Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  “I’d say that’s a pistol,” said one of the treasure hunters.

  There was no doubt—it looked like a small handgun, but the rust was so heavy that parts of it were indistinguishable.

  “Mangan was telling the truth,” Bamonte said. “It’s right where he said it would be.”

  He searched the bridge for the Conniffs, then held his find aloft, making sure they saw it.

  “My … God—he’s done it!” George Conniff said. His sister Olive was near tears; she sensed a miracle.

  The man who had been watching Bamonte from the cliff was now spying down from the bridge. When the sheriff looked up at him, he turned away. Later, when everyone had left the river, the man dropped a metal object, about the size and weight of a pistol, from the bridge to see if it could, in fact, land where Bamonte had made his discovery. Bamonte found out the man was a former bootlegger, one of Ralstin’s best friends in the 1930s, an intimate of the Mother’s Kitchen circle that included Virgil Burch and Acie Logan. When questioned by a friend of Bamonte’s, he said he was there looking out for Clyde’s best interests.

  The gun appeared to be precisely the weapon they were looking for. It was six and a half inches long, the barrel rusted shut, the trigger missing, and the handle hollowed-out in the center, where a hardwood core would have been grafted to the metal. Reporters gathered around Bamonte; the fool was a genius. He was momentarily stunned into silence. He felt vindication. He felt like he had Clyde Ralstin at last. He wanted to say, “God damn, I got the asshole cornered.” He wanted to shout, to wave the gun in front of Ralstin’s face, and say, “Remember this? Remember!”

  But instead of gloating, he gave a measured response, the autopilot reply of a baseball player after he’s won the game with a late-inning homer. “This is extremely good circumstantial evidence,” he said. Asked about his next move, Bamonte said he was going to send the gun to the state crime lab for verification of its make and year. “This investigation is far from over.”

  Like the years of cover-up and deceit, the river itself had been peeled away, and what it revealed backed up the words from all those lanced consciences. The news of Bamonte’s great find, carried in newspapers and television accounts around the world, brought a flood of inquiries and a rash of tips. Reporters from Australia, Europe, Mexico, and throughout the United States called about the story. Bamonte was overwhelmed by the reaction; he had been so wrapped up in the case that he had lost a sense of perspective. He just wanted to catch up with Ralstin, to see it through for the Conniffs, to prove that Charley Sonnabend and Pearl Keogh—and yes, Bamonte himself—were not crazy. In a way, it mattered less and less what the sheriff said about who killed George Conniff in 1935. Bamonte the graduate student had awakened history; Bamonte the sheriff had forced it from the academic attic. Once free, it took on a life of its own.

  23.

  Last Gathering

  THE GUEST OF HONOR sat in front of the room, next to his wife, surrounded by more than a hundred admirers, friends, and curious acquaintances. On his ninetieth birthday, Clyde Ralstin was the toast of Saint Ignatius. Judging by the turnout, it did not seem to matter that he was the lead suspect in a first-degree murder case, or that news about the discovery of a rusty handgun had joined his name to murder and spread the word to cities half a world away from Montana. To many of those gathered inside the senior center, all the evidence they needed was before them: entering his tenth decade, Ralstin still had his legs and his arms, his sight and his hearing, most of his hair, some of his teeth, and could raise his hand-carved willow cane high enough to threaten a much younger man. Would God preserve a killer for so long, in such mint condition? In the fight against time, as with most other struggles, people love a winner. And so on this evening in mid-September, the cottonwoods of the Mission Valley showing a blush of color, fifty-four years to the week after George Conniff had his life taken from him, the man said to be his executioner was hailed for his perseverance and applauded for his fine life.

  Beyond the usual accolades that come with reaching a certain age, what Clyde Ralstin heard on his birthday was a strain of congratulations not unlike the kind he and Virgil Burch used to share with each other at Mother’s Kitchen after a particularly successful butter heist. Several men of varying ages approached Ralstin, bellowed “Happy birthday,” and then whispered into one of his flappy ears. “The bastards didn’t lay a hand on you,” one man was heard to say as he walked away. “You did it,” said another. “You goddamn well pulled it off.”

  They chuckled, slapped his back, poked his ribs, raised a glass. He attempted a smile, but the old confidence wasn’t there; the eyes were dimmed.

  Few people mentioned, to his face, the name Conniff or the word “killer,” or brought up the gun that had been resurrected from the bottom of the river. Bamonte’s name was heard once, tailing on a snarl. “Vindictive,” he was called—which was progress of sorts: no longer did the people of Saint Ignatius say the sheriff from the Pend Oreille was making it up. Too many things were falling in place. Now they said, so what? Let it rest. What more do you want to do to the guy?

  Clyde’s wife, Marie, was her husband’s best defender. She tried to keep quiet, but it grated on her. She could see how the investigation was draining life from her husband. “Even if he did do it—which I don’t think he did—what difference does it make?” she said. “I was only eleven years old when that happened. It’s done. It’s dead. Let it stay dead.”

  Her friends had urged her not to get too worked up.

  “It’s not fair!” Marie said, angered. “That man the sheriff is talking about—that’s not the man I know. I love Clyde for the man he is today, not for what he may have done before.”

  A woman stirred the crowd. “Let’s go, everybody! Gather round. One, two, three—‘Happy birthday to you.…’ ”

  AFTER FINDING THE GUN, Bamonte sent it to the Washington State Crime Laboratory in Seattle. Because rust had penetrated the pistol, the only way to determine the make was to examine its shape and compare it with similar weapons. A serial number, usually stamped on the side of the frame under the grip, was long gone. The barrel was sealed, foreclosing any examination of the groovings in comparison to bullet size. Still, there was no mistaking that the L-shaped piece of decomposed metal was a .32-caliber handgun, from a vintage of fifty to a hundred years ago. Frank Lee, the crime lab’s firearms supervisor, concluded that the gun was likely an Iver Johnson .32-caliber Smith & Wesson, a pistol introduced around the turn of the century. Conniff was killed with a .32. At the time, most police detectives in Spokane carried the same kind of gun—a breast-pocket special, easily concealed. Bamonte already knew from a previous document that Ralstin, when he was forced out of the police department in 1937, had reported his .32 missing. Closing out nine years of demotions, suspensions, and warnings, Ralstin said at the time that he wasn’t sure what had become of his gun, but he thought it was stolen. There was a grain of truth in the assertion, Bamonte felt, if you considered who did the stealing.

  As corroded and ancient as the gun was, it gave credence to the sheriff’s long investigation, an artifact to back the tiers of the tale. Doubters at the Spokane Police Department all but disappeared—at least in public—grousing less about the cop who was bad-mouthing their shop and more about the need to get on with other things. The odds against finding the weapon had been great; the odds against finding in the exact spot pointed to by Mangan a gun other than the one dumped by the pair of Spokane policemen were enormous. Ralstin’s old buddy, the spy who stood atop the bridge, had spread a story that Bamonte had planted the gun. But he knew as well as anybody that the sheriff’s search of the river was conducted in public, in front of numerous witnesses and a television camera.

  Rusted shank and lab report in hand, Bamonte went back to his prosecutor, Tom Metzger. He wondered what more he would have to do before an arrest warrant would be issued. Metzger was cautious, but the sheriff pressed his case. Any fair-minded person, he said, could
not doubt that he had found the gun disposed of by Spokane police. Fine. Next question: What were the police doing burying a murder weapon in the falls? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the People call Dan Mangan.

  “Ralstin’s in trouble,” the old sergeant recalls being told as he’s handed a loose-wrapped package by his superior. “Get rid of this.”

  Follow that with Pearl Keogh, her testimony of Virgil Burch and his boast about Clyde’s performance on the night of September 14, 1935—“Ralstin just blowed his brains out. Said ‘It was us or him.’ ”

  Hearsay, strike it.

  All right. Then enter into evidence the police reports from 1955 and 1957, the summaries of two visits with Detective Sonnabend, who told of arresting Acie Logan in 1935, and Logan spilling his guts, after three days of interrogation, about the black-market butter gang, naming Detective Ralstin as the leader and the shooter. Charley Sonnabend, whose integrity had never been questioned, twice summoned a passel of lawmen to his bedside to recount this confession. His life at ebb, he insisted that one fact be passed on before he died: the Conniff killer was a cop named Ralstin.

  “Well,” the defense attorney and a skeptical juror might ask, “is this man Ralstin—the chief of security at the place where America made plutonium for the first nuclear bomb, the judge of Lapwai, the civil servant, everybody’s favorite neighbor, the father of a fine young son, grandfather by marriage to five, great-grandfather of six—really the kind of man who would kill another human—not to mention another cop?”

  He is indeed. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he killed a fifteen-year-old boy two years after he gunned down the marshal. Shot the kid in the back.

  Objection. Inadmissable. The kid killing was not part of the court record.

  Back and forth went Metzger and Bamonte, kicking around what they had. The prosecutor had been down the lane of long odds before with his hyperactive sheriff, a man who once had helped to spring a felon convicted on evidence gathered by his own men, because new information pointed the other way; a man who had written Attorney General Edwin Meese that “justice was not served” and actually expected Meese, who spent most of his official years fending off personal ethics charges, to investigate the Forest Service for its role in the accidental death of a convict killed in a fire (a con!). Metzger looked at Pend Oreille County’s best-known windmill chaser and shook his head. As dramatic, compelling, and thorough as Bamonte’s investigation had been, helped by luck and fate, a convergence of mildewed guilt and quirky river currents, the prosecutor still was not satisfied with the package.

  “Not quite there yet, Tony.”

  “But the witnesses, the statements, the gun …”

  “Not enough. Sorry.”

  What was needed before Ralstin could be charged with murder in the nation’s oldest active homicide investigation, Metzger said, was somebody who had heard him confess. His wife. A best friend. A relative. A neighbor. Somebody who could come forth, point to the old man in court, and say, “He did it. I know because he told me.”

  Even then, there was another problem, Metzger explained. Ralstin might insist on calling certain people to his defense—acquaintances, say, who could provide alibis. But the most significant ones were dead. Thus, while there was no statute of limitations on murder, the law also provided that if a person could not get a fair trial because key witnesses were missing or dead, the case could be dismissed. Such a situation was sometimes known as the passage-of-time defense.

  “You’ve done a hell of a job,” Metzger told the sheriff. “I don’t think anybody expected you to get this far. I know I didn’t.”

  For Bamonte, it was not enough. Yes, he had gone back to the past, erased one set of facts about a man and an institution and replaced them with something else. To change the content of years laid to rest—that in itself was a sensation even the best historians rarely experience. In those last days of a drawn and dry summer, Bamonte knew the exhilaration of resuscitating a long-buried personal history, but he also knew the grief. His own family had fallen apart. After failing to find some sign that her husband was ready to change, Betty left for good. They filed for divorce; nearly a quarter-century of marriage was handed over to the lawyers.

  IT WAS EASIER to roust demons from the other man’s closet. After the prosecutor poured water on his case, Bamonte talked to George Conniff.

  “I imagine you’re going to fold the tent,” George said.

  No, he would not quit. He had worked on a dozen murder cases in his entire career as a cop; every case had been solved. He would chase Ralstin until the sheriff’s voice was many voices—the Conniffs’, Pearl Keogh’s, the Lapwai police chief’s, those of the family of the murdered fifteen-year-old and the doubters in Saint Ignatius—whispering, then speaking aloud: You can’t hide. We know what you did. We know.

  LATE ONE NIGHT, Bamonte emptied out his files, panning for a last break. Sonnabend, Logan, Burch, Cox, Hinton, Black, Ralstin—say something! Going back through the scraps of paper, the jottings on side margins and familiar reports, he found the name of one retired Spokane policeman with whom he had yet to speak—Bill Parsons. The top brass, committed to preserving a flattering view of the institution they represented, had generally been the least helpful to Bamonte, and he did not expect much from Parsons, now approaching his eightieth birthday. From police records, the sheriff knew Parsons had been around the Stone Fortress in 1935, his rookie year. In 1966, when Bamonte joined the Spokane Police Department, Parsons was its chief.

  The sheriff phoned Parsons, who said he did not remember Bamonte from his days at the department, but he knew all about him. Parsons had been following every step of the investigation. After the gun was found, Parsons figured it was inevitable his name would come up; the pistol had forced his past to the surface. The only question left was whether Bamonte would make it out to see him before he died. Bamonte explained that he wanted to talk about the gun, the police cover-up, Ralstin, and Mangan. They arranged to meet at Parsons’s home.

  Before he hung up, Parsons startled the sheriff. “You know Mangan’s lying about that gun.”

  “What?”

  “Says his partner, Cox, threw it off the bridge. Cox wasn’t his partner that day.”

  “Who was?”

  “Me.”

  ON THE MORNING of September 5, Bamonte sat in the kitchen of Parsons’s home, facing his former boss. Parsons still had his bush of silver hair, the creaseless face, but he seemed to have very little life left in him. Emphysema was wearing him down. He was barely able to sit, sucking oxygen from a container.

  The key to understanding why Ralstin was never questioned or arrested for the killing was with the department itself, Parsons said.

  “Was Dan Mangan an honest person?” Bamonte asked.

  “No.”

  “What kind of stuff was he into, Bill?”

  “Anything he could get his hands on.”

  “Was Ralstin an honest man at that time? Do you remember him being honest?”

  “Any story I heard was just the opposite,” Parsons said.

  “What kind of stuff did you hear about him, Bill?”

  “Chippy … burglary …”

  “What kind of burglaries?”

  “I have forgotten what kind they were. There is … Some of the guys called him Slippery Dick.”

  Parsons had not seen or spoken to Ralstin since 1937, five years before Bamonte was born. The last time he encountered Mangan was in the late 1940s, when he used to go to his annual summer bash at the bar in Hungry Horse. Mangan, now living in a nursing home in north Spokane, had just been through another stroke—his third.

  “What do you remember about Dan Mangan dropping this pistol off?” Bamonte asked Parsons.

  “Dan and me were riding in the car, and in the station, Dan said, ‘C’mon.’ Went up to the Hacker Cox house and got a package and come back down to the bridge. Dan got out and tossed it over the side.”

  “Who was driving, Bill?”

 
“Dan was.”

  “Did you guys take turns driving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Did you have radios in your cars then?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you get a call over the radio to go up and get it?”

  “No. In the station the captain told Dan to destroy it.”

  “What captain was that?”

  “Captain Hinton. He’s dead now.”

  “Do you remember what the date was on that? Was it one or two days after the murder?”

  “It was shortly after. I wouldn’t say it was one or two days.… I know it was shortly after because the next day I heard something that Captain Hinton was talking about a cover-up.”

  “What did he say about that, Bill?”

  “I don’t know. Just double-talk.…”

  “Where did Cox live?”

  “Mainly northwest. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “And then Dan Mangan drove to his house?”

  “Yeah.”

  At Cox’s house, they received a package, wrapped in newspaper. Parsons asked what it was, but Mangan wouldn’t answer him. They drove to the bridge.

  “He threw it,” Parsons said. “I never got to see the damn thing good till he threw it.”

  “Did he throw it or drop it?”

  “No, he threw it.”

  “Do you remember how far he threw it?”

  “He just threw it over the side of the bridge … a short distance.”

  “What did he say after he threw it?”

  “He wouldn’t answer me for a while.” Later, Parsons said, Mangan told him they were tossing the gun to help Ralstin—a departmental favor.

  Parsons added that he’d heard of another courtesy done for Clyde, during a roadblock on the night of the killing. Ralstin had appeared in a car, running hot, on the road out of Newport leading into Spokane, and two Spokane police officers let him by. Parsons knew because one of the officers at the roadblock, now dead, had told him.