Breaking Blue (18 page)

Now, four years later, Helen’s former husband sat in the den where she had spent her final days, his big, knobby hands clasped around a beer bottle, surrounded by her pencil sketches of Jesus. And then the oversized Irishman, who was once so mighty he pulled runaway houses from a river in Montana during a flood, and later rented them out, would get another dose of his toxic past. He preferred talking about Hungry Horse, where he had set up a bar on a pair of two-by-sixes planked over sawhorses in the boomtown that sprouted around the federal dam on the Flathead River. For forty years he held court at the Dam Town Tavern. He could outlift, outdrink, outbrag, outfuck, and—he used to think—outlive anything.

But Rose did not take him into her house to hear old boys’ stories. He would reminisce about the time his picture was displayed on the front page after he captured a particularly dangerous felon—Alfred the Hunchback, a killer of two women, the papers said—and she would reply with a more painful truth: he was one of the crookedest cops west of Chicago.

For most of her life, Rose hated her father. It was only during the last years, when he was crippled, that she occasionally felt sorry for him. At Rose’s house, the old wife-beater, womanizer, animal killer, and deal maker was like a dependent child. Once a month, she took him down to the Police Guild for the regular gathering of retired Spokane cops. He ordered his R and R and sniffed around, looking for familiar faces, muttering to himself. He didn’t know a soul. Occasionally, when Rose would introduce her father, somebody would say, “Mangan? Sergeant Mangan? I thought he was dead!”

“No such luck,” she would reply.

After a few drinks, Mangan’s small eyes would cloud up behind the thick, wire-rim glasses and he’d say something about wanting to talk to a detective.

“What for?” Rose would ask.

“Got something I need to talk about.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t. It’s something a detective needs to hear. Something I gotta do.”

“Then you want me to call a detective?”

“No, no. You … I’ll do it on my own time.”

“What the hell is it?”

“Something I got to do.”

Rose, the old man’s conscience, would shake her head; she was finally starting to chip away at the black heart of her father. Or maybe he was just trying to get her to ease up on him.

I
F
B
AMONTE
was going to reopen an old murder case, he would need more than a hunch developed through his master’s degree project and a sheaf of police reports burnished with age. There was no
statute of limitations on homicide, so he had adequate legal justification. The murder was committed in his county—no jurisdictional problem. But his resources, in the vast Pend Oreille, were stretched. And there were his critics to contend with, the citizen-taxpayers, who howled any time the sheriff assumed the role of whim chaser and provocateur of the status quo. In the history of Pend Oreille County, seven killings remained unsolved. Why go after this one? A fresh investigation, using the information from Sonnabend’s 1950s tale, could tarnish the names of people long dead, smudge institutions, and break a few links in the fraternal chain that held policemen together. But if the victim’s family, the aging children of Marshal Conniff, were clamoring for justice, that could help his cause.

After meeting with the Conniffs, Bamonte asked each of them to write him a note about his or her feelings and offer suggestions on whether he should proceed.

On the way back to Spokane, the Newport marshal’s three children decided that the distant possibility of achieving justice was worth the pain of reviving bad memories. A week later, Bamonte received two letters from the family.

“Always, after the death of our Father, there was the question of who would have done such a thing to us,” George wrote. “Was the man someone we knew? Was he from somewhere else? At first, you believe there will be answers, then you only hope. As the years pass, you face the reality that there will never be the finality of knowing the answers to the questions that are always there.”

Bamonte set the letter down; this aging voice of outrage was more than enough motivation to reopen the case. George Conniff wanted finality. If nothing else, Bamonte would try to help the Conniffs spend their last years free of doubt. And the sheriff was haunted by something Olive had said, when she wondered why her neighbor, Sheriff Holmes, a longtime friend, never told her what he knew. The implied thought was: cops treat each other like family, sharing vital secrets, and everyone else gets the filtered facts and official shrug. Whether the Conniffs would come to trust him or not, Bamonte heard the last cry of the slain marshal.

“You are the voice of the dead,” he told his deputies whenever
they investigated a murder. And sometimes, in reaction, his subordinates would look at each other, then throw their eyes to the sky. Right—voice of the dead. I hear one coming in now on the radio.

“There is a lot of emotion,” George Conniff wrote, and continued:

Olive wrote the other letter, a shorter one than her brother’s. What came through was her faith in the power of conscience:

D
URING THE LAST DAYS
of winter, a chinook blew up from the south, warm and feisty, melting the snow that covered the Pend Oreille Valley. The white of winter storms always brought out the dark by-product of the cement factory in Metaline Falls, a heavy soot that splayed against the ground like spots on a dalmatian. With the wind, the ugly snow swooshed away, leaving metallic-colored pools of slush in the streets of the hamlet. The factory sirens still called in three shifts a day to process limestone and shale into cement dust. But there was much talk in Metaline Falls that the plant, which had been the life-blood of the community for eighty years, might close. A French conglomerate, the LeFarge Corporation, was negotiating to buy the factory from the German manufacturing firm, Heidelberger Zement, that had owned it since 1977. At one point, the plant had turned out half a million tons of dry cement a year, material that was used in the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River and the Hungry Horse Dam on the Flathead River in Montana. But now the European owners were not showing any signs that they wanted to return the plant to its glory years. They were letting things go into disrepair, laying off workers, ignoring sales requests. Some plant workers said the prospective buyers had no intention of actually producing anything or trying to keep the town alive. The speculation around the village built at the confluence of the Pend Oreille River and Sullivan Creek was that LeFarge, in keeping with the corporate climate of the 1980s, wanted to purchase the plant from Heidelberger and then kill it—for the sole reason of knocking out an international competitor.

In late afternoon, Bamonte arrived at his home in Metaline Falls, a three-story brick building erected in 1928. Across the street, one way, was the high school, Bamonte’s alma mater, where the kids used to tease him about his clothes. The school was a grand brick design
by the architect Kirkland Cutter that rose in 1914, when Metaline Falls was young and cocky. Cutter had created the Davenport Hotel and the Spokane Club, two celebrated historical fixtures in eastern Washington; but his work in Metaline Falls seemed destined to fall with the ages. The factory also was within steps of Bamonte’s door, its ashen towers rising from behind a wire fence. Bamonte had tried to keep up the appearance of his red brick building, sanding and varnishing the deep-colored wood trim, making cabinets and alcoves, laying carpet, replacing old plumbing with new. But it was a losing struggle. The place was cavernous; paint peeled from the high ceilings of rooms that he never had time to attend; the faucets in a neglected extra bathroom were rusted. Like Metaline Falls itself, Bamonte’s home resisted change, wearing the same face it had worn for more than fifty years, the only difference being the accumulated layers of gray from the factory.

He called out for Betty, then realized she was not yet home from the cement plant, where she worked as clerk. His son was also gone. Most days, Tony didn’t know whether to hit or hug the boy. A year earlier, Tony was at the sheriff’s department’s annual picnic when a call came over the radio at headquarters that somebody had been spotted in Bamonte’s car, brandishing a gun. Sheriff’s vehicles raced to the scene, the deputies fearing that their boss was in mortal danger. They found his teenage son with a BB gun, playing with a friend. The prank was still a sore spot. Through the fall and into the winter, the boy and his father seldom spoke other than to exchange basic information. Bamonte was repeating the habits of his father, the silence and the distance. In turn, his son was developing Tony’s dark doubts, picking up his father’s debilitating insecurity.

Tony and Betty had been fighting over the usual things—money problems, his long hours, his moods. A trip west to Seattle, six hours in the car each way, had only heightened the rancor. He felt awful about the scrapes, but instead of talking about it, he worked harder, longer, going deeper into the past, spending more time with the people from 1935 who had suddenly become such a big part of his life.

With nightfall, temperatures dropped in the mountain valley, and the slush turned to black ice. Bamonte went to his study and put a piece of sheriff’s department stationery in the typewriter. He addressed a letter to Terry Mangan, Spokane’s chief of police (who was not related to the old man who lived with his daughter in the Spokane rambler). Mangan had come to Spokane from Bellingham, in northwest Washington, promising to make the Spokane Police Department one of the best mid-sized units in the country—a formidable task. In the early 1980s, when parts of Spokane were under siege by a serial rapist, the leading detective on the case advised women, if they were attacked, to “lie back and enjoy it.”

With Elmer Black and Charley Sonnabend both dead, Bamonte felt it only logical that his formal investigation begin in the Spokane Police Department—his old haunt, the palace of secrets. In typing the first words of his letter, Bamonte left the realm of academia and upgraded the Conniff project to official business.

He made copies of the police summaries of the Sonnabend interviews and included these in his letter, for reference. He also enclosed the Conniffs’ notes. He wrote:

A week went by, and Bamonte heard nothing from Spokane; then another week. This was unusual: it was police courtesy to respond promptly when another agency asked for help. Bamonte called the department and asked for the chief. He was given an assistant, who told him that the chief had not been happy to receive the letter from the sheriff in the wilderness county. For one thing, there were several implicit allegations in his letter—of cover-up and corruption that continued, through institutional memory, to the present day. The chief was offended at the very thought. Sure, cops from the old days were dirty—untrained, uneducated, driven by anemic salaries. But Terry Mangan, only the second chief ever to attend college, a former priest, had a master’s degree. To become a Spokane policeman today required passing a civil service test and two months at the police academy, which included sessions on constitutional rights. Just what was Bamonte getting at with this suggestion that there could be “an old man out there somewhere with a dirty conscience”?