Breaking Blue (20 page)

Mangan was slow to talk, answering Bamonte’s questions with little elaboration. When he was asked if he knew about corruption, he replied matter-of-factly, “Hell, yes. There was graft and corruption all around. Everybody was dirty.”

“Everybody? Who? How ’bout a few names, Dan?”

Mangan sipped his R and R, quiet again.

Bamonte thought he might be embarrassed—or afraid—of letting his daughter hear the truth. “Let’s go into the other room, where we can talk privately,” Bamonte said.

The internal affairs officer, the sheriff, and Mangan went behind a closed door. Bamonte picked up where he’d left off.

Mangan remained reticent; each sentence had to be dragged from him. “I got envelopes,” he said.

“What kind of envelopes?”

“Envelopes with money inside. Ten-dollar bills. They came in the mail, or somebody would drop ’em off.”

“What were they for?”

“For looking the other way.”

“Who else got ’em?”

“Everybody I knew. That’s the way we did things.”

“What about Charley Sonnabend. Was he dirty?”

“Sonnabend?” Mangan rubbed his chin. “Big guy. Detective, I think.…”

“That’s right.”

“Sonnabend was a pretty nice guy. He was honest.”

Bamonte brought up some of the names from Sonnabend’s report. Acie Logan, the tattooed con from Mississippi.

“I remember Logan,” Mangan said. “He was always at Mother’s Kitchen.”

“Mother’s?”

“On Riverside. A diner. Logan was there with Ralstin”—

That was the first time Bamonte had heard the name spoken since his days at the Spokane Police Department. It was “Ralstin” not “Roston” as the old summary had indicated.

—“and I knew Ralstin pretty good,” Mangan said.

“How good?”

“We chippied a little bit. I knew his wife, before they got divorced.” Mangan allowed himself a half-smile, remembering the women from the Mother’s Kitchen circle, cheating on Helen, a night with Ralstin’s wife.

Bamonte steered him back to the detective.

“Ralstin was into something,” Mangan said. “He was involved in the creamery burglaries and he was peddling.”

“How did you know that?”

“It was common knowledge.”

“Was he involved in the Newport Creamery burglary?”

Mangan fell into silence again. If he was thinking of the days when a ten-dollar bill was all it took to own a policeman and butter
was sold on the black market as a moonlighting scheme, he did not let on.

“What do you remember about the Conniff killing?” Bamonte asked.

“I think Ralstin …” He did not finish his sentence; it was as if the story, buried for so long, was incapable of coming forth.

“Hacker came out and said he had a package that Ralstin gave him that he wanted to get rid of …” Mangan said quickly, then trailed off, leaving his sentence on the table like a hot wire dropped in a driveway after a storm.

“Hacker?” Bamonte and Johnson were confused. Mangan explained about William Harrison Cox, his partner during the 1930s, and the nickname that paid tribute to Cox’s skills inside an elevator. He had died years ago.

“Hacker brought out the package and set it on the seat. It was shaped like a pistol. We took it to the Post Street Bridge and dropped it off the bridge.”

Was Mangan talking about the missing murder weapon? Bamonte followed up with a series of questions on the pistol, but Mangan’s responses were muted, confused. He had temporarily lost his memory—or regained his loyalty.

Bamonte stood, motioning the retired cop to get up with him. “C’mon, Dan. Let’s go for a ride.”

“A ride? Whereabouts?”

“To the river.”

Paraded through the Police Guild, accompanied by two active lawmen, Mangan looked a bit sheepish in front of his daughter and the handful of old-timers who gathered for drinks in the early evening. They whispered as Mangan walked by, and the word “snitch” passed a few lips.

T
HE MIST
from Spokane Falls rose nearly a hundred feet, dampening the cement rails of the Post Street Bridge. Snowmelt pouring into the river had swollen the city’s most prominent landmark; the water
crashed through its basalt gorge with much noise and froth. For years, the river was an open sewer, carrying the industrial and human waste of the metropolis built on either side of its banks and toxic shavings from the mining operations of Idaho. In 1935, the year that Officer Dan Mangan stood above the falls with another officer, the river was ranked as the foulest waterway in Washington. The city no longer dumped its garbage into the Spokane, but the river covered more than a century of secrets and bad habits. Now Mangan was there with Bamonte to talk about a single disposed piece.

“Why did they choose you and Cox to get rid of the gun?” Bamonte asked him.

“Well …” Mangan looked east, in the direction of the old brewery home of the Hotel de Gink, and then he looked west, where the river tumbled further down into the valley where dust bowl migrants had taken up refuge. “The captain—Hinton, was his name—the captain called me into the station at the time and gave us this package.”

“The gun?”

“It was shaped like a gun. Weighed about what a gun would weigh. Felt like a gun. And Hacker and me … we drove up here.… He said the gun was from Ralstin. That Ralstin was in trouble. Hacker brought out the package and set it on the seat.…”

“Why would this Captain Hinton call you in?”

“The captain was very good friends with Ralstin. Hinton was about three or four years older than Clyde.”

Bamonte wondered if Hinton was alive. Mangan told him he’d died more than twenty years ago.

The sheriff was struck by how many people inside the Stone Fortress—not just patrolmen but detectives and high-ranking officers—knew something about the killing.

“Hacker said, ‘Ralstin wanted us to get rid of it,’ ” Mangan said.

“So who threw it in the river?”

“Hacker did. He just dropped it.”

“Where? Show me.”

Mangan took a half-step toward the rail and looked down. The water was deep and muddy and ragged-topped, collecting itself
against a sheer rock face after coming through the falls. Mangan motioned toward the shore, next to the rock face, an unlikely place to bury a weapon. Most people, Bamonte thought, would throw it into the middle of the falls.

“There.” Mangan lifted a bony finger, squinted. “Right over there.”

“Did he throw it or drop it?”

“He dropped it.”

Mangan seemed very tired, struggling for breath. He needed to sit down somewhere. Bamonte had one more question. Then he would be done with him, and Mangan could go back to the Police Guild and his R and R, or back home with Rose and his scrapbook.

“Did you know what that gun was used for?” Bamonte asked. “Did you know what you were doing?”

Mangan’s mouth zippered into a line. He held his jaw tight. Bamonte did not try to rush him.

“I knew about that murder.…” Mangan said. “And I thought this might have been the murder weapon. But …”

“And you never told anybody?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Nobody ever asked me about it.”

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, another story ran in the
Spokesman-Review
, the second piece by Bill Morlin, the paper’s crime reporter, and the most thorough account yet written on the case. Morlin interviewed Mangan, Bamonte, the present Spokane police chief, and members of the Conniff family, and described an investigation that was now considered the oldest active homicide case in the United States. The headline, on page one, read:
1935 SLAYING PROBE REOPENED
. The story, picked up by the Associated Press, ran in papers around the world. In the article, Bamonte was quoted as saying, “Now, the cover-up is over.”

Within a week, letters and tips started to trickle in to Bamonte’s office in Newport. Among them was a note from a retired New York City police officer—a letter that sent a chill down Bamonte’s spine.

“You’re starting to sound like the Serpico of the West,” the former cop wrote, referring to the New York detective who blew the whistle on corruption among his fellow officers. He concluded with some advice for Bamonte:

“You never badmouth a brother.”

I
N THE LOFT
of Snake River high country set aside for displaced bands of the Nez Percé Indian tribe, a local police chief read the story in the Spokane paper and then picked up the phone. Keith Hendrick, the top lawman in the reservation town of Lapwai, Idaho, dialed the number of the Pend Oreille sheriff. Then he hung up before anyone could answer, opting to cage his doubts for the time being. Those newspaper guys would print anything to sell a paper; now here was this libel about a Spokane detective from the 1930s labeled as the likely culprit in a half-century-old murder case. The story, without naming Clyde Ralstin, gave enough details to lead Hendrick to believe they were talking about a man he used to know very well—a man who was like a father to him. But the Clyde Ralstin he once knew wasn’t a dirty cop, and he certainly was not the type of person who could ever kill somebody over a few pounds of butter, putting a final bullet in him as he lay mortally wounded. When he left town, more than a decade ago, he was one of the most revered figures on the reservation, a white man who married a young native woman and spent his days trying to uphold the law.

Several hundred miles east of Spokane, in a Rocky Mountain hamlet, a woman who told Sheriff Bamonte she was afraid to give her name said she knew a fellow—a former Spokane police detective—who once tried to rape her. He was tall, arrogant in a crude way,
and rough, matching the description in the paper. She remembered his face, the pointy nose, the motor charge of his voice, and his threat after assaulting her: there wasn’t a thing she could do, because the law couldn’t touch him.

Nearly two thousand miles to the north, in the mummified Alaskan gold-rush town of Skagway, the name Acie Logan, carried by the wire service story, stirred memories. Could this Acie Logan, this Mississippi con who was supposed to have had a hand in the 1935 shooting, be the same stretch-necked southerner who showed up in the frontier oasis of Skagway just after the war and stayed on for several decades? Mrs. Joseph Shelby, whose husband was an engineer on the railroad that carried timber, food, and minerals over Barstow Pass, remembered Logan as somewhat of a rounder who set up a homestead on a bar stool in one of Skagway’s darkened watering holes. But he was a damn good fireman on the railroad. Nobody ever asked him about his past, even when a son from a distant marriage arrived one day and Acie walked around town boasting about what a great daddy he was.

In northern California, a retired policeman read the story and also dialed the Pend Oreille sheriff’s office. He told Bamonte he knew a man who fit the suspect’s description, a violent old cuss, always showing off his guns. What’s more, he used to brag about his misdeeds.

In a trailer park on the eastern fringe of Spokane, Bill Parsons realized during the first week of April that he would not be able to die in peace—not with Dan Mangan telling the world about what had been the best-kept secret of the Spokane Police Department. Now that the institutional safe was open, all the valuables would eventually spill out. Parsons, the former chief, holding to life with the help of his oxygen bottle and shelfful of pills, was so mad he nearly fell out of his breakfast chair. Not only was Mangan blabbing; he didn’t even get it right.

Bamonte used to say he was just stupid enough to believe in luck and smart enough not to trust it. Casting his net across a gulf of time, the sheriff was finding out that the world was full of people with something to report or something to hide. The trick was separating the swollen consciences from the bad memories.

*  *  *

W
ITHIN THE WALLS
of the Spokane Police Department, discretion still had its place. In a second request, Bamonte had asked for the personnel files on Clyde Ralstin, Dan Mangan, Ed Hinton, Charles Sonnabend, and others. The records were kept underground, in a former missile silo. Weeks later—and only after he castigated the department in the press for its lack of cooperation—information came back to him on all of the men but one: Clyde Ralstin. Spokane police had no record of any such man ever working at the Stone Fortress; the name drew a blank.

Bamonte was livid. “I’m a cop, trying to solve a murder in my county—what the hell’s going on!” he thundered.

A month earlier, they had told him not to bother pursuing the case because nobody was alive from that era. Then Dan Mangan appeared, holding the rusted secrets from September 1935. Now, as Bamonte tried to follow a paper trail, he ran into another wall. He produced newspaper clips in which a Detective Clyde Ralstin was mentioned for some deed or another in the line of duty. In addition, he found a picture of the phantom, from an archival yearbook, showing Clyde in the uniform of a Spokane police detective, the big nose sloping out from beneath a cap with a badge atop its brim. Please look again, Bamonte asked the department.

A
T HOME
in Metaline Falls, the alders were starting to leaf out on the south face of Mount Linton. The ravines in the lower elevations of the Selkirks were full of snowmelt, water coursing down the mountain pleats and filling the Pend Oreille. Tony and Betty talked very little, their lives becoming more detached, their thoughts held close and contained. Over twenty-three years, they had lived through a miscarriage, hospitalized bouts of hepatitis, death threats from liquor-pumped cons, weeks without money, and winter nights so black and cold it was as if all life had been sucked out of the valley. What did they have now? Suspicion and pride, walls and fences.

They exchanged information about work. Betty was worried for her
job, wondering what the true intentions of the potential buyers of the cement plant might be. Work was continuing to slow, orders dropping off, the plant deteriorating. The air-raid siren called just two shifts to work, the seven a.m. and three p.m. rotations, but it was starting to sound like a dirge. Rumors blew in with the spring wind—harsh half-truths about closing the factory and ending the pension obligations to men crippled and diseased in service to cement—and then blew out on a breeze of gray dust.