Breaking Blue (24 page)

Memory was selective, and if a lie could lodge itself long enough to become a fact, faulty. Conscience was more accurate. What the Conniff investigation had proved to Bamonte thus far was that most people could not outlive their pasts. The worst deeds of a lifetime could be buried or blurred to the point of being unrecognizable; but more often than not, they came back—the revenge of truth.

In his darkened room on a damp night in Metaline Falls, Bamonte heard the voices of killers trying to rationalize their deed, and he also heard the hauntings from his own past. What could possibly make Clyde Ralstin think he could kill a man and then live an entire life without facing justice? Bamonte asked himself the same question, in a slightly different form: could he repeat the sins of his mother, and
follow the same pattern of neglect as Bull Bamonte had done, without his own life falling apart? The query answered itself in the project he was staring at; the past, this place he had taken refuge in, was a manacle.

E
ARLY MORNING
, Bamonte was still at his desk. The room was cold, and he shivered. His home, a building that used to be one of the more elegant creations in Metaline Falls, seemed damp and crumbling. Until this spring, Bamonte never thought twice about the town’s hoary slogan, passed on by the company managers who ran the hamlet: that one day Metaline Falls would be all bustle and gloss, a brawny city in the valley of the Pend Oreille. Now he was thinking of getting out, trying to sell the building; there was no future in a grit-coated brick stack across the way from a fast-dying cement factory, no future in Metaline Falls. If he could get twenty thousand dollars for the place, he would consider himself lucky.

Bamonte was due at work in an hour. Except for editing polish, the thesis was now done. His writing legs were wobbly; for every sentence that had made it onto the paper, three went to the dump. He wondered if Professor Carey, and his fellow graduate students, would laugh at his finished project. He was sure they were sketching out bigger themes, while he kicked around something that belonged in the fruit cellar, wrapped in cobwebs. He had tried so hard to stay with the class, doing extra papers, asking about books that were not required. Still, he believed there was a good chance the professor would flunk him. He decided to close out the chapter on Marshal Conniff with some questions left unanswered. After all, the idea behind the project was not to solve long-dormant crimes but to produce a history of law enforcement in Pend Oreille County. The student ended his story of George Conniff with a discussion of the gun, a reflection, subconscious or otherwise, of the hole in the sheriff’s case. What Bamonte the investigator really needed was physical evidence—something solid to place on the table. Bamonte the student reached his own conclusions.

Initially, Bamonte thought the murder weapon might be tied conclusively
to Ralstin, because one of the pistols taken from Logan had been signed out by Clyde. Later, when the case was reopened briefly in 1957, that pistol—still in Sonnabend’s possession—was sent to the FBI to see if it matched the bullets that had been pulled from the body of Marshal Conniff. There was no match.

By Bamonte’s deduction, the gun used to kill the Newport marshal was the one that Mangan threw in the river in 1935, not the one taken from Logan by Sonnabend. The timing and circumstances, and Mangan’s precision, all pointed in that direction. In the half-century since the marshal was gunned down, the Spokane River’s course had been adjusted several times, not by a wide margin, but the upstream dam-builders had pinched the flow enough to alter the main channel. Mangan had pointed to the froth at the base of the waterfall, against a sheer rock wall, as the burial site for the gun. After his initial interview with Mangan, Bamonte had raised the idea of looking for the gun. Perhaps, at the low-water point of the year, the river could be searched. Spokane police were skeptical, to the point of ridicule. Another blast of angry letters from Pend Oreille taxpayers hit the newspapers. The police chief said, diplomatically, that it is always appropriate for law enforcement to investigate new leads, but his men were stretched. An old case like the Conniff murder would have to be weighed against the more pressing crimes of the day.

The head of Spokane’s internal investigations unit, Lieutenant Gary Johnson, also had his doubts about finding any physical evidence. Johnson was with the sheriff at the Police Guild when Mangan told him about throwing the gun in the river. He believed there had been a cover-up; he did not doubt that someone, long ago, in his own department had killed Marshal Conniff, and that the crime had been concealed, the secret kept, from generation to generation. But to Johnson, more worried about internal police concerns of the late twentieth century—officers who might be taking drug money to look away, or a shift supervisor who couldn’t work with female cops—the question of justice in a 1935 killing seemed too distant. It was like a hobby. When Bamonte raised the question of searching for the gun, Johnson echoed his chief’s words: the Conniff case was not a priority for the department.

Besides, he told the sheriff, he did not think the gun would still be lying around at the bottom of the river. “Fifty-four years is a lot of time,” he said.

The message—from the citizens of the Pend Oreille, from Spokane police, from the prosecutor, from friends—grew to a chorus: give it up.

In his thesis, Bamonte said the marshal’s murder was never vigorously investigated because the killer was a cop; there are no better protectors of their own kind than those sworn to uphold the law. He had no institutional remedy for this, a dilemma that was not unique to Spokane.

Most importantly, the Conniff case showed that conscience is a power that answers to its own rules. The burden of conscience had been passed on, like a baton in the night, from the original culprits to their sons and daughters and friends, a counterforce to the cover-up. Thus, by Bamonte’s reckoning, in this epic struggle between criminals protecting their own and the weight of conscience, the truth eventually had forced its way out. Even so, the institution of the Spokane Police Department continued to cover up, following its instinct for survival.

So, Bamonte concluded in the final words he wrote on the Conniff chapter, the river held the last and most important clue. And, of course, it was impossible to pull back the layers of water that ran over the burial site. A river could not be stopped, no more than a person could outrun his past, or an institution reform itself from within.

“Do you want some coffee or something?” Betty asked her husband, peeking into the study, startling him somewhat. She was fresh, her hair done nicely, dressed for work.

“Please.” She went back upstairs, and the student penned the last line of the Conniff section.

“There was no gun,” he wrote. “The Spokane River holds the final and irretrievable piece of evidence.”

O
N THE PHONE LINE
, Keith Hendrick, police chief of Lapwai, Idaho, said, “Sheriff Bamonte, please.”

“Can I tell him what this is regarding?”

“That murder case of his … the one from the Depression.”

This was hard for Hendrick—giving up an old friend, a man he had known for nearly half his life, a father figure. He still was not sure he had the nerve to follow through with it, so he got right to the point.

“Sheriff, the man you’re looking for is still alive.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re looking for Clyde Ralstin, that right?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” Bamonte answered. “Don’t know if he’s dead or run off or what the hell, but I’m—”

“You know where Saint Ignatius is?”

“Montana, somewhere.”

“Montana, north of Missoula. Clyde’s home.”

“Home?”

“Yes. He’s not dead. Or he wasn’t dead the last time I checked.”

“My God! Are you sure?”

Hendrick sketched out Ralstin, lean as a strip of jerky, a workhorse who used to cut ten cords of firewood every year, handy with a half-dozen
guns, a friend who valued loyalty over all else, at times mean enough to stop a train with his glare, but always on the Right Side.

“He have any trouble with the law?”

Hendrick fell silent.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here.” He wanted to laugh. “Sheriff, up until a few years ago, he was the law.”

“That’s what they said about him in Spokane, that he took the law into his own hands and—”

“No, I mean legally. He hired me as sheriff in 1969. He was our judge, our stability, the person who kept everything in line. He decided who went to jail and who didn’t, who was guilty and who was innocent.”

“We talking about the same Clyde Ralstin?”

The ages matched. Clyde Willis Ralstin, born September 13, 1899, was just a few months away from his ninetieth birthday.

Hendrick had been to Clyde’s eightieth birthday party, in Saint Ignatius—and what a bash it was, on a night when the first frost killed the last wildflowers in the high basins of the Mission Mountains, and a mob of stars pressed through the borderless sky of Montana. Most of the town turned out to fete Clyde; a better citizen, an easier neighbor there never was. All evening long, men came up to shake Clyde’s hand or slap his back, and pretty girls gave him kisses, to which he always responded with a touch of charm. He talked about shooting bears, killing deer, felling trees, grub staking in the early days, framing houses later on, chasing wildcat oil jobs in South America—all these grand adventures, from the Roaring Twenties through the tortured years of the Depression, the boom time of World War II, when the Northwest came of age with the big dams and the bomb-building plant on the Columbia River, into the fifties and sixties, the years when he brought his brand of law enforcement to the Nez Percé Indian Reservation. Clyde was at the party with his young wife, a Flathead Indian who called him Dad, and his boy, barely a teenager, just learning how to shoot and cut wood in the mold of his old man.

“His boy?” Bamonte was incredulous. “You telling me Clyde Ralstin had a kid, at his age?”

“And a nice kid, too. Clyde used to brag about it, you know, being able to father a child at an age when most people have grown grandchildren.”

When the boy was twelve, he and Clyde were deep in the woods of the Jocko Valley of Montana, cutting firewood. Clyde’s chain saw slipped and ripped a deep gash in his arm. Most men would have bled to death, far from the nearest hospital, immobilized by shock. But Clyde wrapped a cloth around the wound, tying a tourniquet, and then directed his son into the pickup. Under his father’s guidance, the twelve-year-old drove at top speed nearly forty-five miles into Missoula.

“Clyde has the strength of three men, in just about every way,” Hendrick said.

And now that he was talking about the man he used to idolize, he was starting to feel better about turning him in. If the sheriff knew the real truth of Clyde Ralstin, maybe this business with the Newport marshal would prove to be a frame-up, or some awful mistake. “I remember seeing him, not too long before he left Lapwai to go to Montana, tearing a roof off this house. He was near eighty years old, and he was running the length of this thing, tearing it apart.”

Hendrick told Bamonte how he had come to know Clyde, more than twenty-five years earlier. Ralstin was born near Spaulding, a hardscrabble village on the Clearwater River, just a few miles from Lapwai. For centuries, the dry mountain country of eastern Oregon, central Idaho, and southeastern Washington belonged to the Nez Percé. The tribe called themselves Nimipu, or “the Real People.” They spent their summers hunting elk and picking berries in the Blue Mountains, just west of where the Snake River cut Hells Canyon, the deepest trench in North America. In the fall and early winter, the Nez Percé caught chinook salmon and steelhead in the spawning waters of the Snake and its tributaries, the Clearwater, the Salmon, the Grande Ronde, the Imnaha. The tribe held on to its land long after other natives were driven out of their homes, in part because
Idaho was the last state to be discovered by Europeans and settled by Americans. To this day, much of the state east of the Snake in the Clearwater mountain range, and south in the Sawtooths, headwaters of the Salmon (the River of No Return), is roadless—without stump farms or dams or any hint of the sloppy attachment to the land that is the trademark of much of the American West.

The Nez Percé have not fared as well as their former homeland. Refusing an order by the American government to leave their homes in the Blue Mountains, which had been promised them by an executive order, they took up arms against the cavalry in one of the last Indian fights, in 1877. An epic retreat—down Hells Canyon, through the untracked mountains of central Idaho, across Yellowstone Park, and up through Montana on the way to Canada—ended just short of the border, in defeat. Chief Joseph, who led the defiant march, was taken away in shackles, relocated to Oklahoma, and then placed on the Colville Reservation of eastern Washington with a small band of his followers. Other members of the tribe were forced to live on a cutout of scrubland east of the Snake River—the Nez Percé Reservation.

Five years before Chief Joseph died, Clyde Ralstin was born on his father’s homestead in Nez Percé country. The Ralstins didn’t have a pindrop of Indian blood in them. But with passage of the Allotment Act in 1887, whites were able to buy up tribal land from individual natives, most of whom sold their allotments, at bargain-basement prices, out of desperation. Today about 80 percent of the Nez Percé Reservation is owned by or leased to non-Indians.

There were five children who grew up in the hillside ranch of the Ralstins; Clyde was the oldest. He never cared for school, but he took to the land as if he had sprung from a petroglyph; he became a flawless shooter, chasing deer, elk, antelope, sheep, mountain goats, pheasant, and other creatures of the Snake River country, which ran from the Seven Devils Mountains in the south to the Clearwaters in the north. As a seventeen-year-old boy who wanted a piece of World War I, he tried to enlist in the Marines but was turned down. In 1928, he parlayed his best qualifications—his fists and his utility with guns—into a steady job with the Spokane Police Department.