Breaking Blue (15 page)

“If a civilian had started this fire I would have initiated charges of reckless burning against him, and because of the death, he could have been charged with manslaughter,” Bamonte said. The sheriff could not charge the federal government, but he tried to interest the United States attorney’s office in the case. After all, the Forest Service itself had initiated prosecution of campers or loggers whose negligence had led to fires. Was there a double standard: one for individuals, another
for bureaucracies? The Spokane office of the Justice Department turned Bamonte down. Who is this guy? Trying to sue the government? Sticking up for a dead convict? Doesn’t he have better things to do?

Thwarted at the local level, Bamonte sent his investigative report to the office of Edwin Meese. To Bamonte, it was very clear: the government was morally and legally accountable for the death of Cash Hopkins. The United States attorney had betrayed the public trust by not investigating the fire that killed the convict. “Justice was not served,” the sheriff from the wilderness county in northeast Washington wrote to the highest law-enforcement officer in the land. He was surprised when Ronald Reagan’s attorney general did not respond.

Most nights, Bamonte could not leave the problems of his county inside the sheriff’s office. He brought them home, kicked them around at the dinner table, ran them through his head while lying awake, and then started the next day with the stale conflict as his first thought. All the criticism, the ridicule by the newspaper and the contempt from the older deputies, had started to wear him down. More and more, he would lapse into self-doubt, the little boy who used to sleep in the tent next to his father, scared of being abandoned. He wanted most what he could not control: the affections of his wife, the esteem of the community he served. Betty wanted to see less of the sheriff and more of the man, but he could not rest while things were unsettled. She urged him to laugh more, to relax, to unclutter himself. There was, after all, plenty to laugh about. The Rainbow Family, for example—seven thousand aging hippies, led by a man named Laughing Heart, who one year had chosen a wide, flowered meadow in the Selkirks as the site of their annual gathering. For five days, they ran naked through the fields, camped in tepees and leantos, a carnival of herbal confections and pubic hair. One of Bamonte’s deputies donned a green mask and a cape—he called himself “the Green Ranger”—and galloped through the meadow on a black horse.

A year later, an encounter with the chairman of the school board, who’d been accused of neglecting his horse, turned into a kung fu-type showdown in Metaline Falls. The man returned the sheriff’s
accusation with a claim that Bamonte’s dog had bitten his girlfriend on the hand. He then challenged Bamonte to a fight, telling him to leave his guns inside his house and meet him in the middle of the street. Citizens gathered to witness the duel between public officials. When Bamonte showed up, the challenger—an expert in the Korean martial art of Tang Soo Do—was in the midst of a choreographed tune-up, slicing the air with his hands and feet.

“Come on, hit me!” the chairman shouted at the sheriff. “Give me a reason!”

Bamonte stood and watched his neighbor for a few minutes; then his patience wore out. He grabbed the man by the head and squeezed. “You can’t stand around and watch that kind of stuff all day,” the sheriff said.

B
AMONTE EASILY WON
a third term as sheriff in 1986, beating a former deputy. By then, he had learned that his energies and the rhythms of the county, while they often seemed incompatible, actually had much in common. Many people in the Pend Oreille expected to fail, expected things not to turn out, expected bad times, incompetence, broken hearts. Most homeowners seemed to cut twice as much wood as they would ever need for the winter, afraid to trust even the certainty of the following spring. Bamonte was just as prone as his neighbors to feel run over by the world. His troubles at home were mounting. In darker moods, which were becoming more frequent, he felt like a failure as a human being. Always there was the shadow of Bull, whom he idolized, and his mother, whom he despised. The traits of his parents came out in flashes of anger, fits of stubbornness, days of feeling unloved.

He took refuge in the master’s project. But in studying the private notes and public travails of former sheriffs, Bamonte began to think of himself as an heir to the problems those men had left at their gravesides. And so rather than lessening his load, the master’s project added weight. In seeking help from the past, he picked up new responsibility. History was not a shrink, as he had hoped it would be, but a ghost.

In early 1989, Bamonte was asking questions that had not been asked for decades. Nobody seemed to care what Black had found out about the shooting of Marshal Conniff, or whether this new information had any connection with Black’s fall from the bridge. Although Bamonte’s queries produced nothing new on Black’s death, he would not let up. He recorded each setback, a cop’s way of internalizing frustration.

Alone with the past, Bamonte wrote:

“Murder is a great tragedy, but to have no one care is greater still.”

A
T NIGHT
in the muffled refuge of Metaline Falls, Bamonte sat up with the old police files, looking for what Elmer Black had seen. Outside, snowdrifts piled up three feet and more, curling over shrubs and woodsheds, blanketing the industrial dust that covered the town. The cement factory groused through an evening shift. There was very little truck traffic through the village this time of year; the sounds that drifted up to Bamonte’s third-floor study came with the wind—an occasional barking dog, branches clawing against an icy window, a distant whine from the factory. Bamonte had written a brief history of the mining town, which once aspired to become the “Pittsburgh of the West” but now struggled to stay out of the register of ghost towns, its population 305 and sinking. Metaline Falls had come to life suddenly, born in the spontaneous rush to a freshly revealed mother lode, and now seemed to be aching through its final years. Young people left town as soon as they got out of high school, fleeing with the familiar lament of many small western towns, that there was no work, no future. The factory was laying off, cutting back purchases, letting things go to hell. A few routines—the Thursday-night cribbage game at the Western Star Tavern, fresh blackberry pies at the Hangout Cafe—held the community together.

Bamonte knew all the swindling and whoring stories from the glory
days of mining, when gold nuggets were scraped out of Sullivan Creek and the town mogul hired a team of prostitutes to recycle back to him the wages he paid his miners. On this winter night, as ice formed at the edges of the Pend Oreille River, Bamonte was looking for other voices and other stories. Elmer Black had died just after hearing from Charley Sonnabend, the retired Spokane detective who had conducted the initial investigation of the Conniff killing. Now, Bamonte found something about Sonnabend on a typewritten report, the paper faded to the color of beaver teeth. During an earlier sweep of county records, Bamonte had passed over this report; tonight, it revealed itself as if the type were throbbing neon. Not long after the Conniff case went dormant in 1935, Sonnabend left police work and returned to his first love, carpentry. He framed houses throughout Spokane, built with pine beams, sheathed in cedar. In the mid-1950s, Sonnabend—who carried nearly 300 pounds on a six-foot frame—had a massive heart attack. Lying on his back in a hospital room, Sonnabend thought he was going to die. He summoned to his bedside the United States marshal in Spokane, Darrell Holmes, a former Pend Oreille County sheriff. Sonnabend told the marshal he did not want to die without first revealing something that had happened during his last years as detective. The federal marshal called Pend Oreille authorities, who sent the retired Elmer Black and a prosecutor down to Spokane to hear the deathbed tale of Charley Sonnabend.

On a late-winter day in 1955, near dusk, Sonnabend told the story he had kept to himself for twenty years. The carpenter talked for two hours. A summary of his revelations was contained in the memo that Bamonte found in the files. The top of the page read:

Bamonte sat upright, rubbed his eyes. He stood and paced the length of the room, talking to himself. Here was a possible answer—and a half-dozen questions—about a killing that had gone unsolved
for fifty-four years. It all seemed so antique: a gang peddling black-market butter and stolen shoes, run out of a place called “Mothers Ketchen,” masterminded by a Spokane police detective. Who was this “Sgt. Mangrin”? And who was this “Roston”? The last name was vaguely familiar, a snippet of sound graffiti from the Stone Fortress.

Bamonte felt an affinity with Marshal Conniff, like himself a log-cabin builder, a father, struggling to stay alive in the Pend Oreille. He thought of the marshal facedown in a puddle of blood in an alley next to the Newport Creamery. The building was still around, used now by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Could it be he was killed by a police detective? Nobody would believe such a thing.

The Sonnabend memo contained a few more telling details. The carpenter told of taking two guns off Logan and his partners when he arrested them in the World Hotel. One of the guns in Logan’s possession had been previously signed out of the Spokane police property room by Detective Roston. The whereabouts of the pistols was addressed in the last line of the 1955 Pend Oreille sheriff’s memo: “The guns mention we are unable to find any trace of them any where.”

Bamonte wondered why Roston had never been arrested. “Go after him!” he said to himself. By Sonnabend’s account, they had a strong case against the detective: a confession from Logan implicating Roston as his partner; a gun that was traced to the city detective; and the roadblock—two officers who stopped a car driven by Roston about one hour after the killing. A fistful of leads; and yet Bamonte could find no evidence that this Roston had ever been questioned, let alone brought to trial. The files indicated that Logan had gone off to jail on his interstate-theft plea bargain—stealing shoes from a boxcar. Roston had gone … where? Was this behind Elmer Black’s forty-five foot drop from the interstate bridge? Somebody ought to know. But everyone who had been at the meeting on March 3, 1955, was now dead—Charley Sonnabend, Elmer Black, Darrell Holmes, and the Pend Oreille prosecutor, Roy Jones. If Bamonte could have five minutes with any one of those men, he would have asked a single question: Why didn’t you go after Clyde Roston?

*  *  *

W
HEN
T
ONY WENT
to tell Betty the news of his discovery, she was asleep. He woke her, talking fast.

“Honey, you’re not going to believe this. Remember I told you about Elmer Black? I found something else—a memo—and it looks like there’s this other guy, Roston, a detective, a real asshole from what it sounds like, and he—”

“Go to sleep.”

“No, there’s more. The guy—the guy got away with it. Black probably found out about it. Then he fell off the bridge—or somebody pushed him. I don’t know.”

Betty was in no mood to talk about ancient crimes. There were more immediate concerns in Metaline Falls—their marriage, for example. Couldn’t he sense the gulf between them? Tony was obsessed with work. He didn’t know when to stop. He never took vacations. He always had been a good provider, but she needed a man who was a full emotional participant. Cops developed calluses, protection from the failures of the heart. This graduate project, which Betty had encouraged, was taking up too many of his extra hours. And now that it was coming alive, it was crowding out the living partner in his life. In the middle of the night, snow rounding out the hard features of the dying town, when Tony wanted to talk about Charley Sonnabend’s deathbed story of 1955, Betty wanted no part of it. Not now. She was worried about their eighteen-year-old son. He had the strong body of Bull Bamonte—he won the school weight-lifting title, breaking the record for his division—and the soft face of Betty. But more and more, what he seemed to have inherited from his father was the emotional fragility.