Breaking Blue (2 page)

In the early stages of Bamonte’s graduate research, one particular case—the crime of the century in the wilderness county, some called it—was a chapter full of holes. So little was known about it that Bamonte wondered how he, an amateur historian, wrestling with words, unsure of his academic ability, could explain this lapse to his professors. At one time Bamonte thought he might have to write around it. But then something extraordinary happened, a convergence of conscience and coincidence: the lost years came to life. The archives, police records, and newspaper clippings told nothing more than the usual details of blood, grief, and mystery. What Bamonte found was a living time capsule; he broke into it, and was now in the process of rearranging the pieces.

From his home in the Pend Oreille, he phoned Parsons and explained what he was looking for. “Just hoping you can help me out with a few details about what happened in 1935, Bill—”

The older man cut him off; he knew all about Bamonte and the case that had become his obsession. “I wondered why you didn’t call earlier,” Parsons said, speaking in a halting and whispery voice. Bamonte
could hear the strained breaths, the sucking of oxygen. “You come by,” Parsons said. “I’ll be here.”

S
ET IN A GRAND BREACH
sliced through the basalt layers of the upper Columbia Plateau, Spokane was a town of cumbrous secrets, where the jazz artist Billy Tipton lived most of her adult life disguised as a man, and the worst rapist in the city’s history turned out to be the son of a leading citizen, the managing editor of the afternoon newspaper. Butch Cassidy, leader of the Hole in the Wall Gang, is said to have spent the last third of his life there, living off the earnings of his nineteenth-century bank robberies as a quiet citizen with an impeccably neat lawn. Though historians had maintained that Cassidy died in a Bolivian shootout in 1909, his sister, Lula Parker Betenson, said in a deathbed interview in 1970 that her outlaw brother lived on in Spokane until 1937. “The law thought he was dead and he was happy to leave it that way,” she said. “He made us promise not to tell anyone that he was alive. It was the family secret. He died peacefully in Spokane.”

From the outside, Spokane looked as orderly as mathematics and just as sedate—a well-groomed town on a tight leash. City leaders referred to their town as the center of the “Inland Empire.” But the city’s worst critics, natives who left and swore never to return, sometimes referred to it, in a swipe at the century-old booster slogan, as the hub of the “Ingrown Empire,” a reservoir of buried personal histories.

There are millennia-old glaciers in the North Cascades, to the west, that move faster than the pace of change in Spokane; and that was just fine with Parsons and thousands of other citizens who lived all of their lives in the biggest city between Minneapolis and Seattle. Spokane offered the security of a routine as reliable as the dawn. From 1929 until the mid-1980s, the city was essentially frozen. Outsiders—from the radical labor unions whose members staged free-speech marathons to the defeated Indian tribes from Montana and Idaho who held occasional rallies in town—were dealt with quickly and violently. During the early part of Bill Parsons’s career, crime
was tolerated so long as it was the right
kind
of crime. Bootlegging. Cathouses. Gambling. Wife-beating. Gun-running. No harm there. Like other cities in the American West, Spokane was built virtually overnight on the wealth of abundant natural resources. And when the silver veins dried up or didn’t bring enough money to pay for the cost of transporting men underground, and the market for white pine from Idaho and wheat grown in the rolling hills of the nearby Palouse collapsed along with the rest of the economy in the 1930s, Spokane reverted to its frontier roots. Breadlines brought out the devil. For all but the most serious of crimes, the law was nothing more than what a given police officer said it was.

Thinking about those first days now, Parsons would have preferred to dwell on the small triumphs: a shootout that he walked away from, a winning footrace with a fleeing felon, a burglary ring cracked. He focused instead on a flick in a lifetime, knowing very well that this one asterisk, unearthed by Bamonte, could well define him in the years to come.

When Bamonte arrived at Parsons’s house, he found a man as thin as broth, pale and gaunt, attached to an oxygen machine. Jerie told the visitor that her husband was dying of emphysema. Parsons peered through thick black glasses, blinked as if startled by a headlight, and extended a hand. He said a few words, but his voice was so weak that Bamonte had to move his ear next to Parsons’s face to hear him. Now that the interrogator was in his home, Parsons seemed relieved. He wondered how this younger man could possibly understand the Depression, a time when you could not trust tomorrow.

“You’re making a lot of trouble for everybody,” he said.

“I just have a few questions, Bill,” Bamonte said. “Trying to get to the bottom of this thing.”

Parsons told his visitor about police work in 1935. The job wasn’t about law enforcement, it was about survival. An honest policeman during the Depression was a loser and a loner. Parsons knew, because he started out as one.

“What kind of stuff are we talking about?” Bamonte asked.

Parsons took several pulls from his tank, removed the black glasses, wiped his eyes. “Burglary,” he answered. Also, theft. The officers,
men in uniform, stole food, turkeys, radios, small change, jugs of oil, he said. Try feeding a family on twenty-seven dollars a week during the Depression. Even when the money was better, a sergeant’s salary plus perks, who could keep the peace without keeping a piece for himself?

“Robbery.” They took from people they didn’t like, with impunity.

Bribery was common.

“What kind? How big, Bill?”

“Chippy stuff,” Parsons said. “Ten-dollar bills.”

For much of his life, Bill Parsons had convinced himself that he was different from the other officers. They were dirty. He was clean, the respected community leader. By the 1950s, Parsons believed that that crowd, from the 1930s, was out of his life for good; and so he thought the secret they had shared had left town with them. They could have hurt him in 1967, when he was named chief of police, but he heard nothing. Every decade further buried the story of what had happened in September 1935, until the truth was very deep and very distant.

“What else, Bill?” Bamonte asked, his voice a gentle prod.

Parsons looked into the eyes of his wife of forty-five years. Then he told Bamonte what he had just told Jerie.

“That killing from 1935 … we all knew about it. It was … one of us.”

To Jerie, who had long ago stopped asking her husband what went on inside police headquarters, the revelations of the last fifteen minutes were astonishing—not so much for what he said as for the fact of his saying it at all. There was natural law, there was man-made law, and then there was Cop Code. As every police officer knew, only one of these was absolute—above all, the commandment “Thou shalt never snitch on a fellow officer.” More than half a century after Bill Parsons’s initiation into the fraternity of lawmen, he was breaking the trust.

What’s more, he was naming names, dates, details. Bamonte’s tape recorder was running, and he took notes as well. His interest in the case went beyond historical curiosity, for he was also the sheriff of Pend Oreille County, where the 1935 killing remained an unsolved
homicide in his jurisdiction. By 1989, it was the oldest active murder case in the nation, a probe that had occupied the time of three sheriffs and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Thus, as Bamonte’s graduate project entered its last phase, he was not just blowing dust from a corner attic of Washington while pursuing an academic degree. He was looking for a murder suspect in his county. Bamonte the scholar, reading microfiche until his eyes blurred and his head ached, was attempting to alter a small bit of history—the private motive of many tellers of the past. Bamonte, the Pend Oreille sheriff, was attempting to extract some measure of justice from it.

That same week in September 1989, there had been a story in the paper about drug gang members from Los Angeles moving to the Northwest; they would kill one another over the color of somebody’s hat, the story said. Imagine. But Parsons now recalled a day when one man would shoot another over a few pounds of stolen butter.

I
N
1935, something happened to parts of the American West and midsection that only God in the foulest of Old Testament moods was supposed to be capable of causing: the land died. Green never came to those prairies and river valleys and meadows and former sea bottoms and high-elevation soil beds which had always brought forth grass and fields of knee-high perennials. Instead, barely a half-century after the first white farmers cut the ground with plow blades, the earth dried up and gathered itself into amber clouds of airborne dust. Some days, though the sun burned high overhead, much of the sky was dark, blackened by raging dust clouds. Streams disappeared; cows choked to death or went blind; corn curled and collapsed; leaves blighted and withered; trees stopped and surrendered to beetles and locusts. When the anemic spring alfalfa fields were exhausted and the reserves of hay depleted, there was nothing to feed the livestock. In Fort Worth, Texas, six hundred thousand head of cattle were shot, firing-squad style, and buried. Parched and emaciated, they were deemed not even fit enough to feed those thousands of Americans who found themselves without homes or hope in the Southwest.

This drought had begun in 1934, when the winter rains never came, and the winds carried soil from state to state, until there was a wall
that could be seen a hundred miles away. A curtain of dust blew east across the Great Plains, dumping twelve million tons on Chicago, and then on to the Eastern Seaboard and out to the Atlantic Ocean, where the soil that was supposed to produce food from seed fell to the sea. By early 1935, the winter wheat, planted out of optimism and little else a few months earlier, came forth stunted and brown; there had been only a trace of snow during the cold months. Plow it under, the farmers were told; five million acres of winter wheat were destroyed. Start anew. But with what?

In the cities, where money could be made out of other money or from serving those who had it, the depression had started with the stock-market collapse of 1929. In ten weeks, the market shed half its value, and shareholders lost $40 billion—more than eight times as much as the entire federal budget of the time. Life savings were wiped out; pension funds disappeared; banks folded like cheap tents in a gust. Earlier that year, Herbert Hoover had been sworn into office with the boast that “Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

In the new farmlands of the West, hard times had hit well before 1929; the economic drought arrived just after the end of World War I, when there was a surfeit of farmers and food. While city dwellers practiced the silly sophistications of prosperous life in the 1920s—flapping and flagpole sitting and bathtub-gin parties—farmers suffered through one inexplicable disaster after another. There were no Roaring Twenties, no New Era, no giddy exploration of leisure’s edge for those who tilled the ground. By 1935, the worst agricultural depression in this country founded by farmers was in its fifteenth straight year.

The railroads and real estate promoters had lured the parents and grandparents of these farmer families from the old land in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and other states with promises that the new land was virtually free and would come to life with little more than a few years’ care. It was an arid stretch of rumpled land, from Texas and Oklahoma on up through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and the eastern halves of Oregon and Washington; but all that was needed
to produce a crop was perhaps fifteen inches of rain a year, the promoters said. “Muscle is the only capital needed!” went one slogan. “This is by far the best money-making country in America” was the banner across the Northern Pacific Railroad Company’s milk-and-honey depiction of Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington.

So the first of the farmer families came, immigrants and Civil War veterans, staked off small homesteads with barbed wire, put potatoes in the ground, grazed a few head of cattle, and turned over the bunchgrass. Always, the wind blew. For a few years, the soil responded well. But then this land, which had fed the natives for centuries—the natural sod nurtured bison and grouse and brought forth edible bulbs—turned to powder. Without the root structure of the short grass to hold the soil down, it disappeared.

By early February of 1935, the great dust clouds had started up again, a return of the tantrum from the year before, and kicked across the land, ripping up the carpet of what had been spared from the previous year’s drought. Dust blew into unpainted frame homes and covered everything—dishes, lamp shades, family bibles—and it stung the eyes and lacerated the skin. One storm in March scooped out twice as much soil as had been dug to create the Panama Canal. Through Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas (where a train was derailed by a fierce blow), the sky rained dust. Through Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas, cotton fields blew away; orchards browned and weakened and collapsed.

By spring, the new land was leathered; even the cursed tumble-weed, Russian thistle, could not grow in 1935. Near the end of the year, more than 850 million tons of topsoil—enough to layer 6 million acres with an inch of dirt—had been ripped from the surface of the new land. In Texas and Oklahoma, four million acres were abandoned. A million people left their homes. Farm prices fell to the lowest point in history, then climbed as food became scarce. Those who had held on by diversifying their crops, or lending their muscle out for hire, gave in. On their heels came swarms of grasshoppers and men from the banks, carrying promissory notes. A farmer who could barely stay alive on rural subsistence now found himself on the road and unable
to afford the food he hadn’t been able to give away a few years earlier.