Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan Read Free Book Online Page A

arrested for some reason,” the judge said in dismissing the case. He knew the reason, of course—no Spokane cop was going to arrest a brother, no matter what the offense. But the judge went no further than his comments from the bench.
    The fight enhanced Ralstin’s reputation among fellow officers and at Mother’s Kitchen, where he spent most of his time while on duty. To his renown as a wrestler and marksman was added the designation as a man with an undefeated pair of fists.
    Ralstin and Burch were the closest of friends. They told each other they had the best women, the best food, the best booze, and the best clothes in a bad time. They shared a hunting cottage near Superior, Montana, not far from the old placer mine Burch had picked up. Ralstin loved to kill things—in season or out. He and Burch shot deer, elk, cougar, grouse, marten, even an occasional buffalo. They shared women from the talent pool that Burch brought through Mother’s. And they shared a vision, born of failed schemes, that the needs of hungry people could bring untold riches to a plumber and a cop.
    W ITH EVERY NEW DAY of the drought, Spokane’s butter shortage grew worse. Mother’s controlled one of the largest local supplies of the scarce commodity, and they were selling it as fast as they could bring it in. Nearly two thousand pounds of butter from different creameries had moved in and out of Mother’s Kitchen in late summer of 1935—appearing by night, from some furtive connection. Now, two weeks into September, they needed a fresh load. Burch knew of a creamery in Newport, forty-seven miles north of town on the Idaho-Washington border. He had worked on the place as a plumber and was familiar with the doors, the locks, the volume of creamery products moved in and out. It would be a piece of cake. They could takeSaturday night, service a couple of women Burch knew in the neighboring timber town of Priest River, and then hit the Newport Creamery on the way home. It would be one of their biggest butter heists.
    They could keep some of the butter at Mother’s and store the rest of it at Ralstin’s ranch, south of Spokane near Hangman’s Creek—so named as the site where defeated Indian leaders were hung from pine boughs in 1858 after they came to Colonel George Wright seeking terms of surrender. In 1935, some citizens were urging that the original name, Latah Creek, be restored—a proposal that was shot down by Spokane civic leaders, who said it must remain Hangman’s Creek “to remind us of when the Redmen were cowed,” as one local politician put it.
    As Burch and Ralstin discussed the rough outline of their plan, Burch noticed that somebody was listening—a woman named Pearl Keogh. A late-night regular at Mother’s Kitchen, Pearl was short and very pretty, with intense blue eyes and dark curly hair, which she usually wore to her shoulders. After midnight, when Pearl got off work from Sacred Heart Hospital, where she was a nurse, she went down the hill to Mother’s. Her sister, Ruth, worked there as a cook and later as night manager. With three children, and a husband sick with tuberculosis at a sanitarium, Ruth needed every nickel she got from Mother’s. Pearl was a bit more footloose. She flirted with cops at Mother’s and told jokes that cracked the boys up. Some nights, she would sit and chat with Ruth, nursing coffee, listening to the radio. Walter Winchell’s weekly round of rapid-fire news, launched from table 50 of New York’s Stork Club, was a favorite (“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press …”). Everybody was talking about Huey Long, the Kingfish, former governor of Louisiana, then a senator, who could coax a snake onto an iceberg. “Every man is a king, but no man wears a crown,” the Kingfish would say. His call to take money from the wealthiest people in the country and give it to the poorest, in the form of a five-thousand-dollar homestead fund for each family,