Breaking Blue (5 page)

T
HROUGHOUT
the first two weeks of September, people from distant towns and dusty fields continued to funnel into Spokane, and the sun burned hot and ceaseless as never before. Monday, 92 degrees; Tuesday, 97; Wednesday, 95; Thursday, 97; Friday, 97. Here was the weekend, seven days to the start of fall, with the sky bleached and shapeless, the wheat fields limp and rusted. The forests smoldered as one fire embraced another. What came from overhead was not rain but ashes, the fine residue of burnt pine needles. The Spokane River, carrying the last collection of mountain water sucked from the summits of the Coeur d’Alenes, forced itself through the ancient channel from the Idaho border, passing the beige orchards on the way to the falls of the city, where the torrent had shrunk to a trickle, exposing the polished skin of big rocks.

It was the scent of jobs and water that had lured these families to the inland Northwest, stirred by President Roosevelt’s dream. The largest of the Roosevelt’s WPA projects was the Grand Coulee Dam, a scheme to subjugate the Columbia River, mightiest waterway in the West, and fill an ancient, dried-out coulee ninety miles east of Spokane with water. The idea was to deliver, through irrigation, the basic lubricant of life to a high plateau that was then the domain of sage and rattlesnakes. Spokane newspapers blasted the project as a
“socialist scheme,” but their criticism meant very little outside of the South Hill and the Spokane Club. As Will Rogers said at the time, “If Roosevelt burned down the Capital we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.’ ”

On a tour of the region, Roosevelt said, “There are many sections of the country where land has run out or been put to the wrong kind of use. Out here, you have not just space, you have space that can be used by human beings—a wonderful land—a land of opportunity.” In between feature screenings of
G-Men
, a James Cagney crime picture picture of 1935, newsreels around the country showed surveyors and engineers running along the length of the future dam site—the Great Pyramid of our times, it was called, the biggest construction project in history.

But when the new arrivals, their legs stiff and their necks sore, departed trains in Spokane and looked around for work or water, they were told the Grand Coulee wasn’t hiring yet and wouldn’t need an army of excavators for some time. Like the tumbleweeds that whisked across the Columbia Plateau, they were supposed to blow away, move on to some other place. But for many of them this was it—the end of the road in the far corner of the country. Stuck in Spokane, the migrants were shooed away from the rail yards east of town, the dense village of other broken families living off what could be taken from boxcars or pulled from the river. They were told they might find shelter at the Hotel de Gink, a former brewery which had shut down during Prohibition and was now a concrete warehouse for temporary residents of Spokane. Only men were allowed in the Gink; it was a place of knife fights and alliances based on accents. Some men who had spent time in the old brewery said they preferred jail to the filth of the hotel. Other families ended up downstream, just below the falls, where the mid-river band of the Spokane Indians had once gathered for a month of spearing the hefty chinook salmon. There, on the north bank of the river, beneath the thousand-foot arch of the Monroe Street Bridge, another village arose. A steep path with a wire cable for guidance led down the rock-and-earthen bank to a squatters’ settlement at the river’s edge. Some of the newcomers found work in the woods, at three dollars a day, which was enough to bring home
food and maybe keep a little hidden for particularly lean weeks. If they stopped for a drink on the way home, the path to the river was particularly hazardous. Oftentimes, a man would lose his footing, stumble down the embankment, and drown. The city leaders did not like these transplants; they were an embarrassment, one councilman said, a nest of Reds and Okies and drifters. And so it was proposed that the transient village be doused with gasoline and set afire.

I
NSIDE
M
OTHER
’
S
K
ITCHEN
, on Riverside Avenue, midway between the Hotel de Gink and the Stone Fortress, the world maintained a certain routine, directed by a tight circle of men who had found a way to profit from hard times. The diner’s doors never closed. There was a long bar near the kitchen, the stools invariably occupied by at least one man in uniform. Mother’s fed and watered the working policeman, free. In turn, the working policeman made sure that no harm came to Mother’s. Much like the Stone Fortress, Mother’s was a safehouse for police secrets—where food and drink went with furtive sidelines and black humor, deal-making and payoffs. The restaurant was no place for scruffy Civilian Conservation Corps trail-builders from the East—more than twelve thousand men, each given two blankets and outfitted in leftover clothes and boots from World War I, now filled the camps and shelters of the inland Northwest—or migrants looking to spend half a day’s wages on what was arguably the best steak in town. Because the town was so full of strangers, the regulars at Mother’s Kitchen grew more defensive of what they had. Some of the city’s most important bootleggers had regular booths there, in part because a budding bootlegger, Virgil A. Burch, the manager and part-owner of the place, lived in a room in the back, with his latest wife and a wood-eating parrot.

Burch came from Montana, where he’d been imprisoned for cattle-rustling on what he said was a bum rap. Making his way west, he was arrested in Idaho for bootlegging, but avoided a prison term. Arriving in Spokane, he learned the plumber’s trade and worked throughout the area. But he despised pipe work, the grease and green-rusted toilets and no respect; it only made him feel more insecure.
He married five women during his life, and even during his younger days he needed the constant attention of a new bride. When he walked across the Monroe Street Bridge and saw the broken families huddled by the river’s shore in the canyon below, it made him shiver. He would ride in his new Hudson up to the Tudor mansions on the South Hill, passing a long line of the defeated who waited for soup and bread at Sacred Heart Hospital. Life’s losers, he called them. He would rather die than fall among their ranks.

Burch had accumulated enough of a stake from an old mine in Montana to become a partner in Mother’s Kitchen. But even when his restaurant became the hottest ticket in town for mid-level deal-makers and all-night grazers, Burch wanted much more. It was one thing to have a diner; it was another to be the center of a self-manufactured world. He was especially enamored of the police detectives who drove new cars, wore tailored suits, and told everybody else how to run their business.

Burch scoured the city looking for women. He liked them young, attractive, vulnerable to his manipulations. Burch himself was fair-skinned, bulky but not fat, with cinnamon-colored curly hair; he could not easily have been described as handsome, but that is how he thought of himself. By mid-September 1935, he had twenty-nine women on his payroll—the best-looking girls in town, he bragged. Some waitresses at Mother’s seldom served food; they were hired to be part of the scenery. They would appear at booths out of nowhere, smiling between main course and apple pie to ask if everything was swell. The customers were allowed a wink-and-pinch tolerance that went so far, depending on how wobbly Burch’s ego was on a given day.

Just as the garage across the street was a fender-fixer by day and a liquor-warehousing operation by night, Mother’s Kitchen had a dual purpose. Under the hand of Burch, ex-con and cattle-rustler, bootlegger and plumber, Mother’s trafficked in products that were in short supply. In August and September, Burch sold great quantities of butter and cream which seemed to come out of thin air. Cars would come and go at night, bringing in deliveries of butter. So, throughout the driest summer of the maturing twentieth century, when butter
reached its highest price in decades and was rationed by the few wholesalers who could get their hands on normal supplies, Mother’s Kitchen had a surfeit. Burch let the word leak out around town to other restaurants that if they wanted creamery products, he was willing to sell. At first, some merchants balked. They were suspicious and angry: how come Mother’s Kitchen had such a bounty? But when they walked in to see the product, or talk price, or snoop around for evidence to use against Burch, they saw cops—at least a pair in uniform, ingesting a free meal, and always one detective in a three-piece suit: a tall, rock-fisted man named Clyde Ralstin.

A young patrolman, acting on the suspicions of merchants, walked into Mother’s Kitchen to investigate the butter surfeit; the probe ended when he saw Detective Ralstin. People either feared Ralstin or worshipped him. And some worshipped him out of fear. Those who looked up to him gathered at Mother’s to hear his stories of bedding women and besting challengers to his boast of being the toughest man in town. At just over six foot three inches tall—with a fifty-four-inch chest—Ralstin towered over all but one man at the Stone Fortress. He had a long, pointed nose, green eyes, and showed dimples when he smiled. In silk vest, pressed fedora, gleaming shoes, he didn’t look like a man who earned forty-two dollars a week. He was the best marksman on the police force, and certainly the best-known fighter. Several times a week, he took on contenders inside the Stone Fortress. Nobody ever pinned him. But as strong as Ralstin was physically, his real power came from psychological intimidation. He knew a little bit—the right information—about everybody who might have some control over him. He traded in these small secrets, the shadings of character that could determine a career or break a marriage. It was, until the late summer of 1935, his black-market specialty.

By 1935, after seven years as a cop, Ralstin seemed to have enough ammunition on his police colleagues to see him through the roughest of times. He needed it, because his career was then in decline, and his marriage, to Monnie Elliott, was falling apart. When he liked another woman, he simply went after her. By the mid-1930s, he liked a lot of women, most of them introduced to him by his best friend,
Burch. When Monnie objected, he blew up at her: it was none of her goddamn business what he did outside the house. After a while, he rarely came home or made any pretense about monogamy or trying to stay together.

But he adored his wife’s daughter, Ruby. She was barely a teenager when Clyde introduced her to liquor, taking her into a speakeasy and ordering her a whiskey sour. She coughed; he laughed. “Swallow it, kid; it’ll make a man out of you.” He seldom mentioned anything to his stepdaughter about police work, unless something had happened that he found funny. He told her once about an acquaintance of his, a fellow cop, who would spend the first part of his shift walking down one side of the street, drinking a pint of whiskey; in the second half, he would walk down the other side, consuming another pint. His doctor told him he was going to kill himself if he continued this routine. So, rather than give up drinking and patrolling, the cop went home and blew his brains out. Clyde nearly fell to the floor from laughing as he told the story to his stepdaughter.

When Ruby was in her early twenties, she married. Ralstin hated his new son-in-law, a car salesman. On a November night in 1934, Ralstin went over to their house, a few blocks from his own home on the North End, and started slapping around Ruby’s husband, a much smaller man. Clyde dragged him out into the street, knocked him to the ground, and kicked his head against the pavement. Blood poured out of one side of the young man’s head; his face was smashed in and he could no longer resist. In the midst of this pummeling, a gas station attendant, Monte Adams, who had just ended his work shift walked by. Seeing the younger man on the ground, attacked by a windmill of fists, Adams screamed at Ralstin to stop. Ralstin told him to back off, mind his own business. Neighbors peered out from behind drapes. Lights came on. Fearing that Ralstin would kill the man, Adams jumped atop Ralstin, who threw him to the ground. While they wrestled, Ralstin’s service revolver fell out. Adams grabbed the gun and pointed it at Clyde.

In a few minutes, a patrol car arrived. When the two officers stepped out, they immediately recognized Detective Ralstin. “He tried to kill me,” Ralstin said of Adams. Pointing to his wounded son-in-law
on the ground, Ralstin said that the boy was drunk and had been beating his wife. The gas station attendant and the young man were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

At their trial, they were found not guilty by a judge who said there was no evidence to back the charge. “The man who was most guilty and was the cause of the disorder was not arrested for some reason,” the judge said in dismissing the case. He knew the reason, of course—no Spokane cop was going to arrest a brother, no matter what the offense. But the judge went no further than his comments from the bench.

The fight enhanced Ralstin’s reputation among fellow officers and at Mother’s Kitchen, where he spent most of his time while on duty. To his renown as a wrestler and marksman was added the designation as a man with an undefeated pair of fists.

Ralstin and Burch were the closest of friends. They told each other they had the best women, the best food, the best booze, and the best clothes in a bad time. They shared a hunting cottage near Superior, Montana, not far from the old placer mine Burch had picked up. Ralstin loved to kill things—in season or out. He and Burch shot deer, elk, cougar, grouse, marten, even an occasional buffalo. They shared women from the talent pool that Burch brought through Mother’s. And they shared a vision, born of failed schemes, that the needs of hungry people could bring untold riches to a plumber and a cop.

W
ITH EVERY NEW DAY
of the drought, Spokane’s butter shortage grew worse. Mother’s controlled one of the largest local supplies of the scarce commodity, and they were selling it as fast as they could bring it in. Nearly two thousand pounds of butter from different creameries had moved in and out of Mother’s Kitchen in late summer of 1935—appearing by night, from some furtive connection. Now, two weeks into September, they needed a fresh load. Burch knew of a creamery in Newport, forty-seven miles north of town on the Idaho-Washington border. He had worked on the place as a plumber and was familiar with the doors, the locks, the volume of creamery products moved in and out. It would be a piece of cake. They could take
Saturday night, service a couple of women Burch knew in the neighboring timber town of Priest River, and then hit the Newport Creamery on the way home. It would be one of their biggest butter heists.