Breaking Blue (31 page)

The company was planning to remodel its big Monroe Street Dam, below the site where Mangan said the gun had been dropped, and needed to do some survey work at low-water point before the project could proceed. Sometime in August, it planned to draw the water down to a trickle.

“You’ll let me know?”

The company said it would take his offer under consideration. There were some legal problems. And it did not want to appear at odds with the Spokane police.

A more direct way to close the investigation—equally farfetched, but the only other choice—would be to force a confession from Ralstin. Maybe the old man, so near death, could be shamed into telling his secret. The Conniffs offered to write Ralstin a letter, an appeal to his heart. Bamonte did not think Clyde would soften; still, the letter was worth a try.

On August 8, the Conniffs composed their note, carefully considering each word, trying to keep their anger off the page. Like Bamonte, they believed that Clyde Ralstin had killed their father in 1935—shot him for butter, and then put the last bullet inside him to make sure the marshal would not live to tell what he’d seen. But venom would not serve their purpose. The letter, mailed to Saint Ignatius on the same day it was written, read as follows:

A week passed, and they heard nothing. When another week went by with no response, the Conniffs knew they would never hear from him. Instead, they received a letter from Grainey, explaining that his client had nothing to say. If Ralstin were truly innocent, as he and his supporters claimed, surely he would have the decency to explain, the Conniffs reasoned. It was no mystery to them that Ralstin did
not send so much as a word. A killer hides. A killer denies. A killer does not explain his actions.

Every week, Bamonte called the Washington Water Power Company.

“Just checking to see how that river’s doing,” he would say. “See what your schedule is.”

In the third week of August, the company was ready to stop down the flow so that there was a window of time, no more than a few hours, when no water would come through the valley.

“I’ll take it,” Bamonte said.

Without aid from Spokane police, the sheriff needed somebody with searching expertise. He called the Treasure Hunters Club, a group whose members are well acquainted with metal detectors, and asked if they could help him look for a gun. Several members volunteered. He then contacted the Conniffs, advising them not to get their hopes up.

Word also spread to a local television station, which broadcast news of the sheriff’s plan. In the hamlets of the Pend Oreille, in Spokane, in police departments throughout the inland Northwest, people said, “There he goes again.” Some of Bamonte’s political opponents saw the river search as their gain. The sight of the sheriff slopping around in the mud, looking for a gun from 1935, while kids whacked out on PCP raced up the backroads of the Pend Oreille, was political dynamite.

T
HE SKY WAS DARK
with thunderheads on the afternoon of August 21; the collision of stale, suffocating air with cooler, westerly breezes produced a gnashing of electricity. At home, Tony was full of turbulence. Betty was gone, lazing away the last days of summer at a cabin. She had asked her husband if he wanted to join her. He shrugged—work. “I’ve got to see this through,” he said.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t take a day off.”

“I will.”

“When?”

The next morning, it rained, a dawn of warm drizzle. A few hours into daylight Bamonte met his team at the Post Street Bridge, above the river in the heart of Spokane. He had with him the Treasure Hunters, an odd party of informally deputized assistants who usually spent their free days searching for silver dollars and quarters on beaches. Their metal detectors were charged and ready to go. A few bystanders had gathered. And an older man—he looked to be in his eighties—seemed to be spying, watching the sheriff’s every move through binoculars. He moved around on a cliff atop the river. The Conniffs arrived, taking up a position above the river.

The Post Street Bridge, built in 1917, is 340 feet long, and spans the midsection of the falls. Mangan had been very specific in pointing out where the gun had been dropped by his partner. He said they stood at the north end of the bridge, above a point where the water crashed into the high, hard-edged cliffs of basalt, and let the weapon fall to its grave. Now, the riverbed was naked, drained of water. Without the cover of the swift Spokane, the channel looked ugly, embarrassed to show itself. A chocolate water line was plastered against the rock banks. Thick, greased pilings ran across the mud and stone bottom. The floor was littered with wires and cables and metal rods and garbage cans and batteries and cement blocks. Fat river rats, a type of marmot, dragged pieces of scrap onto the shore.

In the short time since white men had driven out the Indians, another sweep of history had passed through this channel. Ghosts of defeated people and surging salmon runs, relics of industries that hitched their future to the brute force of the river—all the shouts and grunts of ancient vitality had drained through the chasm. A few fragments of animal bone, preserved in layered silt, might still be found, evidence of Colonel Wright’s crime of 1858, when he slaughtered the horses upriver. It took all day to kill the eight hundred horses; some had to be lassoed, dragged out, shot twice in the head. After killing the animals, Wright had said to Garry, chief of the Spokanes, “You have been badly whipped. You must come to me with your arms, your women and children, and everything you have, and lay them at my feet. If you do this, I will dictate the terms upon which I will grant you the peace.” A second, perhaps more lethal
blow to Garry’s band came forty-two years later, when Washington Water Power began work on its first big hydroelectric dam, a few feet from the place where Bamonte now stood. That dam blocked the returning chinook salmon, which had been the source of native prosperity for thousands of years. Very few clues remained from those great runs, unless one believed, as the natives did, that the salmon were gods, temporarily inhabiting the skins of fish as a way to return inland from the sea. If so, the salmon were all around. Downstream, on rock faces hidden behind wire fences to keep vandals out, the earlier inhabitants had left a few paintings—drawings of the sun, lizards, small buffalo.

As if to mark the change from one band of people living around the falls to another, an enormous fire had engulfed the new town of Spokane Falls in 1889, burning virtually the entire downtown area, thirty-two blocks, to the ground. The fire broke out exactly one hundred years earlier than Bamonte’s search, in August. It started in a cafe kitchen, spread to the wood-frame buildings lining the river, and then swallowed the city. Firemen arrived, tapped into the hydrants, but nothing came through their hoses. The water system failed completely, and with it went the city. To those broken members of Spokane Garry’s band living without salmon in shacks downriver, the fire must have seemed like fitting revenge on the people who had established their will over this land by slaughtering horses and destroying salmon runs.

What mattered to the river now was whatever the Washington Water Power Company commanded. David Thompson, the first white man to see the Spokane, had called it “one of the wildest and least navigable streams in the world,” but it was now tame and well-mannered. The power company’s founders had purchased Post Falls—once the summer gathering site of a band of the Coeur d’Alene led by Chief Seltice—in order to provide power for the mines in the mountains of northern Idaho. In drawing down that dam, twenty-eight miles upriver from Spokane Falls, they dried up the riverbed that Bamonte wanted to search, an area that had never been disturbed. Most of the riverbed except the place Mangan had pointed to had been stirred up in the 1970s, when the utility was doing
extensive repair work on the Monroe Street power station, a few feet downstream from Post Street.

Down the banks of the river the sheriff went. He walked out among the mud-tarred rocks, under a drizzle, to a place not far from shore, in what would have been a pool of frenzied water at least ten feet deep, directly behind the big dam. Some of the rocks were polished; others were caked with sticky clay and mud. Bamonte believed Mangan was telling the truth, because the place he had pointed to was so precise, an odd spot to bury a gun. Why not throw it in the middle of the river? But he doubted if they would find anything; he prepared himself for another round of ridicule and scorn from the police department up on the bank, and from his constituents. Bamonte tracked a site line from the bridge to the river bottom, and then began kicking over rocks at the place where the weapon was most likely to be.

“Found something!” came a shout from one of the treasure hunters. He pulled a sawed-off shotgun, lightly rusted, no more than a few years old, from the river.

“Set it aside,” Bamonte said. “We’ll turn it over to SPD.”

From atop the bridge, George Conniff watched, shaking his head. Bamonte was obsessed, clambering over the rocks.

Five minutes into the search, Bamonte spotted an irregular-looking shank of mud wedged tightly against the rocks.

“What’s this?” he said, calling a few people over. “Look.…” He stooped down, ran his fingers through the goo. It was hard. He picked it up and let the water drain away; it was heavy. Outer layers of mud fell off, but the core did not break. In the misty light, it revealed itself as cinnamon-colored, a precious fossil in the shape of an L. Bamonte lifted it up, a handful of rust and silt, and wondered if what he held had been clutched by Clyde Ralstin on the night of September 14, 1935.

“I’d say that’s a pistol,” said one of the treasure hunters.

There was no doubt—it looked like a small handgun, but the rust was so heavy that parts of it were indistinguishable.

“Mangan was telling the truth,” Bamonte said. “It’s right where he said it would be.”

He searched the bridge for the Conniffs, then held his find aloft, making sure they saw it.

“My … God—he’s done it!” George Conniff said. His sister Olive was near tears; she sensed a miracle.

The man who had been watching Bamonte from the cliff was now spying down from the bridge. When the sheriff looked up at him, he turned away. Later, when everyone had left the river, the man dropped a metal object, about the size and weight of a pistol, from the bridge to see if it could, in fact, land where Bamonte had made his discovery. Bamonte found out the man was a former bootlegger, one of Ralstin’s best friends in the 1930s, an intimate of the Mother’s Kitchen circle that included Virgil Burch and Acie Logan. When questioned by a friend of Bamonte’s, he said he was there looking out for Clyde’s best interests.

The gun appeared to be precisely the weapon they were looking for. It was six and a half inches long, the barrel rusted shut, the trigger missing, and the handle hollowed-out in the center, where a hardwood core would have been grafted to the metal. Reporters gathered around Bamonte; the fool was a genius. He was momentarily stunned into silence. He felt vindication. He felt like he had Clyde Ralstin at last. He wanted to say, “God damn, I got the asshole cornered.” He wanted to shout, to wave the gun in front of Ralstin’s face, and say, “Remember this? Remember!”

But instead of gloating, he gave a measured response, the autopilot reply of a baseball player after he’s won the game with a late-inning homer. “This is extremely good circumstantial evidence,” he said. Asked about his next move, Bamonte said he was going to send the gun to the state crime lab for verification of its make and year. “This investigation is far from over.”

Like the years of cover-up and deceit, the river itself had been peeled away, and what it revealed backed up the words from all those lanced consciences. The news of Bamonte’s great find, carried in newspapers and television accounts around the world, brought a flood of inquiries and a rash of tips. Reporters from Australia, Europe, Mexico, and throughout the United States called about the story.
Bamonte was overwhelmed by the reaction; he had been so wrapped up in the case that he had lost a sense of perspective. He just wanted to catch up with Ralstin, to see it through for the Conniffs, to prove that Charley Sonnabend and Pearl Keogh—and yes, Bamonte himself—were not crazy. In a way, it mattered less and less what the sheriff said about who killed George Conniff in 1935. Bamonte the graduate student had awakened history; Bamonte the sheriff had forced it from the academic attic. Once free, it took on a life of its own.