A FEW DAYS BEFORE his forty-seventh birthday, on a warm morning in mid-spring, Bamonte drove east, crossing the Coeur d’Alene Mountains into the old silver mining country of his father, cresting the Bitterroot Range near the Idaho-Montana border, and then following the Clark Fork into a broad valley north of Missoula. He approached the Flathead Indian Reservation just as the sun left his rearview mirror. All his life he had lived with cloud-humbling mountains, waterfalls that bounced from the heavens, and forests of great size and age; but the Mission Valley was something else. When the glaciers shrank and disappeared from all but the highest nooks of western Montana, they left behind a lake, the largest natural body of fresh water in the American West, that covers the northern part of this breach between the Rockies and Bitterroots. Aquamarine, Flathead Lake holds the color and character of the big sky overhead. Even at its present size of two hundred square miles, the lake is a puddle compared with what it once was. The old lake bed is level like a prairie, yet forested with clusters of pine, cedar, and fir. Cottonwoods shade the trout streams; black bears and grizzlies clamber over a vast habitat; elk and pronghorn stuff themselves in grassy meadows; and hundreds of buffalo roam throughout the nineteen thousand acres of the National Bison Range, bordering the Jocko and Flathead rivers.
If there is a more isolated big valley in the lower forty-eight states, it has yet to be found. The Rocky Mountains reveal themselves here as the scaffolding of creation, all exposed geology and millennial tiers of construction, one uplifted layer sitting atop another. As Bamonte drove the downslope of State Highway 200, passing through the towns of Thompson Falls, Plains, Paradise, Perma, Dixon, Ravalli, and entering Saint Ignatius, he was struck by the curtain of earth to the east, a subrange of the Rockies known as the Mission Range. The mountain wall was green and forested at the base, burnt-red and rusted in the middle, and eagle-capped along the summits with snow from the last seven months. To the north is Glacier National Park; south of that is the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The Continental Divide follows a winding pattern through this part of the Rockies, the eastern side falling off abruptly to the treeless plains, where Blackfoot Indians still live on a windswept reservation, the west side draining into the Pacific and the land of people who spoke the Salish dialect and fished for salmon.
When Jesuit missionaries first entered the area in the 1840s, members of the Pend Oreille tribe told them their land was called Sineleman, meaning “Place of Encirclement,” where tribes from throughout the inland Northwest gathered to trade and barter. Surrounded by humpbacks of granite and basalt that rise nearly two vertical miles, the valley is protected from the worst storms that gather over Montana for much of the cold season.
The most prominent human landmark in Saint Ignatius is the mission, established in 1854 and named for Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. The first version of the church was built of whipsawed lumber and held together by wooden pins. Forty years later, the priests finished their arched masterpiece, built, with Indian labor, of stone and a million red bricks the color of sunset. Brother Joseph Carignano spent most of his adult life on his back inside the church, painting fifty-eight murals on the ceilings and walls, finishing the last picture around 1920. The church draws tourists to Saint Ignatius, a town of 877 people, which might not otherwise attract outside visitors. Well-traveled Catholic clerics says their outpost in western Montana is one of the five most beautiful churches in the world, a house of worship made all the more stunning by its setting, alone against the mountains, an inspirational chip off the granite block of the Mission Range. The priests intended Saint Ignatius to be a spiritual fortress; just as the mountains protected the valley, the church was supposed to be a shelter from the harsher impulses of humanity. In the spirit of that design, Brother Carignano’s murals depict scenes of great optimism instead of the usual Gothic gloom or graphic illustrations of the consequence of sin.
Pearl Keogh grew up in Saint Ignatius, raised in a mission school for Indians and whites, which the Sisters of Providence ran. When Bamonte told her that he had traced Clyde Ralstin to her girlhood home, Pearl detected the hand of God scripting a final and fitting act to both of their lives. She wanted to travel to Saint Ignatius by herself and confront Ralstin with September 1935. But Bamonte advised her against that; he promised to tell Pearl everything upon his return.
In Saint Ignatius, which the locals call Mission, there is a clear dividing line between the white and Indian sections of town. Members of the Flathead (or Salish), Pend d’Oreille (upper Kalispel), and Kootenai live near the church. Ralstin managed an apartment complex in the poor part of town, leasing the units out to Indians. He was not well liked by his tenants, who feared his flash temper. To be a few days late on a rent payment was enough to prompt an eviction threat from Ralstin. A few small businesses operate in the summer, selling dolls made of bear’s hair, and moccasins with traditional beadwork. The whites live in what some residents jokingly call the silk stocking district, in wood-framed houses, well kept, some with metal roofs to speed the melting of heavy snows. The general store in this neighborhood sells vials of scented cover for hunters—“guaranteed 100 percent elk urine.” At the local hangout, the Malt Shop, everybody knows everybody else’s business and stool assignment. Although the original Flathead Reservation comprised 1.2 million acres, it has long since been opened up to homesteading, allotment sales, and leasing to non-Indians. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation now own less than half of the land promised them by the Hell Gate Treaty of 1855.
Bamonte found Clyde Ralstin’s house in the white part of town at 365 First Avenue, a small, single-story home with a green tin roof and white siding. Next to the front door was a wooden sign inscribed “The Ralstins.” Though the grass was still brown, newly unveiled from winter snow cover, the yard was neat and the hedges trimmed, reflecting the pride and the routine of its owner. The fruit trees in this neighborhood had yet to flower; their skeletal claws clacked against each other in the wind. Firewood was cut and stacked nearby. Bamonte drove by the house but did not stop his car.
When he checked in with the Lake County sheriff’s department—a common courtesy when a cop from one jurisdiction is investigating someone in another county—a deputy told him that within an hour of his arrival, Ralstin knew he was in town. Clyde had friends. Bamonte smiled and pulled up a seat. Scenting and circling was part of the ritual of the hunt. He had traced Ralstin from a bootlegger’s hangout in Spokane to a valley that seemed to be at the end of the earth.
RALSTIN SHARED the little white house on First Avenue with his wife, Marie. They socialized mainly with non-Indians, retired people who talked about hunting, fishing, the weather, and fixing things up. On occasion, the Ralstins would go to dinner at the Indian cultural center, on the other side of town; in Saint Ignatius, there was consent that the food was far better at the tribal center than anywhere else in the valley.
When the first news story came out of Spokane, Clyde had suspected Bamonte would eventually catch up with him. And with each new article, he cursed the sheriff from Pend Oreille County. Bamonte became a distant nag, lingering out of view. Oflate, Ralstin’s breathing was erratic, and sometimes he would wake up coughing and pained. He told friends he had not slept well since the graduate student’s project came to light in February. In that regard, he and Bamonte were alike.
When Marie and Clyde sat at breakfast, Ralstin would offer a prayer, repeated every morning since the Conniff story broke. “Lord, get this off my back,” said Clyde, his head bowed. “Please, Lord, make this go away.” But the circle only closed tighter; the pressure increased with each new piece of information trickling into Montana from Spokane.
“Dad,” his wife had asked him a few days before Bamonte arrived in Saint Ignatius, “what’s this all about?”
“It’s hogwash,” he replied. And in angrier moments, he called it “bullshit,” professing bewilderment that his life had taken such a strange turn. He told Marie that Bamonte must have thought he was dead; otherwise, he never would have stirred up so much trouble.
There was very little mystery to the Clyde Ralstin of 1989. He had come to Montana from Lapwai, riding into town on his reputation as a law-and-order man with fifty years of experience. He remodeled and managed his apartment complex, built a house outside Saint Ignatius, sold it, then moved into the little frame home on First. Most days, Clyde went for a long, slow walk, using his hand-carved willow cane for balance. To his neighbors, he was the sweetest octogenarian this side of the Divide. He respected his fellow citizens and he feared God. He was ever helpful. He was a fine storyteller. He had suffered from a peptic ulcer, and gout, and had a type of heart disease typical for a man his age; but overall, he was considered, by friends and by his doctor, to be a strong, well-preserved man. One thing he could not be, his neighbors were convinced, was a killer. To think that Clyde Willis Ralstin, the very embodiment of the self-reliant westerner, the pains and changes of the twentieth century etched in his face, this former judge, a longtime lawman, head of security at Hanford, kind and gentle neighbor, had once been a bootlegger of butter, and had fired four shots into the body of a small-town marshal—including a final, killing blast when Conniff was down—was a preposterous notion. As Clyde walked through town, offering advice on fixing a truck or finishing a chore, he was accorded respect, the kind people want in their late years, the simple acknowledgment of a life well lived.
The Lake County sheriff’s deputy told Bamonte that he had stirred up a nest of trouble in the Ralstin home with his investigation of the 1935 killing.
“Imagine people will be mad at Clyde,” said Bamonte.
“More likely mad at you.”
“Me?”
“For bringing it up.”
At the Lily of the Valley flower shop, Clyde was known as a romantic, one of the best customers. About once a week, he’d come into the shop in the afternoon and buy a bouquet for Marie. The ladies who sold him his flowers did not care what was in his past. A person had a right to be forgiven and to move on with his life. “Even if he did kill that marshal,” said one of the store’s owners, “it’s so long ago, who cares? Are they gonna hound the man to his grave? I mean, that’s not fair.”
In the Tepee Tavern, where a schooner of Coors costs less than a dollar, Clyde was a hero. Among regulars at the Tepee, some hoped it was true that Ralstin had killed Conniff. “If he did it, and got away with it, more power to him,” said one patron. “There’s something to be said for a man who can pull it off, then live the rest of his life as a righteous man.”
A few doors away from the Ralstin house lived Olive Wehr, a columnist for the weekly Mission Valley News. Olive was the same age as Clyde, a few months shy of her ninetieth birthday, and she spent her days in a big house full of books and western antiques, with a large garden outside and a fenced-in quarter-acre of grass. She had written four books; one of them, God’s Forgotten Garden, a volume of poetry about runaway girls, won a Mark Twain Award for Literary Excellence in 1947. Olive Wehr still banged out her column, “The Saint Ignatius Grapevine,” every week in the local paper. What got her back up was when somebody dared to call her contribution a gossip column. Gossip was a form of torture, cruel and whispered. Olive dealt in facts, writing about grandchildren who came to town for a visit, comings and goings of her fellow townsfolk, who was sick and who was well. There was a line that she would not cross. She had yet to write a thing about her neighbor, because she did not consider the rumors coming out of Spokane to be worth repeating in print. Nor had she talked about the killing with Clyde. “You don’t ask about certain things,” she said later. “Everybody has a past. We are a very close-knit and very protective community. In a small town, that’s the only way you can get along.”
She was outraged that Bamonte and his allegations had followed Clyde to Saint Ignatius in the last years of his life. “How would anybody feel if they’d lived their whole life only to have something like this thrown at them near the end?” she said. “I know Clyde Ralstin as a friend and a neighbor, not the person this sheriff says he is.”
She had first met Clyde when he moved into 365 First Avenue; it seemed so long ago she could not remember exactly when the Ralstins had come to town. Olive hired him to build a sun room, expanding a porch and covering it. A superb carpenter, reliable, steady, and meticulous, Clyde was a magician with circular saw and hammer. And he was charming, chatty; he certainly never made a pass at Mrs. Wehr or went into a gallop of foul language. “He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word,” she said. “He stands for the right things.”
After work, Clyde and Olive would sip lemonade and watch the golden light on the western flank of the Mission Range. He talked about the adventures of his life—the days in South America, the war period at Hanford, the years as a judge at the Nez Percé Reservation. “Once in a while he’d bring up something about his being a detective,” she said. “But there was nothing shameful, nothing scandalous. He told me he was quite a good policeman, is what I remember.”
As veterans discuss the war that scarred them for life, Olive and Clyde would sometimes talk about the Great Depression and what it did to them. They knew it was something that could not be understood by their children, or friends from a younger generation. You simply had to live through it—the humility, hunger, and long nights without hope, the dollar-a-day jobs, the lines for soup, the unheated rooms on winter nights—to understand what it did to people. A teacher in the 1930s, Olive was not paid in money; rather, at the end of her work period she was given a ration of scrip, which she would take to local farmers and redeem for food.
“It seemed to us that life just stopped during the Depression,” said Olive. “It brought out the best and it brought out the worst in everybody.” Given the times, was it not possible that Clyde could kill another man over food? Olive had thought about this question since the whispered stories of Clyde’s awful past first came into town in mid-spring.
After much rumination, she had settled on an answer. She told about a rock in Saint Ignatius the size of a house, a remnant from an Ice Age glacier as it gouged its way north. Nobody asks about the rock or how it got there, said Olive Wehr. The neighborhood was built around it. Everybody accepts it for what it is.
BETTY BAMONTE was late for work and looking for something at home in Metaline Falls. She went downstairs to the first floor of the brick building and started rummaging through a stack of papers next to her husband’s master’s degree project. Looking at the completed thesis, she thought of how she had been left out of the recent triumphs. He used to talk nonstop about how excited he was to be stirring up the past. If she let him, he would jabber on till dawn. On many nights, even after she kissed him and told him to put the project out of his head and go to sleep, his mind kept racing, and she shared the thumping heart. The entire bedroom seemed to pulse with his restless mind. As the initial breakthroughs came, she was the first to know; Tony rushed the information to her like a kid running home from school with his best report card. She was a partner in discovery. But in recent weeks, she learned of developments—the existence of Clyde Ralstin, the complete story of Pearl Keogh—from reading the newspaper. She felt no closer to her husband than the average subscriber might feel.
A section of computer paper buried in a stack on Tony’s desk caught her eye. Betty saw these words, in big letters spat out by the automated printer:
She stared at the paper in disbelief.
XXOO LINDA LOVES TONY
Was this what those Thursday nights in Spokane were all about? The reason he couldn’t look her in the face without turning away? Why he no longer asked the basic questions about the structure of her day?
She caught her breath, forcing the air out slowly. Now she was gasping; the oxygen had left the room. She didn’t care what happened to him now, if he ever came home or lived or died. If he returned to Metaline Falls today, she would not let him in this house. She would throw everything of his in a bag and tell him to be gone, off to some fleabag room down the road, where he belonged—out, out, out! When the flash of anger passed, she started to cry, alone with the hollowed-out feeling of the betrayed.
XXOO LINDA LOVES TONY
She threw the paper down. Work beckoned, but she could not move just yet. She sat, buried her head in her hands.
BAMONTE COULD FIND no one in Saint Ignatius who had heard Clyde Ralstin mention anything about the Conniff killing. Instead, he found himself nearly drowning in a reservoir of good feeling for the old man. And how dare the sheriff insinuate that he might have been mixed up with police corruption and a cop killing!
Mike Walrod, the undersheriff, was one of the few people in town who had seen another side to Clyde. The old man had a hot temper, he said, which caused some people—Indians, without money or options, who lived in his apartments—to fear him. Still, Walrod was confident that Ralstin would talk to the law. “He was a cop, he used to talk to me about it,” said Walrod. “He would say, ‘I sympathize with your job, ’cause I know how it works.’ ”
That night, staying in a small roadside motel outside town, Bamonte wondered if perhaps he was going after the wrong man. The last thing he wanted was to hound an innocent person to his grave. But as he sifted through the evidence, he arrived at the same conclusion as before: everything pointed to Ralstin. Even if he had lived somewhat of an exemplary life since the killing, he still had to answer for September 1935.
In the morning, Bamonte went to the Lake County sheriff’s office; it was time to face Ralstin. Mike Walrod was planning to go with Bamonte to Ralstin’s house. But just as the two cops were leaving, a phone call came.
“A lawyer on the line for you, Sheriff Bamonte.”
Bamonte picked up the phone. An attorney, Philip J. Grainey, somewhat ubiquitous in western Montana, with offices in two towns and a practice that stretched over an area bigger than most states, identified himself as Clyde Ralstin’s attorney, hired to represent him in the Conniff investigation.
“I didn’t know he had a lawyer,” Bamonte said.
“He does.”
“We’re on our way to Ralstin’s house right now,” the sheriff said. “Would you like to meet us there?”
“My client doesn’t want to talk.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said he doesn’t want to talk. It wouldn’t be right for him. Not now.”
“What do you mean, he doesn’t want to talk? He was a cop. I’m a small-town sheriff. Why shouldn’t one cop help another? I’m just looking for a few answers.”
“Can you come to my office?” Grainey asked.
“I’d rather talk to Clyde.”
“What … exactly what have you got on him, Sheriff? What sort of case? Maybe we can talk about something.”
“Let’s talk to Clyde first.”
“My client hired me … to represent his best interests. And his best interest now is that he would rather not discuss this case.”
“Why not? If he’s innocent, what’s to hold him back?”
“He has the legal right to remain silent.”
And as Bamonte heard the basic speech he’d heard hundreds of times, his doubts of the night before vanished. He wanted to sit face-to-face with Ralstin—close enough to see him sweat, to watch him quiver, to lock old eyes with young eyes—and ask him what happened to his .32 revolver, the one that he reported missing when he left the police department in 1937, and what he was doing at a roadblock one hour after the shooting, and why Acie Logan would have named Clyde as the shooter, and what Virgil Burch was talking about when he told Pearl Keogh the same thing in 1940.
“Come out to my office,” said Grainey. “We can talk there.”
Walrod could not believe Clyde was refusing to cooperate. “Let me call him.” He dialed Ralstin at home, spoke to him for a few minutes, then hung up.
“He won’t talk,” said Walrod, greatly surprised. “Told me he had nothing to say. Said we should see his attorney. Makes you wonder.”
BAMONTE DROVE twenty-five miles north to the town of Ronan, a hamlet that seemed, even more than Saint Ignatius, to be overwhelmed by the great wall of the Mission Mountains. He felt as if he had been squeezed among the ages and dropped between two curtains of granite.
Grainey was polite and to the point. He said Ralstin had hired him after the stories started coming out of Spokane. Clyde had no criminal record, the attorney said, and had lived a fine life, as far as he knew. He had very little time left on this earth. His family was deeply upset by this … encumbrance from the Pend Oreille. Why would the sheriff want to bother an old man?
For one thing, Bamonte explained, the marshal’s murder remained an unsolved homicide, and he had a legal duty to investigate any leads. Secondly, even if the case never made it to a courtroom, Bamonte owed it to the Conniff family, Olive and Mary and George junior, to follow through with what he had started. Finally, he had a scholarly interest in the case.
Grainey nodded. The moral posturing concluded, the attorney cleared his throat. “Are you going to arrest him today?”
“Yes. He thinks you’re going to arrest him.”
“Why is that? I mean … if he’s done nothing wrong, why does he think I’m going to arrest him?”
“All this business in the papers.”
“I want to talk to him,” Bamonte said. “I’ve got a few questions.”
“What have you got on him?” Grainey said.
Bamonte was not prepared to lay out his entire case, but he wanted to show the attorney enough to coax him into cooperating. The sheriff produced a copy of the two Sonnabend interviews, in which Acie Logan named Ralstin as the killer and the leader of the gang of butter thieves.
“Sonnabend—he’s dead, isn’t he?” Grainey asked.
“Yes, but—”
“Then what are we supposed to make of this? Hearsay.”
Bamonte showed part of the transcript of an interview with Dan Mangan. “Mangan knew Clyde pretty well,” said the sheriff. “Worked sixteen years at SPD. Left as a sergeant. Had a place not too far from here, at Hungry Horse. The Dam Town Tavern. Said Clyde used to come up for drinks.”
“Yes …”
“Told me about the gun. Look.” He showed Grainey a section of the transcript of the interview with Mangan. “Said they threw it over the bridge to cover for Clyde.”
“And why would he do that?”
“Clyde had something on him. Had something on just about everybody in the department.”
“Mangan—he’s still alive?”
“He is.”
“You didn’t find the gun?”
“No, it’s … We did not.”
“This doesn’t prove a thing. These are not sworn statements.”
Bamonte opened his briefcase and took out a small tape recorder. He slapped a tape inside and pressed the play button. “Listen to this.”
What Grainey heard was the scratchy voice of Pearl Keogh, recounting her days at Mother’s Kitchen, finding butter wrappers from the Newport Creamery just days after it was robbed.
“And this.” He sped the tape up to the part where Pearl recounted the dinner-table boast of Virgil Burch, the one in which he said Clyde Ralstin sprayed the marshal’s body full of lead, and that their only regret was that they had to leave the creamery before picking up all the dairy products they wanted.
Grainey, accustomed to dealing with the banalities of small-town legal work in the late twentieth century—the divorces and wills, the petty crimes and drunk drivers, the trespasses and title disputes—had never heard a story so rustic and foreign.
“Sonnabend may be dead,” said Bamonte. “But this lady, Pearl Keogh, is alive.” He turned off the tape recorder. “And she’ll testify if we ask her to.”
“You don’t have enough to charge Mr. Ralstin,” Grainey said. “Do you?”
“That’s not up to me,” Bamonte said.
Grainey asked about physical evidence—fingerprints, butter wrappers, a weapon, anything to place the former detective at the crime scene.
“We have some loose ends,” Bamonte said. “But if you let me see him, I’m sure he can clear everything up.”
“Sheriff, this was fifty-four years ago. You can’t expect him to remember.”
“I just want to ask him a few things.”
Grainey was adamant: His client would not discuss any part of the Conniff case with Sheriff Bamonte. It was, he reiterated, Ralstin’s legal right to remain silent.
Now more than ever, Bamonte felt convinced Ralstin was his man. “Did you ask him about this?” Bamonte said.
“He’s never heard of Conniff. Doesn’t remember anything about the case.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Bamonte said. “Memory.”
“He doesn’t have to talk to you, Sheriff.”
“If he’s innocent,” Bamonte said, “he’s got nothing to hide. He’s supposed to be such a great supporter of the law. Just let me sit down with him. Straighten this thing out.”
Grainey was insistent. “If you try to talk to him, it might kill him.”
“I thought—”
“He is a frail old man. He has a bad heart. He suffers from internal bleeding. This whole matter has weakened him. I’m afraid an interrogation might just be too much for him.”
“Too much?”
“Yes. You know what I mean.”
“How sick is he?”
“He has trouble breathing. He can’t exert himself for long without shortness of breath. He just wants all this to go away.”
“It’s not going to go away,” Bamonte said.
“You don’t have enough to charge him. And you say you’re not here to arrest him. Well then, Sheriff, what do you want from this dying old man?”
Bamonte gathered up his papers and his tape recorder. He rose, thanked Grainey for his time, and made his way to the door.
“You tell him I know all about this,” the sheriff said. “Tell him I know what he did. Make sure he understands you. Tell him I know.”