Breaking Blue (30 page)

Among the clips was a story from April 4, 1937, inside the paper, wedged between a piece on “Midget Dancers United by Cupid” and an account of firebombing and rioting in Nelson, British Columbia. The article was headlined
BOY OF 15 SHOT TO DEATH IN FLIGHT FROM POLICEMAN
. The six-paragraph story told of Roger Irvine, age fifteen, a student at John Rogers High School in the Hillyard section of Spokane, who was killed by a bullet which pierced his heart from behind. The boy was joyriding, along with two companions, in a 1937 Plymouth coupe they had stolen. The patrolmen were in pursuit when Irvine, the driver, slammed on the brakes, which caused the police car to smash into it. The boys then fled and were fired on as they tried to run away from the officers.

“The bullet that ended young Irvine’s life was fired by Prowl Car Officer Clyde Ralstin,” the story said.

In the same file, Morlin found several follow-up pieces and a copy of Ralstin’s resignation. He showed these to Bamonte. The second story, dated April 5, 1937, not only confirmed what the old woman had said but elaborated on it:

This account assured Bamonte of several things. First, despite the official fuzziness from the Spokane Police Department, and the void of formal records on him, Ralstin worked for the department. Second, he had been demoted from detective—as he was in the last stories Bamonte had seen on him, from 1935—to prowl car officer, as he was called in 1937. Third, and most important, he shot the kid in the back. Joyriding was hardly a capital crime, and the fleeing boys were not exactly threatening the officers’ lives. The kid had stolen a car, smashed it up, and then ran away when chased by policemen. For that, he was shot in the back. A marksman like Ralstin, the best shooter in the department, a man who could split a duck’s beak from fifty yards, would not aim for the legs and hit the spine. He shot to kill.

In recounting the boy’s short life, the paper wrote:

A third story, dated April 6, 1937, told of a coroner’s probe and mentioned deep in the story that “police said there is little likelihood of charges being brought against Officer Ralstin, whose duty it is, they explained, to stop any escaping felons.” Later that night, a six-member coroner’s jury followed the prosecutor’s recommendation and absolved Ralstin. The killing was justified, they said, because “Roger Irvine was fleeing from justice after the commission of a felony, to wit: the unlawful taking of an automobile.”

Included in the packet was a letter of resignation from Ralstin, dated three months after he killed the boy. The notice, and a small newspaper clip, did not say precisely why he left the police force, but referred to a dispute when Ralstin failed to show up for work. No mention was made of previous suspensions or demotions, just a
hint of the contentious nature of a man who seldom did anything without a fight.

“Upon acceptance of my resignation, you are hereby authorized and directed to disregard my notice of appeal from that certain order of suspension dated June 7th, 1937, and signed by Commissioner A. B. Colburn,” Ralstin wrote. “It is understood that with the acceptance of my resignation that the records of the Civil Service Commission and the Spokane Police Department will show that I resigned as a member of the Spokane Police Department.”

In the accompanying newspaper story—a three-paragraph notice—Ralstin was asked about the resignation. “I asked for a six-month leave of absence because I had a chance to get a better job—one I always wanted,” Ralstin was quoted as saying. “When my request was denied, there was nothing else to do but resign.”

F
ROM THAT DAY
in July 1937 on, there was no mention of Ralstin in any story in the paper’s morgue. In the file marked “Police—Shootings By,” no stories appeared for more than thirty years. Then, a clip from the late 1960s carried an account of a shooting by a young patrolman who fired on an armed robber as he was fleeing a department-store holdup in downtown Spokane. The robber, hit with a single shot between his eyes, was left in a vegetative state afterward, severely brain-damaged by the wound. An inquest found that the shooting was justified.

Of course, Bamonte recognized the story instantly. The patrolman was Bamonte himself.

A
LONE ON
the Pend Oreille River, Bamonte guided his boat downstream, following the slow current, no particular direction in mind. It was a Saturday morning in late July; the sky was smeared to a faded yellow from forest fire smoke and lazy air. Another drought, perhaps the worst in twenty years, made people cranky and less tolerant, a behavior pattern the sheriff could chart along with the high temperature readings. Soon as it got hot, and the winds disappeared, the men of the Pend Oreille lapsed into their mean streak, draining six-packs every few hours, bashing their wives, smashing up cars. The sheriff had his hands full chasing calls in the distant corners of the county.

And it was not much better at home, at the end of those summer days when the light held to the sky till nearly ten p.m. Bamonte was trying to reconcile with his wife, a trial return.

“Just move back, and see what happens,” he had asked Betty. “We don’t have to do anything. No conditions. We’ll be like … roommates, if you want.”

The words between them were barbed—small informational exchanges sent as a form of reconnaissance, but received like a lance. Tony slept on the first floor, Betty on the third. But of course he didn’t sleep; the heat alone was enough to keep him awake. He wanted
to strip himself of the bark of pride, tell Betty what a mess he was, and what she meant to him. But when he tried to explain himself, it all came out like clumps of gravy. He felt stubborn and inarticulate, the curse of the physical man, trapped in the code of manhood handed down by his father. Men stood for action over contemplation, aggression over mediation, work over family. Afterward, he thought of what he should have said, and it seemed so simple. Watching his family slip away, he knew he was failing, but still he could not act. There was no manual for such repair.

On the river, he passed ospreys diving for river rats, and fishermen with sunburned backs and slack lines. Irrigation sprinklers spit water over rusty hay fields. With the boat engine at low idle, he coursed with the flush of the river, his thoughts trailing along with him. He was trying to find a way to get at Ralstin. The discovery that Clyde had killed a boy and then left the police department under cryptic circumstances had refired Bamonte’s outrage. The kid was unarmed. He posed no threat to the officers. He was scared. He ran, like any fifteen year old, and Ralstin knocked him dead. It was legal, of course, and all justified, because the shooter wore a badge. In Bamonte’s mind, Clyde Ralstin had killed at least two people, then sailed through more than half a century of life without answering for his crimes. Worse, Bamonte believed Ralstin had killed for excitement—a hunter of animals who shot humans with the same disregard, firing on one person before he could see him, shooting the other one in the back. It was all turkey shoot. After twenty-three years as a cop, Bamonte knew why some people, otherwise rational, hated policemen. There were just enough Ralstins in uniform to make every other officer pay for it.

All this talk about the benevolent judge of Lapwai and the helping neighbor of Saint Ignatius made the sheriff sick with cynicism. But with every character tidbit brought forth by Bamonte, Ralstin’s position also hardened, and his supporters closed ranks around him. Bamonte was on a self-serving and irresponsible crusade, they charged—a sentiment echoed by top brass in the Spokane Police Department.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” one officer in Spokane
asked Bamonte. And, of course, he did. Summer was the worst time to be a rural sheriff—everybody was outside, riding boats, or RVs, or souped-up vans, or dirt bikes, doing the same awful things they did indoors, except in public view. His shift sometimes lasted as long as daylight.

In Saint Ignatius, the friends of Clyde Ralstin repeated what Phil Grainey had said: Clyde was too frail to spend an afternoon with an interrogator, and had nothing to say anyway. When pressed by the sheriff, Grainey finally issued a challenge to Bamonte: “Put up or shut up.” He said, “If you got enough to prosecute him, charge him. If you don’t, drop the case.”

Bamonte knew he did not have enough. Not yet. Nor did he feel he had much time left to come up with something. The sheriff could hear the clock; not a statutory timer but the slowing tick of life. He did not want Ralstin to die before the full story caught up with him.

One hope, a slim one, was the Spokane River. As Bamonte was constantly reminded, he lacked physical evidence. All he had, the critics said, were overripe consciences, memories stained by the years. Bamonte thought if he could find the gun, it would corroborate the best evidence from his strongest living witness. Dan Mangan had pointed to the rock walls in a pool between tiers of Spokane Falls and said his partner had tossed the gun there to cover for Clyde. If Mangan was telling the truth, the gun might still be under the river. But even if the sheriff found the gun, Mangan was fast deteriorating, his blood slowing through his hardened veins. He could barely talk. The case would fall apart if either of Bamonte’s two best sources, Pearl Keogh and Dan Mangan, died before he finished the investigation.

T
HROUGHOUT THE SUMMER
, Bamonte had kept the Conniff family informed of developments. After going a lifetime without hearing the slightest word from the authorities about who might have killed their father, feeling snubbed and ignored, the Conniffs now had been privy to one astonishing break after another. They encouraged Bamonte, inspired him during his low points. George Conniff in particular
was full of ideas, some of which conveyed the outrage he carried on behalf of his father. But when Bamonte shared with the Conniffs his thought about searching for the gun, George was less than enthusiastic. “It’s a longshot,” he said. “Your chances of finding something are a hundred to one.”

In the early part of the summer, Conniff was not sure exactly what drove Bamonte. Did he want revenge against the old cops and the old ways? Glory? A political plum for his next election campaign? But as he came to know him, talking late nights with the sheriff, and he saw the investigation go from a glamour hunt to a political liability, he was convinced that Bamonte wanted nothing more than justice for the death of the marshal. Sometimes, the way the sheriff spoke about it sounded a little spooky. “I’m the voice of the dead, I’m all they have,” he told Conniff.

The Spokane Police Department did not seem any more receptive to Bamonte’s latest idea than they had been to his previous requests. But the sheriff never gave up hope that somebody in uniform would do the right thing. He asked the department to provide him with a few officers to help search the river, two blocks from their headquarters.

“You can’t be serious,” an assistant to the chief said over the phone.

“Look, you’ve got—what?—two hundred and fifty officers sitting within a stone’s throw of the river. Just let me borrow a few men for an hour or so,” Bamonte said.

If the drought kept up, the Spokane River would continue to shrink, presenting a rare opportunity to sift through the secrets that had been buried underwater, Bamonte explained. “It could be years before the river conditions are ever just right again.”

Usually, the river ran at better than ten thousand cubic feet of water per second; by early August, it was a tenth of that force. But Spokane police refused to provide any assistance, in manpower or equipment. Not even a police metal detector was offered. A vital piece of evidence in a first-degree murder investigation might be at the bottom of a river in the middle of the Spokane Police Department’s jurisdiction. Why no cooperation? Bamonte asked. Back-channel, department
officials explained that they had more urgent things to do than pursue a case that could tarnish the institution.

Bamonte then contacted the Washington Water Power Company, whose dams pinch the river for most of its length, and asked for assistance. It also expressed astonishment.

“The water’s getting so low,” Bamonte said. “Isn’t there any time when I can just get out and walk on the riverbed?”