Breaking Blue (8 page)

Nothing angered a lawman, even a corrupt one, more than the shooting of a cop. Life was a war; the bad guys could gain the upper hand, or retreat, but if they took out a foot soldier in uniform, somebody from the other side had to die. As news of the shooting spread, police from all over the inland Northwest volunteered to help track and find whoever had murdered Marshal Conniff. Hard times had brought a surge of lawlessness to the West: robberies, rapes, assaults, drunkenness, burglary—the new America was frightening. But even then, homicide was rare. In all of 1934, not a single killing happened in Spokane. The previous year there had been only two murders. Now, not quite nine months into 1935, two cops had been shot—the
town marshal of Rosalia, south of Spokane, and Marshal Conniff in the village to the north. Bursts of anger and outrage came from the Spokane mayor, the chief of police, the sheriff, the United States marshal, and the county prosecutor. They would spare no expense, in manpower or resources, to find the killers. This was not the Old West, they thundered, but a civilized area, the richest empire in the Western Hemisphere.

On Monday morning, September 16, Bill Parsons joined several other Spokane police officers in a search for the marshal’s killers. At roll call, the basic plan was outlined: they would surround the city and move in toward the center, squeezing the dirt out. Eventually, they would find the cop killer. Officer Dan Mangan led a patrol of men out to Hillyard, the rail yards east of town, where hundreds of homeless people camped. They were told not to return unless they came back with a suspect.

The transient village, Spokane’s biggest Hooverville, exuded a stench of campfires, garbage, and clothes worn for weeks without washing. Everybody smelled of fire, the children especially. They were used to being kicked around, the farmer families who picked hops and apples or cut wood by day and then returned to the camps at night. But they had rarely seen anything like the ferocity of this search, aided by billy clubs. Mangan swatted heads and kicked rib cages. The tall, bespectacled cop was on a tear.

“Anybody here see two guys show up in a car last night?”

No, sir.

“Butter? How ’bout it? You bindle stiffs seen a load of butter moving around here?”

Butter? Nobody in this gulch of despair had seen butter for months, and if they had, word would have spread. Folks in the camp were living off brown apples and potato soup. They boiled water in tin cans and cleaned what they could in the river. Butter? No, sir. Not in this heat wave. It wouldn’t keep any longer than a Popsicle on pavement.

Then it was on to the boxcars. The officers went through the cars one by one, looking for the hiding, sniveling bastards who had gunned the marshal down and then put a final bullet into him as he lay on the ground. Seven rail lines came into Spokane from all directions,
bringing in silver, wheat, timber, apples. But the most common cargo of 1935 was the broken men and women from the dry lands of the West and the Plains. Searching the boxcars, the patrolmen found tiny, urine-fouled homes in darkened corners. How could people live like this? This town was going down the toilet.

Empty-handed, the police search team headed for the Hotel de Gink. Perhaps the killers were trying to blend in with the rest of the Okie trash, as they called the inhabitants of the former brewery. They searched rooms where hollow-eyed men awoke to the light of another hot day and a Monday-morning hangover. The Gink smelled worse than the boxcars. People had made small fires in their rooms to cook. The cots were yellowed and flat, stained by moonshine and lovemaking. An Italian immigrant was found with a gun; they slapped him around and chained him to a post while they looked for other suspects. There was plenty of hooch in most rooms of the Hotel de Gink; plenty of gambling slips from the Chinese lottery game. But no butter. “The Indian did it!” one man said in desperation. “Yes,” a friend seconded, “check the Indian!” The officers rousted an alcoholic native, red-eyed, mumbling when they woke him. He was chained next to the Italian. By day’s end, the search had produced a handful of warm bodies: a smart-mouth, a troublemaker, a goddamn Okie with an attitude, the Italian, the Indian. There was nothing to tie any of them to the robbery of the Newport Creamery or the killing of Marshal Conniff. But it was enough to get the officers back into the station without a tongue-lashing from the shift captain.

V
IRGIL
B
URCH
had showed up at Mother’s Kitchen early Sunday morning, just before dawn. He looked terrible, nervous and frayed. Pearl Keogh was still there, waiting for Ruth to get off work. She had never seen Virgil so tense. When she asked him what was up, he yelled at her to keep quiet. A few police officers, the usual contingent of uniformed stool-dwellers, were still at the diner. Burch went to a back room, and when he reappeared nearly an hour later his face was pale. He paced behind the bar, walked around the restaurant, undistracted by the familiar banter.

Just after dawn, Detective Ralstin appeared, a sight better than the sun. He looked clean and well kept, his green eyes clear, and never more commanding. Virgil rushed over to him, but Clyde made a motion with his hand, like a master slowing down his overanxious pup. Clyde flashed a grin at Pearl, ordered coffee.

“You heard about the shooting?” Pearl asked him. Even before it hit the papers, the cops who spent most of their shift at Mother’s Kitchen had spread the word.

“What do
you
hear?” Clyde asked, his voice as slow as crank-case oil.

“The marshal,” she said. “Somebody gunned down the Newport marshal last night. Shot him in the back.”

Clyde stared at Pearl, an interrogatory hold with his eyes. At six foot three, he was a full head taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the nurse from Montana. “And …?”

“That’s all I heard,” she said.

Clyde sat down, holding back a smile. He looked up at Virgil and winked. “Relax,” he told his buddy.

“So they shot the marshal?” he said to Pearl, flashing his teeth, showing his dimples. “In the back, you say?”

“That’s what the boys are saying.”

“Shouldn’t ever turn your back to anybody.”

Now Virgil eased up a bit. Clyde was so commanding. “Shouldn’t ever turn your back to anybody,” he echoed.

“What kind of smokepole he use?” Clyde asked.

“Smokepole?” Pearl asked.

“A rifle? Forty-five? What?”

“Didn’t hear.”

Clyde sipped his coffee, checked his watch, and turned to Virgil. “I’m going out of town for a few days,” he said.

“I’m going with you,” Virgil said.

“No, you’re not. It wouldn’t look good.”

“You can’t leave me here, Clyde.”

Ralstin told Burch to calm his nerves and settle his heart. He would be gone for only a day or so—just enough to establish his whereabouts
this weekend. His brother Chub had a place down by the Snake River in the traditional home of the Nez Percé Indians, not far from where Ralstin was raised. If anybody asked, Clyde was hunting with Chub. Gone the whole weekend.

He didn’t want to be away from Dorothy, the waitress at Mother’s, for too long. Now in the process of shedding his wife, Clyde had been sampling some of Virgil’s talent, as he called it: the redhead from Idaho … the blonde with the big lips. And now he was moving closer to Dorothy.

“What if somebody comes to see me?” Virgil asked. “Starts asking questions?”

“Nobody’s gonna ask you any questions, Virgil.”

Clyde whispered something in his ear. Virgil seemed to relax. Clyde always made him feel good. Nothing could touch him as long as the big detective was around.

On his way out the door, Clyde tipped his fedora to a pair of uniforms sitting in a booth. He slowed to wink at Pearl. When she looked away, his face turned hard, an instant threat. Pearl was afraid, but she tried not to show it. Clyde squeezed Pearl’s arm and motioned toward her sister. She had three kids to support, right?

Yes, Ruth had three little ones at home.

And no husband?

He was in the sanitarium, under treatment for tuberculosis.

“Wouldn’t want anything to happen to those kids,” Clyde said to Pearl.

“My God, no! Clyde Ralstin, what on earth are you talking about?”

He loosened his grip, smiled. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

T
HE DOCTORS
removed three bullets from the body of George Conniff. A fourth slug, which had passed through the marshal, was found in the side of the creamery building. Two of the bullets had soft-nosed casings and two were harder, made of steel. They all looked as if they came from a .32-caliber pistol. It was possible that all four were fired from the same gun, since it was not unusual to load a
single weapon with both steel and lead casings. In any event, the bullets were placed in evidence, with the intention of sending them to the crime lab for precise analysis on what sort of gun had fired them.

George Conniff was buried on Tuesday afternoon, September 17, at the Greenwood Cemetery in Spokane. The funeral procession was led by a motorcycle brigade from the Spokane Police Department. The sky was full of clouds, and light rain fell on the mourners at the cemetery. Alma Conniff, left now without a home or a husband, was helped by her three children. She had no idea what she might do to survive this hard year of 1935, no idea where to go, even. The house had burned down, and now George was dead. In Newport, merchants suspended business for one hour in the afternoon to commemorate their slain marshal. Everybody said it wasn’t fair. Conniff had worked so hard. He was a good man, honest, who’d hit a patch of bad luck and had been trying so hard to put himself back together. He was building the log cabin, the new family home, and he was going to take things a bit easier. Conniff had very few enemies, even after his years as police chief in Sandpoint. He was good with people, fair. He understood that mean times made people do things they wouldn’t normally do. But killing a man over butter? What animal would stoop so low?

When members of the Conniff family asked Elmer Black, the sheriff of Pend Oreille County, about the progress of the investigation, he assured them that the killers would soon be found. Police from eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia were checking all the railroad depots, the major roads, the hobo camps, the Hoovervilles, the jails, the bars, the union halls, the fire camps. The four bullet casings were on their way to a lab for forensic analysis. Before long, the sheriff expected, he’d know exactly what kind of gun had been used, and its year and make. Already a few leads were starting to trickle in. The killers would screw up, he told the family—they always did. Something would leak out; somebody would make a wrong move. Nobody killed a cop and got away with it.

*  *  *

A
RRIVING IN
S
POKANE
three days after the shooting, Black told reporters he was visiting tailors to check on a promising clue. Somebody had pawned a pair of fine wool, handmade trousers in Newport on Saturday night, an hour or so before the killing. Why would anyone sell his own pants, Elmer Black theorized, if he weren’t planning to leave town quick or if he weren’t desperate for money? Although an identification tag had been ripped out, most likely the pants belonged to one of the killers, he said. So Sheriff Black made the rounds of tailors in Spokane, pawned pants in hand, trying to find someone who could remember them.

He also brought to town a door removed from a garage in Priest River, Idaho, a mill town eleven miles east of Newport. A few hours after the shooting of Marshal Conniff, a green sedan had been stolen from the garage. The door to the garage had been covered with grease to deaden the noise of the break-in. Sheriff Black turned the door over to Spokane police, hoping they could lift fingerprints from it. The stolen car had been found in Spokane Sunday morning, abandoned, with a few half-eaten groceries in the backseat. “The theory that the stolen automobile may have been used by the bandits seems good,” the
Spokesman-Review
reported. “Priest River is only a few miles from Newport and it would have been relatively easy for the thugs to reach the town after the shooting.”

Black was under tremendous pressure. The sheriff was short and heavy, with a reputation for slow thinking and sloth. He was fifty years old, with wire-rim glasses and a fleshy double chin, a Republican who didn’t like the New Deal trail-building camp in his county and thought the world would return to normal if everybody just worked a little harder and the government minded its own goddamn business. Conniff had been a beloved figure in Newport, as evidenced by the memorial service at the Methodist church. Several hundred people crammed into the church; the room overheated with talk of vengeance. In the northern part of the county, in the mining town of Metaline Falls, members of the Rod and Gun Club talked of organizing a posse. The Conniff killing, coming one month after the
Rosalia shooting, fed a fire of vigilantism. Nobody felt safe. Anything of value—a creamery, a bank, a wheat silo—was vulnerable. More than half the people in Pend Oreille County were out of work. Those who could hold on, selling their dairy products through the Newport Creamery, now felt they were under siege. If two men were desperate enough to kill a marshal over butter, what might they do next?

Elected in 1934, Sheriff Black promised to bring order to an area where beer halls outnumbered churches and 90 percent of the county had never been penetrated by roads, let alone lawmen. His jurisdiction, the last county to be established in Washington, had more than eight hundred thousand acres of forest, and mountain peaks that reached heights of nearly eight thousand feet. With only a few thousand people, Pend Oreille County was broke in 1935; all services had been cut back except the most basic—enforcing the law. Fights with fists or knives were so common among workingmen of the Pend Oreille that the sheriff was seldom called to the scene unless somebody had been seriously wounded. At Kelly’s Tavern, Newport’s most popular bar, patrons in a fighting mood could wrestle with the black bear kept in a cage inside.

N
OBODY IN
S
POKANE
recognized the pawned pants. After striking out with the tailors, Sheriff Black began searching the transient camp a mile south of Newport. A riverfront Hooverville, the camp was an outdoor version of the Hotel de Gink. Men who had worked as farmhands or built houses during the go-go years of the Roaring Twenties took refuge there, hoping to snag day jobs, scratching together enough money to stay alive. They were paid fifty cents a cord, plus board and free work gloves, to cut and load firewood onto freight trains bound for Spokane. Black had his suspicions about this camp: it could provide easy camouflage for somebody running from the law. But a search of the camp, and a check with a few informants, produced no hint of butter thieves or anybody who had boasted of a recent windfall.