Breaking Blue (22 page)

“She quit because of that?”

“Yes.” Pearl looked straight ahead at Bamonte, unblinking. A lifetime in the outdoors had hardened and cracked her skin. Her hair, which she used to wear in long black curls, was bristly and gray, cut short. The eyes alone carried the intensity of her youth.

“And Virgil says, ‘Well, to hell with ya! I don’t care. We can get lots of cooks.’ ”

That was not the end of it, Pearl explained. She kept an on-and-off friendship with Burch. He was attractive, and she found him more charming than she usually cared to admit. A few years after the Conniff killing, Pearl and her husband moved into a house in Spokane that Burch had lived in during the mid-1930s. She remembered the year, 1940, because she had just taken in her brother’s baby, born to a sick mother.

“We lived in this little house on Jackson Street and it had been Virgil’s before he married Zada. And the funny part of it was, I was cleaning out a cupboard and I found a bunch of Newport wrappers.”

“You found them yourself?”

“It was Virgil’s bachelor shack, see, that’s where he stayed before he married Zada, and here I was cleaning all these shelves out and I pulled out these whole bunch of wrappers, Newport butter wrappers.”

Her memory seemed good, and to Bamonte’s relief, she only answered questions if she seemed to know what she was talking about. Thus, when he asked her about a broad cover-up, and whether she ever saw the Spokane police chief in Mother’s, Pearl answered, “Oh, dear, dear, dear man—it’s awfully hard to remember.”

He asked Pearl for a precise description of the butter wrappers from the creamery.

“Well, they were little thin papers that wrapped around the butter, then they were put into cartons to ship. But they didn’t have any cardboard cartons … just thin paper. But it said ‘Newport Creamery,’ and something else … maybe the address, could be, I don’t know. But I do know it said ‘Newport Creamery,’ and they were just white papers with black writing on them. As near as I can remember it was black. And that’s all I know about that.”

And what had Pearl done with the wrappers?

“I threw ’em out.”

She and her sister had already been to Ralph Buckley, the Spokane County sheriff, in 1935 when Ruth found the Newport wrappers.
Though Buckley promised to investigate, nothing that she knows of was ever done. Neither of the sisters was ever contacted by a detective.

The butter wrappers were circumstantial, Bamonte thought, a small bit of evidence. It could be explained. But it was something new; the smallest detail can sometimes break open a case.

Pearl kept talking, steaming toward “what I came to tell ya about.…”

A year or so after she found the wrappers, Pearl moved from Spokane to Portland. In the early 1940s, there was more work than men on either side of the Columbia River. Two dams—one completed near Hood River, the other under construction at Grand Coulee-held the promise of nearly unlimited electricity, for pennies. This spurred heavy industry, shipbuilding near Portland and aluminum smelting up and down the river. Virgil Burch and his wife had also moved to the Portland area, after selling Mother’s Kitchen. They lived across the bridge over the Columbia in the Washington town of Vancouver. One night, Pearl had them over to dinner.

“I’d cook a big dinner and maybe they’d have a beer or something … and then he’d get to talking about his old days in Spokane and that bragging, see.”

She remembered virtually every word of the conversation with Burch from that night; nearly fifty years later, it continued to bother her. As a Roman Catholic, Pearl believed she could live her entire life as a moral and honest person but still be condemned to everlasting hell if a singular stain—a mortal sin—were not first removed from her soul. She seemed now to be in a great hurry to free herself of the mark from long ago. The same time as the dinner with Burch, she explained, there had been a robbery in Pearl’s neighborhood in Portland, which prompted a particular conversation.

“I said, ‘I can’t understand it.’ I said, ‘I thought the robbing days were over.’ And this was when Virgil chimed in.”

A few beers under his belt, Clyde Ralstin’s best friend could not resist telling about an achievement of his own, in Newport, about seven years earlier—the creamery heist, Pearl recalled. Burch said
he had worked as a plumber at the creamery. He told this by way of detailing the craft of a thief.

“They had this all planned out, see. And he left this latch where he could raise this door up. Well, when they raised this door up, it made a noise. It alerted the watchman. And that’s what he said.”

Bamonte was astonished. “The watchman being Marshal Conniff?”

“Yes. That’s who he was.”

Bamonte jumped up, rubbed his hands. He wanted to hug Pearl. She raised a finger, a wait-for-the-good-part ellipsis.

“Then Virgil said, he said, ‘Well, I’ll just get the hell out of here.’ That’s exactly the words he said. But Ralstin went clear around and I guess this Conniff probably had a gun. I don’t know, but apparently, the way Virgil thought, this night cop pulled his gun, and Virgil got scared, and Ralstin … just blowed his brains out. That’s the way the story came to me.”

Here, for the first time, was a living witness—not firsthand, but a witness nonetheless. She was old and shrunken, but she spoke well. Any chance Bamonte had of getting this story in court would depend on the specifics. He pressed her for the fine print.

“When Virgil told you this story, did he actually see Ralstin shoot the marshal?”

Pearl held her answer, then shook her head. “I don’t know if he actually seen it, but he was standing beside him when he did it.”

“He was standing beside him?”

“He said they were both … He said he thought that Conniff was raising the gun and he said he let him have it ’cause Conniff would have recognized Virgil.”

“Because he had been in the creamery for two or three days?”

“Working there, yeah. Virgil.”

“So he was right beside—?”

“Yeah. He said they both turned the corner at the same time, because they were gonna go in that door, and when they raised the door, it creaked. And Conniff came around another corner, and he said, uh … somebody said, somebody either hollered ‘Halt’ or ‘Stop,’ and he said when they saw that, there was a little bit of light coming
from the yard light or something like that, and he said that they thought that this guy pulled a gun and he said Ralstin said, ‘He’s not going to shoot me. I’ll get him first.’ ”

“Ralstin said that to Virgil?”

“Yeah. Said that to Virgil. And Virgil repeated it. Said ‘It was us or him.’ Virgil didn’t give a hoot then, you know. It was all over.”

Burch also told Pearl about the roadblock, just outside of Spokane, which had gone up shortly after the shooting. Bamonte had heard of the roadblock from the police summaries of interviews with Charley Sonnabend. Without prompting from Bamonte, Pearl had just brought up a key detail that was quite similar to the Sonnabend account. As Burch explained to Pearl, the killers knew that the police would be looking for three suspects, so they had to hide at least one man.

“Virgil said, ‘By God, I sure thought I was gonna get it.’ He says, ‘I thought my day had come.’ And he was under a tarp in the back of this car and they had that loaded with butter.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“It was an old REO Flying Cloud. You know what they are? A real old one. They didn’t make it more after the thirties, I don’t think.”

“A four-door?”

“I believe it was a four-door.”

“Okay now, who was in the car with him? That was the night Conniff was killed?”

“Yes.”

“He used to talk about that?”

“Yes.”

“Who was with him when he was in the car?”

“Well, I think that this Logan and Ralstin, the way he talked.”

Bamonte was pumped, riding the surge that comes with discovery. He repeated some of his earlier questions; he wanted to hear Pearl answer them again.

“Who did he say did the actual shooting?”

“He said that Clyde did it. He said, oh, he said Clyde did it. You know.”

Bamonte returned to the roadblock.

“Well, he said, he said that they went—that he was in the car when they were stopped. But he said it was either Logan or Ralstin that knew one of the guys that stopped him. And that’s why they went by so easy. But the one guy wanted to search them. And the one guy wouldn’t do it. He said.… ‘You’re clean.’ ”

“Did he ever mention who the policemen were who stopped him?”

“No. He said one of them was Ralstin’s buddy. That’s all he said.”

“That’s all? They let him go? And this was right after the murder?”

“Yeah. The same night.… Do you know who those guys were that stopped him?” Pearl asked.

“No. I’m trying to find that out.”

At Mother’s Kitchen in the first days after the killing, Virgil Burch was “an absolute wreck,” Pearl recalled. When she asked him what was wrong, he snapped at her. “I’m sick,” he said. But he grew stronger every day. Soon it was a joke, banter between him and Ralstin. What seemed particularly odd to Pearl was how open they were about it. “Who’d you kill today, Detective?” Everybody at Mother’s shared in the laugh.

One cop in particular came to mind. “Did you know Jimmy Manning?” Pearl asked Bamonte.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, I used to walk his beat with him when I would get off work at midnight … I was young and full of life and knew him quite well. And I knew he was married, see.… I’d walk with him maybe five or six blocks and I’d say, ‘Jimmy, I gotta go now, I gotta go.’ And I was married, see.”

“You were both married?”

“But I was just being a smart aleck, see. But he thought he had something going.…”

And she was off with Jimmy Manning for five minutes—dancing at a beer hall, pulling his shirt out of his pants when she was mad at him, daring him to arrest her. Pearl could not talk about Manning without feeling the blend of guilt and pleasure that is the moral imprint of Catholicism. Bamonte had not asked Pearl for any details of her nights with him, but she wanted this story out.

The sheriff tried to steer her back to his case. “Now, Manning—the
same guy who was trying to hustle you—he was telling you all this stuff. What all did he tell you about the murder?”

“He knew about that gun being thrown over the—the,… whatchacallem.”

“So he thought it was Ralstin that killed the marshal.”

“Yes. He knew all about it. Every policeman in town knew about it.”

“What did he tell you about it?”

“He said … he just said … ‘Virgil and Ralstin is in this business of stealing and robbing and making a living like that.’ He said, ‘I’m not gonna do nothing about it.’ ”

Tiny Stafford, the three-hundred-pound patrolman, was another regular at Mother’s. He claimed he was going to do something about Ralstin, Pearl recalled. “He said, ‘There’s gonna be some investigations about this. There’s gonna be somebody that’s not going to be around here very long—you know, talk like that. He was gonna see that this was done. But he never did anything either.”

“Was he on the take? Was he honest?”

“I heard he used to go to these sporting houses downtown.… He’d go in there and demand money from them … and take it—you know, for hush money.”

“Okay now—after they shot Conniff, did they steal the dairy products and then take off, or had they already had some—”

“They had it loaded.”

“They already had it loaded?”

“Yes. And they were trying to go back for more. They didn’t have it all. They only had butter. They had butter but they didn’t have cream. Virgil said, ‘That’s the only thing that didn’t make my day.’ Because, he says, ‘We lost our cream.’ ”

In recounting the crime over dinner in Portland, Burch laughed throughout, Pearl said—crowing about how “we pulled it off, we got away with it.” One of the few things that still surprised Bamonte, a cop for twenty-three years, was a killer’s lack of remorse. In the Conniff case, the women alone—Pearl, Ruth, and later Mangan’s daughter, Rose—carried the weight of conscience from September 1935.

“They made light of it,” Pearl said. “To think that a life had been taken. Somebody ought to just bang them one.”

Bamonte had this trio—Ralstin, Burch, Logan—pictured. He had known people like them in high school in Metaline Falls. He had known them in Vietnam. He had known them on the Spokane police force. He had a simple, old-fashioned word for Ralstin—“bully.” As he listened to Pearl, his stomach tightened and his fist balled; he wanted to tangle with them.

“Do you have a picture of Virgil?”

“I could have gotten a picture of him.”

“Where?”

“From Helen. But she’s dead now. You see, they went to Missoula and he got into a mess over there and she divorced him.”

“Is Virgil dead now?”

“Oh yeah. He’s been dead quite a while.”

“And Logan’s dead?”

“Is he?” She wasn’t sure what had become of Logan.

Ralstin, of course, was the one Bamonte really wanted. The last time Pearl had seen him was about 1937, two years after the killing. He came into Mother’s Kitchen and said goodbye. He was off to South America, he said, with a new bride, Dorothy, one of the waitresses. They were going to make a killing in the frontier of South America, where a man could still carve out his personal fiefdom with nothing but a rifle and strong will.

“He came into the restaurant and said, ‘I’m not a policeman anymore.’ He said, ‘There’s gonna be some of those SOBs over there pay for this,’ only he used the full word—I won’t say it.”

Bamonte asked Pearl if there was anything else she wanted to bring up. She said no, she had covered most everything she could remember from those days. The sheriff closed his notebook, turned off his tape recorder, and thanked her.

“It’s not you who should be thanking me but me who should be thanking you.”

“Why’s that, Pearl?”

For fifty-four years she had tried to tell the story to somebody, but nobody had ever listened with enough interest to want to do anything
about it. So Pearl and her sister had kept the story to themselves; they were never able to find a comfortable place to lodge the secret.