8.
To the River

THE POST STREET BRIDGE spans the midsection of Spokane Falls, where the water gathers after tumbling over one of three drops. From the bridge, the torrent looks impossible to descend by canoe, kayak, or raft; yet people have thrown themselves into the swirl in an act of bravado—or a moment of despair. As the water slides through the rock cliffs, en route to the Columbia and the Pacific, the river powers turbines that light the streetlights of Spokane. A few years after the city was incorporated, in 1881, the river brought light to downtown streets; it was one of the first waterways in the world to be harnessed for electricity. During the mid-1930s, when Spokane had to close its zoo and pawn the animals, electric power—even that which came from the perpetual flow of the falls—was considered a luxury, and so the city removed nearly four hundred streetlights, and much of Spokane was dark at night.

The police station was a long block south of the Post Street Bridge. The span was a place for private talks and solitary strolls. At peak flow, the roar of the falls was so loud that two people could not hear themselves speak. But in early October, when the surface of the land was hard and dry, and little water fed the falls, the sound was a weak cry in the background of a clattering city, dominant only when Spokane slept.

In the darkness of night, Dan Mangan and Bill Parsons stood above the falls on the bridge. Their police car, a Pontiac with a radio inside, one of five patrol cars used on each shift, idled as Mangan stepped out. They were both in uniform, on duty, upholding the laws of the city of Spokane. Mangan was carrying a package, a bundle of newspapers wrapped around a gun. Parsons was confused. The rookie, still on probation, was paired with Mangan that night because Dan’s regular partner was off. Parsons was still trying to make a name for himself as a decent policeman. On a recent night, while Officer Mangan had been breaking into a restaurant called Dorothy’s and stealing what he could get from inside the diner, Officer Parsons had recovered a stolen typewriter, and he was written up in the newspaper for this notable bit of police work.

Mangan usually operated on the other side of the law, and ’most everybody at the Stone Fortress knew what he was up to. When a particularly dirty job had to be done, Mangan was summoned. It was that reputation that led to his arrival on the ledge of the Post Street Bridge, carrying a package. In addition to burglaries, break-ins, and shakedowns, Officer Mangan drew a regular income from bootleggers, who delivered his payoff in envelopes—usually ten dollars at a time, but sometimes more. Although Mangan was constantly reprimanded, he was never seriously disciplined. His personnel file was stuffed with suspension and warning notices for actions labeled “disgraceful” and “conduct unbecoming an officer.”

Mangan would show up in the cold house he kept in the east part of town drunk and smelling of perfume; if his wife, Helen, ventured to raise even the weakest line of questioning, he would knock her to the ground or put his fist to her face. Often, she was kicked around in front of her children, who were jolted awake by the noise of the drunken patrolman returning from a binge. The next day, nursing a black eye or a swollen lip, Helen Mangan felt helpless. And when friends would seek to console her, she would wonder aloud, “What am I supposed to do—call the police?” Because he considered himself a good Catholic, Mangan would not allow his wife to divorce him.

Mangan’s regular partner was Hacker Cox. Cox had picked up his nickname because of his habit of hacking at prisoners in the elevator on the way up to jail. On the short ride from the ground floor of the Stone Fortress to the top-floor jail, Hacker Cox could change a man’s appearance.

Cox and Mangan were perfect for each other; they also occupied regular stool space at Mother’s Kitchen and aspired to be in the close orbit of Detective Ralstin. In early October they were given their chance. Just after Sonnabend announced that the killing of Marshal Conniff would be solved within twenty-four hours, Mangan was called in to see Captain James “Ed” Hinton, one of three shift leaders in the Spokane Police Department. Fat-faced and balding, with deep circles under his eyes and cheeks shaped by an habitual scowl, Hinton moved in a slightly higher circle than Ralstin or Mangan, spending late hours at the finer speakeasies in the company of the city’s other mid-level leaders. Early in 1935, which had opened with the Spokane Chronicle’s call for a full inquiry into corruption at the Stone Fortress, there came rumblings of a grand jury investigation of the department. As soon as Captain Hinton heard about the prosecutor’s action, he fled to Canada. He later reappeared, back as the shift captain, when the legal thunder died down. Hinton wanted to be chief, and it was that career goal which kept him on a leash held by Clyde Ralstin. Clyde would not have minded seeing Hinton as the top man of the largest police department between Minneapolis and Seattle.

When Captain Hinton called Mangan into his office, he did not look the patrolman in the eyes.

“Shut the door,” he said.

“What’s up?”

“Ralstin’s in trouble,” the captain said. “He needs a favor.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Cox will tell you.”

“He’s off today.”

“I know he’s off. Go to his house. He’s got something for you. Who’s your partner today?”

“Bill Parsons.”

“Take him.”

“You sure about Parsons?”

“Take him. He’s okay now.”

Mangan and Parsons drove to the northwest part of town, to the home of Hacker Cox. Mangan was silent most of the way. When he pulled up in front of the house, he kept the engine running. He returned in a minute with a package wrapped in newspaper.

“What’s that?” Parsons asked.

“A favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“Ralstin’s in trouble. We gotta get rid of this.”

Mangan turned the Spokane police car around and headed south, for the river. He did not say a word during the drive.

WHEN DETECTIVE SONNABEND went to round up the other members of the butter gang, he discovered that most of them had left town. The loot also was gone. Shoes, bacon, butter—it had disappeared. How could this be? They had Logan and Spinks in custody, and they knew about most of the operation, where the butter had come from. Sonnabend was livid; almost overnight, his case was falling apart. How could he get a conviction without the evidence?

Back at the Stone Fortress, a young officer approached him, somebody who had been in Mother’s Kitchen a few days earlier. He took Sonnabend aside and told him that everybody involved in the black-market ring had been tipped off by Clyde Ralstin.

“Ralstin? Detective Ralstin?”

The detective had leaked the latest information from the Stone Fortress to his partners in the fence—his partners? That’s right, the officer said. And Ralstin was their leader.

Sonnabend had heard plenty of stories about his fellow detective. Most of them, he couldn’t give a damn about; but this was a new low. Not only was Ralstin sabotaging a murder investigation; he might have had a hand in the killing.

Sonnabend stormed into the office of Ira Martin, chief of police. Martin, the first chief to hold the job for any considerable amount of time, was particularly good at curbing public outrage during the periodic calls for wholesale firings and grand jury investigations. He was known as an efficient administrator, not particularly cunning or well connected around town. Above all, he believed in the institution; after a tumultuous decade of graft, and then five years of hard times, the very survival of the police department was at stake.

When Sonnabend told him that Detective Ralstin had leaked inside information to the very criminals who were under investigation, Martin at first tried to calm him. Sonnabend’s face went red, and he waved his callused hands around. Whose side were they on, for Christ’s sake? Ralstin had sabotaged his case! He should be arrested—prosecuted! Fired at least!

The chief was well aware of the complaints about Ralstin. This latest information did not seem to surprise him so much as it left him looking helpless. He couldn’t bring the hammer down on Detective Ralstin because it would damage the entire department at a time when it was under siege from the newspapers, the federal prosecutor, the county. And Ralstin could do more than seriously tar the reputation of the Spokane Police Department. If cornered, he could end careers, force men into jail, break up families. Is that what Sonnabend really wanted—to ruin the lives of other policemen?

AT THE Post Street Bridge, high above the falls, Officer Mangan opened the door of his police vehicle and walked to the rail. The Great Northern Railroad clock tower, an Italian Renaissance-styled spire, was anchored to the riverbank, a place where saw and grist mills used to crank out the elemental products of the infant town. The biggest Hooverville was not far from the railroad tower, upriver, and the little squatters’ camp at the base of the falls was less than a mile the other direction, downstream. In accordance with the wishes of Spokane’s political and business leaders, the smaller homeless village would soon be doused with gasoline and burned to the ground. Upriver another twenty miles or so was the graveyard of the eight hundred horses slaughtered in 1858 by Colonel George Wright. Some of the bodies had floated down the river. But a number of skeletons, the bones bleached white by the sun and then decayed to an overcast gray, had remained in clumps at the site of the mass shooting. It became known as Horse Slaughter Camp, a designation that Spokane’s promoters tried to discourage; Wright’s animal massacre was not a historical image that merited further scrutiny. By the early part of this century, most of the bones had been reduced to ash and had washed downstream, the river hiding the last physical traces of the mass killing. Only the memories of cavalry soldiers, preserved in diaries describing the “whinnying cries” of the panicky animals, remained as proof of the night Colonel Wright executed eight hundred horses.

Long ago, in other days of early October, nearly ten thousand natives used to gather to spear fish and talk trade and swap products at the base of Spokane Falls. The original Spokane people believed that a benevolent god had created this breach to funnel fish into the hands of the hungry. When most of the natives and the fish runs had died, and the new city rising around the falls wanted to distinguish itself, civic leaders hired the Olmsted Brothers, the landscaping firm from Brookline, Massachusetts, to create something of lasting value in Spokane. The brothers, whose father had helped design New York’s Central Park, said the city needed only to protect and highlight the great natural waterfall in its midst. “Nothing is so firmly impressed on the mind of the visitor to Spokane as the great gorge into which the river falls near the center of the city,” the brothers wrote.

The river’s course was first altered by humans in the mid-1880s, when the south channel was dammed to make a pond for a sawmill. By 1890, the ten-year-old city had a hydroelectric plant just below the wood planks of the first Post Street Bridge. During the next four decades, the river’s wild character was forever changed. The swift flow was used to power electricity for silver mines in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains and to run the streetcars in Spokane. Riverbeds that had been untouched by sunlight were suddenly exposed, and banks that had not felt the overlap of water since the retreat of the last ice age were buried anew. Lakes were formed with backwater, and orchards and vegetables flourished with irrigation water. The salmon were killed off after Washington Water Power constructed a dam in 1906 at the site of an ancient Indian fishing village.

Standing above the river, Officer Mangan wanted only to bury a weapon and be gone. He wound up and tossed the bundle into the falls, watching the package descend until it hit the foam of the regrouping water. The falls were lit up by lights below, so even at night Mangan could see that the bundle he had been told to dispose of had gone to the floor of the Spokane River.

He turned and got back into the police car, where Parsons had watched the whole thing.

“What the hell did you throw in there?” the rookie asked him.

Mangan said nothing, and they drove off. Mangan whistled, staring straight ahead.

Again, Parsons asked him what he had done.

“We threw a gun in the river,” he said.

We?

“Yeah. You and me.”

ACIE LOGAN remained in police custody for three more weeks and then was released to federal authorities, who allowed him to plead guilty to a charge of interstate theft. He was already in violation of parole and would have faced a much longer sentence as a habitual criminal if he had not pled. In November, he and Warden Spinks told a federal judge that they had stolen forty-two pairs of shoes from a train car. The judge sentenced Logan to four years at the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Puget Sound. Spinks was given three and a half years. They were never heard from or seen again in Spokane.

The same day Logan was sentenced, Officer Bill Parsons was taken off probation. He would stay on the police force for thirty-five years, retiring in 1970 as the chief of police.

Dan Mangan, his partner for a single night on the Post Street Bridge, stayed on the force until 1946, when he was forced to resign after he attacked his wife, nearly killing her with his fists and feet. When fellow policemen arrived at the Mangan home after being summoned by neighbors, they found Helen Mangan on the floor. She had been choked and punched and kicked by Sergeant Mangan, who was drunk at the time. In a police report Helen Mangan was quoted as saying, “I asked him who he had been laying up with, and he hit me. He knocked me down and I don’t know what all happened.” She said her son had jumped atop his father. “If it wasn’t for the kids, he would have killed me.” Mangan was never prosecuted. He moved to Hungry Horse, Montana, where he opened a bar—the Dam Town Tavern. For years, his annual Fourth of July party in Hungry Horse was the best-attended social event among members of the Spokane Police Department.

Virgil Burch continued with Mother’s Kitchen for a few more months, though the volume of food moving through his all-night diner declined considerably. In late January 1936, Burch was arrested and charged with attempting to bribe a government witness. He had tried to pay $500 to one of the butter gang members to keep him from testifying. “Of all the beefs I’ve had with the law, this is the bummest,” Burch said at the time.

In February, Burch was acquitted. The prosecution’s case fell apart when its witnesses lost their memories and their tongues. Burch sold Mother’s Kitchen, married another woman, and moved to Portland, Oregon.

A few days after the gun was thrown in the river, a small story appeared deep inside in the Spokesman-Review: POLICE OFFICER GETS DEMOTION. The story said that Clyde Ralstin had been relieved of his duties as a detective and assigned to the ranks of uniformed patrolman, on night duty. “The action was said to be the result, in part, of recent indiscretions of the officer, including tipping off information in an important case,” the story said. Before he started his new duty as a beat cop, Ralstin was suspended for six days. A few months later, in early March 1936, Ralstin was given a much greater suspension—four months, for actions described by Chief Martin as “infractions which cannot be tolerated.” The story did not elaborate.

A year later, Ralstin resigned from the police department. He said to his stepdaughter, Ruby, that he was leaving town and did not know if he would ever see her again. He deserted his wife, Monnie, and told friends he was off to find his fortune in South America with Dorothy, the waitress he’d met at Mother’s Kitchen. They would be far from the drudgery of police work in a town that couldn’t afford to pay its best marksman and its toughest cop any more than forty-two dollars a week. At the time of his resignation, while turning in his police gear, he reported that his .32-caliber pistol was missing.

The murder of Marshal Conniff remained unsolved. Eventually, the case was forgotten, a distant killing from a dishonest decade. The Spokane River returned to normal in the late 1930s, rainfall and snowmelt filling mountain creeks; and a thick vein of water once again coursed through the center of the biggest city in the inland Northwest, a town that was back on track with the business of empire-building.