Breaking Blue (21 page)

Tony noticed other ominous signs in the valley: the resort and cafe that always drew a respectable clientele along the river’s banks in summer was for sale. Tourism was supposed to be the future for the Pend Oreille; if the resort had no confidence in the coming years, what should everyone else think?

Bamonte wanted just to sit down with Betty and tell her everything: the discoveries from the Stone Fortress, his fears that their marriage—like the town—was dying. But that would involve exposure, showing wounds. What he knew from his father was that emotional concealment equaled strength. He also knew that his father was wrong. But changing a life habit—where do you start?

He went into his study for another session with the men and women from 1935—just a peek, he told himself, a quick escape. He opened the new batch of information from the civil service archives in the missile silo. Sonnabend had been a model officer, just as everyone said, a big, sturdy cop with a commendable record. Dan Mangan was another story. His personnel file was full of citations and warnings—supervisory descriptions of a far different man than the gimpy old tavern owner who had led him to the bridge a few weeks ago. One letter in particular caught Bamonte’s eye. It was dated May 14, 1946, and addressed to the Spokane police chief.

Bamonte recognized the reporting officer: Hacker Cox, identified by Mangan as his longtime partner.

The narrative on Mangan in his personnel file ended a month after he bashed his wife’s head into the wall. The note from June 3, 1946, was addressed to the Police Pension Board.

Wasn’t that just like the police department, Bamonte thought. Sometimes, he was truly ashamed to be a cop. He loved the discoveries, the adrenaline that comes with a chase, the resolutions, the authority. But he also knew too many people who became cops for the wrong reason, seeing the badge as a license to bully. Mangan’s file was full of the kind of crimes that would land most men in jail. He took payments from bootleggers, burglarized stores, and nearly killed his wife. His reward, after such a distinguished career, was a disability pension and six months of sick-leave pay to get him started. Then he was off to Hungry Horse, where he lived off the thirst of dam builders.

A basic question about Mangan remained unanswered. What was it that made him now give up the story of tossing the piece in the river? Was he still trying to protect someone—himself, perhaps? A conscience as shriveled as Mangan’s was not so easily self-started.

The sheriff dialed Rosemary Miller; he needed another session with Mangan. Something more. Shake and scratch and kick and dig. You never know. Wasn’t there something Mangan might still want to talk about—a small detail, a minor fact?

But Rose had bad news: her father had just suffered another stroke—not a big one, but significant. He was in the hospital, in no shape to talk.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, Bamonte tangled with the other Mangan, Spokane’s chief of police, who was mad over an article in the Newport
Miner
. The weekly newspaper of the Pend Oreille had elevated Bamonte-bashing to the journalistic equivalent of aerobics. But in late April, with their sheriff receiving attention in newspapers around the world, the
Miner
ran a rare complimentary article about Bamonte, a long piece on the state of the Conniff investigation. When asked why he was spending county time on the case—at fifteen dollars an hour, was the sheriff
really
giving the taxpayers their due?—he explained that because there was no statute of limitations on murder, he was bound by law to investigate all new evidence.

“My major concern is to solve this and to put it to rest for the sake
of the family,” Bamonte told the paper. “I have never seen a victim of an unsolved tragedy with peace of mind and the Conniff family is no exception. I owe it to our community and the Conniff family to extend our best efforts.”

One of the main problems, he said, was the Spokane Police Department; they were not fully cooperating. Bamonte said he had tried to lay out the importance of the case to the chief, but the man never bothered to respond directly.

After the
Miner
story appeared, Chief Mangan fired off a letter to the paper, saying his department had cooperated as best it could with the sheriff. He said he had assigned Lieutenant Gary Johnson, head of the department’s internal affairs unit, to assist Bamonte, but that the resources of the Spokane Police Department were badly stretched. “Perhaps it is time to remind Sheriff Bamonte that his case is exactly that—a Pend Oreille County case. We certainly could ‘lay out the importance’ of our current Spokane Police caseload, which includes recent unsolved murders, rapes etc.” Pend Oreille County, he wrote, had no murders in 1987, the most recent year for which full crime statistics were available, while Spokane had sixteen.

Bamonte felt humiliated and hurt when he read the letter. If he was to solve this case, he would have to do it with the largest neighboring police department as an obstruction. Chief Mangan’s tone sounded patronizing. Why all the nastiness and sarcasm?

Bamonte penned him a private note. “It is interesting that you can take the time to write your negative, misleading and uninformed letter to the newspaper; however, you have been above responding to me personally,” he wrote. “I will not trouble you about this case again and I am truly sorry about your apathy. This appears to be just another slap in the face to the Conniff family from the Spokane Police Department.”

B
Y MID
-A
PRIL
, the sheriff had yet to receive anything from Spokane police on their former detective Clyde Ralstin. The Conniff investigation, after a burst of fresh information in March and early April, was stalled again. Bamonte added up his case: he had a police report,
from an interview with long-dead Charley Sonnabend, in which Ralstin was named as Conniff’s killer. He had the troubling death of Sheriff Elmer Black, falling from a bridge shortly after he tried to reopen the investigation in 1955. He had a near-dead witness, Dan Mangan, who said he and his partner had disposed of a gun a few days after the killing on the instructions of a Spokane police captain, in order to protect Detective Ralstin. It all added up to an intriguing tale. But where was the physical evidence to back the story? The gun? Fingerprints? Blood samples? Or a living suspect—Logan, Ralstin? The case was built on sand.

But the net was still out there; Bamonte was still trolling. In the third week of April, he snagged another voice from 1935.

He received a call from a woman who thought she could help solve the case. She had read about the Pend Oreille sheriff in the newspaper and had wanted to call earlier, but her husband said she shouldn’t get involved. She might even be vulnerable to prosecution, as an accomplice. Morally, she felt dirty, and wanted to wash herself of this secret.

“I know who killed that man Conniff,” the woman told the sheriff over the phone. Her voice was distant, like a scratchy record, yet showed some feistiness and strength. “And I can help you prove it.”

“When can I meet you?” Bamonte asked, ready to camp on her lawn if necessary.

“You can’t use my name in the paper. Because my husband, he doesn’t want me to get involved too deep and get my name in the paper. He said it doesn’t look good at my age. He said that a lot of people would say, ‘She’s just an old bag trying to get her name in the paper.’ ”

Bamonte promised not to release her name without her permission. At her suggestion they agreed, for the time being, to call Pearl Keogh “Ms. X.”

P
EARL
K
EOGH
was tiny, overwhelmed by her overcoat, with eyes the color of a muddied sky. She drove herself to Sak’s Restaurant, amidst the sprawl of ranch-house suburbia east of Spokane known as the Valley, and then she looked around for the man whose picture had been in the paper. When she found Tony Bamonte she said, “You’re quite a handsome young guy.”

They sat in a booth during the lunch hour, the elfin eighty-five-year-old woman and the cop, as the burger train went back and forth. Pearl ordered coffee and kept her coat on. She was a nurse, she explained, and her life had a symmetry that bolstered her belief in divine justice. Sin was like excess weight: the more you put on, the harder it was to lose. But the same thing went for virtue. When she was a girl, going to school with Flathead Indians on the floor of a grand valley shadowed by the Mission Mountains, the Sisters of Providence took care of her. And when she was older, in her sixties and seventies, she nursed some of those same nuns through their dying days.

Try as she might, Pearl believed that she had not lived a perfect life. Her sense of adventure, her mischievousness, and her pride sometimes led her to do things she later regretted. She loved to flirt. Though married, she sometimes went to Mother’s Kitchen during
the bottomed-out days of the Depression, because the men said flattering things, and the cops radiated action. They had pride and a paycheck—two legs at a time when many people couldn’t walk. It was better at Mother’s than going home to empty cupboards and a husband thrown out of work—Hoovered, as they called it. Also, bootleg gin and whiskey were plentiful at the diner, which meant there was always a party of sorts. Pearl didn’t drink, but she confessed to finding some people more interesting after a few shots of hooch. Cops and whiskey and the nurse: after midnight, it was seldom dull at Mother’s Kitchen. She told Bamonte that some of the boys used to call her “ ‘sweetie,’ ‘honey,’ and all that crap.”

The sheriff turned on his tape recorder. He asked his first questions in a commanding voice, well above his usual soft tones. Pearl told him he didn’t have to talk so loud; her hearing was fine. And he shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming she was some weak old lady. Just a few summers back, she had wrestled a king salmon half her size into the bow of a boat riding the swells of the Pacific off the Washington coast.

Over the phone, she had mentioned that she used to hang out at Mother’s during the 1930s because her sister, Ruth, worked as a cook and manager there. When Pearl’s late-night shift at Sacred Heart Hospital was over, she usually walked down the hill to Mother’s. Bamonte brought up their earlier conversation as a starting point.

“You were telling me about the wrappings from the Newport Creamery on this—”

“Yes.” Pearl jumped right in, hastening back to 1935 and the nights spent with Virgil Burch, Clyde Ralstin, Dan Mangan, and a three-hundred-pound cop named Tiny Stafford. She described Ralstin as the power at Mother’s: “sneaky-eyed … he would never look right at you when he talked to you, and I always feel if you’re gonna talk to somebody at least give ’em an eye once in a while, you know.” Burch, Ralstin’s buddy, the owner of Mother’s was blue-eyed, light-haired, a womanizer who could flatter and scorn with the same sentence. She remembered Mangan as “Danny”—a garrulous sort, always talking up his latest scam. Every cop at Mother’s seemed to have something going on the side.

“They would complain,” she said. “They didn’t want to arrest anybody, because there was no money to feed them. They had no money. The county was broke.”

As she talked, plates full of food, picked-over sandwiches, half-eaten salads, and soups gone cold passed by on their way to the garbage. Pearl narrowed her big eyes. “Tony, money was tight.”

Mother’s Kitchen was an oasis of hot food and fast talk, and it never closed, Pearl said. But she had not contacted Bamonte to talk about her social life a half-century ago.

“When my sister was cooking there and managing the restaurant for Zada and Virgil, she was very suspicious because he brought butter in without wrappers on it, and she asked and wondered why the wrappers were missing, and he said, well, he just thought it was better to bring the butter in and save her from unwrapping them. Well, she said that was good enough. So then she emptied some garbage one day and she found these wrappers, two or three of them that hadn’t been destroyed. And she looked at them, and then she jumped Virgil about it. Virgil says, ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I bought some butter from them.…’

“See, after this man was murdered and this talk was going on and around and around about everybody knew who did it and they wouldn’t say nothing about it, she took the wrappers to the sheriff.… Well, he said he would try to look into it and see what was wrong, and she said, ‘I think it merits an investigation, because there’s been too much butter, cream, cottage cheese, and whatever dairy products that they use there has been brought in.’ And she says, ‘I’ve been suspicious for a long time but I can’t do it on my own.’ Well, he says, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ That was it. So, anyway, she got real upset about the whole thing and she left, she said, ‘I can’t work under these conditions.’ ”