Free Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan Page B

Percé Indians, not far from where Ralstin was raised. If anybody asked, Clyde was hunting with Chub. Gone the whole weekend.
    He didn’t want to be away from Dorothy, the waitress at Mother’s, for too long. Now in the process of shedding his wife, Clyde had been sampling some of Virgil’s talent, as he called it: the redhead from Idaho … the blonde with the big lips. And now he was moving closer to Dorothy.
    “What if somebody comes to see me?” Virgil asked. “Starts asking questions?”
    “Nobody’s gonna ask you any questions, Virgil.”
    Clyde whispered something in his ear. Virgil seemed to relax. Clyde always made him feel good. Nothing could touch him as long as the big detective was around.
    On his way out the door, Clyde tipped his fedora to a pair of uniforms sitting in a booth. He slowed to wink at Pearl. When she looked away, his face turned hard, an instant threat. Pearl was afraid, but she tried not to show it. Clyde squeezed Pearl’s arm and motioned toward her sister. She had three kids to support, right?
    Yes, Ruth had three little ones at home.
    And no husband?
    He was in the sanitarium, under treatment for tuberculosis.
    “Wouldn’t want anything to happen to those kids,” Clyde said to Pearl.
    “My God, no! Clyde Ralstin, what on earth are you talking about?”
    He loosened his grip, smiled. “Just keep your mouth shut.”
    T HE DOCTORS removed three bullets from the body of George Conniff. A fourth slug, which had passed through the marshal, was found in the side of the creamery building. Two of the bullets had soft-nosed casings and two were harder, made of steel. They all looked as if they came from a .32-caliber pistol. It was possible that all four were fired from the same gun, since it was not unusual to load asingle weapon with both steel and lead casings. In any event, the bullets were placed in evidence, with the intention of sending them to the crime lab for precise analysis on what sort of gun had fired them.
    George Conniff was buried on Tuesday afternoon, September 17, at the Greenwood Cemetery in Spokane. The funeral procession was led by a motorcycle brigade from the Spokane Police Department. The sky was full of clouds, and light rain fell on the mourners at the cemetery. Alma Conniff, left now without a home or a husband, was helped by her three children. She had no idea what she might do to survive this hard year of 1935, no idea where to go, even. The house had burned down, and now George was dead. In Newport, merchants suspended business for one hour in the afternoon to commemorate their slain marshal. Everybody said it wasn’t fair. Conniff had worked so hard. He was a good man, honest, who’d hit a patch of bad luck and had been trying so hard to put himself back together. He was building the log cabin, the new family home, and he was going to take things a bit easier. Conniff had very few enemies, even after his years as police chief in Sandpoint. He was good with people, fair. He understood that mean times made people do things they wouldn’t normally do. But killing a man over butter? What animal would stoop so low?
    When members of the Conniff family asked Elmer Black, the sheriff of Pend Oreille County, about the progress of the investigation, he assured them that the killers would soon be found. Police from eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, and southern British Columbia were checking all the railroad depots, the major roads, the hobo camps, the Hoovervilles, the jails, the bars, the union halls, the fire camps. The four bullet casings were on their way to a lab for forensic analysis. Before long, the sheriff expected, he’d know exactly what kind of gun had been used, and its year and make. Already a few leads were starting to trickle in. The killers would screw up, he told the family—they always did. Something would leak out; somebody would make a wrong move. Nobody killed a cop and got away with it.
    *  *  *
    A RRIVING IN S