Breaking Blue (11 page)

“Bill Parsons.”

“Take him.”

“You sure about Parsons?”

“Take him. He’s okay now.”

Mangan and Parsons drove to the northwest part of town, to the home of Hacker Cox. Mangan was silent most of the way. When he pulled up in front of the house, he kept the engine running. He returned in a minute with a package wrapped in newspaper.

“What’s that?” Parsons asked.

“A favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“Ralstin’s in trouble. We gotta get rid of this.”

Mangan turned the Spokane police car around and headed south, for the river. He did not say a word during the drive.

W
HEN
D
ETECTIVE
S
ONNABEND
went to round up the other members of the butter gang, he discovered that most of them had left town. The loot also was gone. Shoes, bacon, butter—it had disappeared. How could this be? They had Logan and Spinks in custody, and they knew about most of the operation, where the butter had come from. Sonnabend was livid; almost overnight, his case was falling apart. How could he get a conviction without the evidence?

Back at the Stone Fortress, a young officer approached him, somebody who had been in Mother’s Kitchen a few days earlier. He took Sonnabend aside and told him that everybody involved in the black-market ring had been tipped off by Clyde Ralstin.

“Ralstin? Detective Ralstin?”

The detective had leaked the latest information from the Stone Fortress to his partners in the fence—his
partners?
That’s right, the officer said. And Ralstin was their leader.

Sonnabend had heard plenty of stories about his fellow detective. Most of them, he couldn’t give a damn about; but this was a new low. Not only was Ralstin sabotaging a murder investigation; he might have had a hand in the killing.

Sonnabend stormed into the office of Ira Martin, chief of police. Martin, the first chief to hold the job for any considerable amount of time, was particularly good at curbing public outrage during the periodic calls for wholesale firings and grand jury investigations. He was known as an efficient administrator, not particularly cunning or well
connected around town. Above all, he believed in the institution; after a tumultuous decade of graft, and then five years of hard times, the very survival of the police department was at stake.

When Sonnabend told him that Detective Ralstin had leaked inside information to the very criminals who were under investigation, Martin at first tried to calm him. Sonnabend’s face went red, and he waved his callused hands around. Whose side were they on, for Christ’s sake? Ralstin had sabotaged his case! He should be arrested—prosecuted! Fired at least!

The chief was well aware of the complaints about Ralstin. This latest information did not seem to surprise him so much as it left him looking helpless. He couldn’t bring the hammer down on Detective Ralstin because it would damage the entire department at a time when it was under siege from the newspapers, the federal prosecutor, the county. And Ralstin could do more than seriously tar the reputation of the Spokane Police Department. If cornered, he could end careers, force men into jail, break up families. Is that what Sonnabend really wanted—to ruin the lives of other policemen?

A
T THE
Post Street Bridge, high above the falls, Officer Mangan opened the door of his police vehicle and walked to the rail. The Great Northern Railroad clock tower, an Italian Renaissance-styled spire, was anchored to the riverbank, a place where saw and grist mills used to crank out the elemental products of the infant town. The biggest Hooverville was not far from the railroad tower, upriver, and the little squatters’ camp at the base of the falls was less than a mile the other direction, downstream. In accordance with the wishes of Spokane’s political and business leaders, the smaller homeless village would soon be doused with gasoline and burned to the ground. Upriver another twenty miles or so was the graveyard of the eight hundred horses slaughtered in 1858 by Colonel George Wright. Some of the bodies had floated down the river. But a number of skeletons, the bones bleached white by the sun and then decayed to an overcast gray, had remained in clumps at the site of the mass shooting. It became known as Horse Slaughter Camp, a designation that Spokane’s
promoters tried to discourage; Wright’s animal massacre was not a historical image that merited further scrutiny. By the early part of this century, most of the bones had been reduced to ash and had washed downstream, the river hiding the last physical traces of the mass killing. Only the memories of cavalry soldiers, preserved in diaries describing the “whinnying cries” of the panicky animals, remained as proof of the night Colonel Wright executed eight hundred horses.

Long ago, in other days of early October, nearly ten thousand natives used to gather to spear fish and talk trade and swap products at the base of Spokane Falls. The original Spokane people believed that a benevolent god had created this breach to funnel fish into the hands of the hungry. When most of the natives and the fish runs had died, and the new city rising around the falls wanted to distinguish itself, civic leaders hired the Olmsted Brothers, the landscaping firm from Brookline, Massachusetts, to create something of lasting value in Spokane. The brothers, whose father had helped design New York’s Central Park, said the city needed only to protect and highlight the great natural waterfall in its midst. “Nothing is so firmly impressed on the mind of the visitor to Spokane as the great gorge into which the river falls near the center of the city,” the brothers wrote.

The river’s course was first altered by humans in the mid-1880s, when the south channel was dammed to make a pond for a sawmill. By 1890, the ten-year-old city had a hydroelectric plant just below the wood planks of the first Post Street Bridge. During the next four decades, the river’s wild character was forever changed. The swift flow was used to power electricity for silver mines in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains and to run the streetcars in Spokane. Riverbeds that had been untouched by sunlight were suddenly exposed, and banks that had not felt the overlap of water since the retreat of the last ice age were buried anew. Lakes were formed with backwater, and orchards and vegetables flourished with irrigation water. The salmon were killed off after Washington Water Power constructed a dam in 1906 at the site of an ancient Indian fishing village.

Standing above the river, Officer Mangan wanted only to bury a weapon and be gone. He wound up and tossed the bundle into the
falls, watching the package descend until it hit the foam of the regrouping water. The falls were lit up by lights below, so even at night Mangan could see that the bundle he had been told to dispose of had gone to the floor of the Spokane River.

He turned and got back into the police car, where Parsons had watched the whole thing.

“What the hell did you throw in there?” the rookie asked him.

Mangan said nothing, and they drove off. Mangan whistled, staring straight ahead.

Again, Parsons asked him what he had done.

“We threw a gun in the river,” he said.

“
We?
”

“Yeah. You and me.”

A
CIE
L
OGAN
remained in police custody for three more weeks and then was released to federal authorities, who allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of interstate theft. He was already in violation of parole and would have faced a much longer sentence as a habitual criminal if he had not pled. In November, he and Warden Spinks told a federal judge that they had stolen forty-two pairs of shoes from a train car. The judge sentenced Logan to four years at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Puget Sound. Spinks was given three and a half years. They were never heard from or seen again in Spokane.

The same day Logan was sentenced, Officer Bill Parsons was taken off probation. He would stay on the police force for thirty-five years, retiring in 1970 as the chief of police.

Dan Mangan, his partner for a single night on the Post Street Bridge, stayed on the force until 1946, when he was forced to resign after he attacked his wife, nearly killing her with his fists and feet. When fellow policemen arrived at the Mangan home after being summoned by neighbors, they found Helen Mangan on the floor. She had been choked and punched and kicked by Sergeant Mangan, who was drunk at the time. In a police report Helen Mangan was quoted as saying, “I asked him who he had been laying up with, and
he hit me. He knocked me down and I don’t know what all happened.” She said her son had jumped atop his father. “If it wasn’t for the kids, he would have killed me.” Mangan was never prosecuted. He moved to Hungry Horse, Montana, where he opened a bar—the Dam Town Tavern. For years, his annual Fourth of July party in Hungry Horse was the best-attended social event among members of the Spokane Police Department.

Virgil Burch continued with Mother’s Kitchen for a few more months, though the volume of food moving through his all-night diner declined considerably. In late January 1936, Burch was arrested and charged with attempting to bribe a government witness. He had tried to pay $500 to one of the butter gang members to keep him from testifying. “Of all the beefs I’ve had with the law, this is the bummest,” Burch said at the time.

In February, Burch was acquitted. The prosecution’s case fell apart when its witnesses lost their memories and their tongues. Burch sold Mother’s Kitchen, married another woman, and moved to Portland, Oregon.

A few days after the gun was thrown in the river, a small story appeared deep inside in the
Spokesman-Review
:
POLICE OFFICER GETS DEMOTION
. The story said that Clyde Ralstin had been relieved of his duties as a detective and assigned to the ranks of uniformed patrolman, on night duty. “The action was said to be the result, in part, of recent indiscretions of the officer, including tipping off information in an important case,” the story said. Before he started his new duty as a beat cop, Ralstin was suspended for six days. A few months later, in early March 1936, Ralstin was given a much greater suspension—four months, for actions described by Chief Martin as “infractions which cannot be tolerated.” The story did not elaborate.

A year later, Ralstin resigned from the police department. He said to his stepdaughter, Ruby, that he was leaving town and did not know if he would ever see her again. He deserted his wife, Monnie, and told friends he was off to find his fortune in South America with Dorothy, the waitress he’d met at Mother’s Kitchen. They would be far from the drudgery of police work in a town that couldn’t afford to pay its best marksman and its toughest cop any more than forty-two
dollars a week. At the time of his resignation, while turning in his police gear, he reported that his .32-caliber pistol was missing.

The murder of Marshal Conniff remained unsolved. Eventually, the case was forgotten, a distant killing from a dishonest decade. The Spokane River returned to normal in the late 1930s, rainfall and snowmelt filling mountain creeks; and a thick vein of water once again coursed through the center of the biggest city in the inland Northwest, a town that was back on track with the business of empire-building.

T
HE STUDENT
had sandy hair, the skin of his southern Italian ancestors, and the type of muscled forearms and chest that a weightlifter could never create in a body shop. A lifetime of outdoor work—cutting trees and skinning logs, clawing inside mine shafts, and pouring concrete—had given Anthony Bamonte a look of lean utility. He was forty-six years old when Professor Michael Carey at Gonzaga University’s Graduate School of Professional Studies in Spokane asked him for some elaboration on his master’s thesis. Sitting in a basement classroom in Colville, a timber town seventy-five miles north of Spokane, where the Jesuits ran an off-campus program, Bamonte seemed ready to spring from his chair. The pace of academia, the slow whittling of ideas to a fine point, was a poor fit for a physical man. Bamonte answered in his usual tone, a voice barely above a whisper, Clint Eastwood without the snarl. The other students—a couple of wheat farmers, a pastor’s wife, a small-town newspaperman, a teacher, two sawmill workers, a city manager—took notice; they were never sure what might come out of Bamonte. One day he might bring a crude weapon to class or pictures of autopsies; another day he would arrive with news from his latest interview inside a jail cell. During class discussions, he would sit quietly, then toss an odd thought or a jarring
anecdote into the usual discourse on how to use computer-drawn pie charts to enhance a career.

His idea was to do a history of Pend Oreille County. Not the story of settlers breaking the back of the wilderness and tacking the rough carpet of civilization to the sod; in the Pend Oreille, where fewer than ten thousand people shared a million acres of mostly roadless forest land with grizzly bears, mountain lions, and the last wild caribou herd left in the United States outside of Alaska, that story was obvious and still unfolding. No, Bamonte was after a peculiar history, a study of law and order in Pend Oreille County. He wanted to dredge up all the major crimes in his county, solved and unsolved, to see if most bullies ever got caught, if victims found justice, if mistakes of the past meant anything to succeeding generations. And he wanted help from the ages, a few lessons from a near century of awful behavior, something he could use to get him through the middle years of his own life.

He would not be relying on footnoted tomes or museum archives for most of his raw material, he explained. With little choice, the information had to come from marginally literate men whose job it had been to record the pained facts of assault, rape, robbery, incest, theft, arson, murder. The police reports (there were stacks of them from the last eight decades, stored in odd locations throughout the county) seldom voiced an opinion on what the observer had seen. Just the facts, often misspelled: Bartender shot in dispute over six-pack.… Prosecutor wounded in ambush attempt.… Convict tries to cut head open by scissors.