Clyde. “You don’t ask about certain things,” she said later. “Everybody has a past. We are a very close-knit and very protective community. In a small town, that’s the only way you can get along.”

  She was outraged that Bamonte and his allegations had followed Clyde to Saint Ignatius in the last years of his life. “How would anybody feel if they’d lived their whole life only to have something like this thrown at them near the end?” she said. “I know Clyde Ralstin as a friend and a neighbor, not the person this sheriff says he is.”