Breaking Blue (25 page)

Years later, when Ralstin returned to his home in the land of the Nez Percé, where his brother Chub raised Appaloosa horses, he advertised himself as a man of the world. Not only had he completed nearly a decade with the Spokane police, first as motorcycle cop, then as patrolman and detective, but he was a patriot, he said—an important man in two places where the American war machine was being put together in the early 1940s. After returning from South America and an assortment of jobs on oil rigs and in construction, he had landed in San Diego and climbed his way up to a supervisor’s position for a company, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, that built bombers. During the last years of World War II, he was back in Washington, at Hanford, where plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb was manufactured in the desert along the banks of the Columbia River. Ralstin told Hendrick he was still sworn to secrecy about some of what he had seen and done at Hanford. His job was plant security supervisor for General Electric, a big subcontractor at the nuclear facility. What went on inside the five-hundred-squaremile government camp was one of the best-kept secrets of the war, and Ralstin took a great deal of pride in helping to keep the lid on it. When a commercial airplane crashed inside the nuclear reservation, Ralstin helped to put out the fire and made sure the report of the accident never went public. Though nearly a hundred thousand men worked and lived in the instant city at Hanford, they were essentially phantoms. So loyal was Ralstin to the secrecy of his mission that when one of the workers under him was arrested on a charge of stealing a truck outside of town, Clyde refused, in court, to say what the man did for a living or even if he knew him. The case was dismissed.

Lewis and Clark had put the Nez Percé population at six thousand in 1805—one of the largest tribes in the West, and the most populous of the Sahaptin-speaking peoples of the Northwest. In the early 1950s, when Ralstin moved back to Lapwai, the Census Bureau counted 608 full-blooded Nez Percé in Idaho. The reservation land was bleak; the wind blew through homesteads constructed a half-century earlier and long since deserted and left to rot. It seemed as if the land, dry and harsh, had been scraped bare by a marauding force of nature. The
big chinooks that used to swim more than seven hundred miles inland from the Pacific, following a migratory route up the Columbia to spawning waters in the Salmon, Snake, and Clearwater rivers, had disappeared—centuries-old runs killed by the hydroelectric dams constructed in a single generation’s time. Most of the Indians had no jobs; those who could find work cut timber, or fought fires for the Forest Service, or picked wild rice around Saint Maries. Staggered by alcohol, deprived of most of the land on their own reservation, they quarreled among themselves, committed acts of thievery and domestic abuse.

For Clyde Ralstin, veteran lawman, keeper of the peace in depression-torn Spokane, and protector of America’s nuclear secrets along the Columbia, it was a perfect situation. The tribe needed law and order; he arrived in Lapwai with a resumé and a mastery of guns to back it up. The little reservation town had a long tradition of subjugating its culture and destiny to non-Indians. Henry Spaulding and his wife had established a Christian mission there in 1836—the first place in Idaho where whites lived on a more or less permanent basis. Ralstin had family throughout the Nez Percé country. His brother Chub had achieved a degree of local celebrity when he sold one of his prize Appaloosa ponies to John Wayne. If the citizens of Lapwai had checked Clyde’s personnel file in Spokane, they would have found nothing about the affairs he ran out of Mother’s Kitchen, or the reprimands and disciplinary actions taken against him, or the time he nearly killed his son-in-law, or the report of the woman who said Clyde tried to rape her, or the suspicions of Detective Sonnabend. For that matter, they would have discovered nothing at all—his file had disappeared, with Clyde, when he left the force in 1937.

“He tried to look after our little town,” Chief Hendrick said. “Tried to look after the best interests of everybody. He was a real wise man in that way.”

Until Hendrick was hired in the late 1960s, Ralstin was the law in Lapwai, first as enforcer, later as judge. He held court at night—“after all the suspects had a chance to sober up,” Hendrick said—and his sentences were usually stiff. Nine out of ten people who came before him were Indians who had run afoul of the law because of
alcohol. A drunk could expect to spend ten days in jail. When the town had some crisis—political, financial, or other—Ralstin was always the first citizen to rally the resources. Hunting season was sacred to him. While in Lapwai, he still saw Virgil Burch; the old buddies kept a hideaway on the Idaho-Montana border, where they stashed good whiskey, antique rifles, and stories that never left the walls of the cabin. A particularly valuable gun, a .30 carbine with a bayonet, was stolen in a burglary; later, in the 1980s, it turned up in Clyde and Virgil’s hunting cabin. But this story did not come out until Virgil was dead and Clyde had given up his official duties.

Ralstin hired Hendrick, giving him the badge in the way that sheriffs used to do in the days when western towns were built in a hurry. But even after Ralstin retired from active law enforcement, when his job was pounding a gavel and sentencing small-time lawbreakers to short-term residency in the Lapwai hoosegow, he kept a hand in the physical end of the law. Clyde liked to beat people up. “He’d see somebody assaulting somebody else, and he’d jump in,” Hendrick said. “No matter how old he got, he enjoyed using his fists.”

Ralstin left for Saint Ignatius, the land of his wife’s people, in 1970. Most of the town of Lapwai was sorry to see him go. When he arrived in Saint Ignatius, about 180 miles northwest of Lapwai, he built himself a house that was said to be worth $100,000 at a time when homes that sold for a fifth of that price were considered lavish by the standards of the Mission Valley. In his eighties he took up another career, working around Saint Ignatius as a carpenter for hire. He constructed kitchens, bedrooms, garages, shelves. His ears grew floppy and oversized, like those of Lyndon Johnson; his hair thinned; his nose seemed to become even more pointed as the rest of his face shrunk; and his eyes receded behind layers of weather-buffed skin. He hunched over a bit, but he never put on an ounce of fat.

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.”

T
HE 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.

S
AINT
I
GNATIUS
, 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.

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 the Pacific and the land of people who spoke the Salish dialect and fished for salmon.