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enforce. His baby face had a way of drawing raised fists. In two months of police work, he picked up more cuts and bruises than he did during years of tramping in the woods of northern Idaho. Around the police station, he was starting to hear things. How couldthe sergeant afford a new Buick—a five-passenger sedan priced at nine hundred dollars—on his salary, with two kids and a wife to support? What was the night-shift captain doing in the Cotton Club, after hours, with the town’s biggest bootlegger? There was a lot of talk about liquid cash, trade secrets, payers and players. The words were barely concealed. Surely, nothing spoken within the stone fortress of police headquarters would ever leave the building.
    Outside, the natural world seemed to be falling apart, from dust storms in the Columbia Basin to forest fires in Idaho to earthquakes in Montana. The man-made world was no better, with lines of hungry people snaked around the block of the big soup kitchen at Sacred Heart Hospital, and the streetcars unsafe to ride for fear of a striker’s bomb blast. But inside police headquarters, one thing had not changed: the Cop Code. The worse things became, the more the tribe of the Spokane Police Department closed ranks, for mutual gain and mutual defense.
    The way a rookie cop learned the job was to follow a journeyman around. There was no police academy. No rudimentary introduction to the law. No courses in when to fire a weapon or in legal rights. During his first months on the force, Parsons was introduced to Dan Mangan, a patrolman six years his senior. Most rookies were afraid of Mangan, with his big hands, his lightning scowl, and his small eyes glowering behind wire-rim glasses. With a select bunch of friends, he was a cutup. Angered, he was a terror. Mangan was one of only a handful of officers to be hailed as “physically perfect” during the annual physical of 1935, something that he never let any of the muscularly inferior officers forget. Mangan told Parsons that being a policeman presented all sorts of opportunities. Just watch.
    Liquor came from one of several gangs that made hooch in town and retailed it to the clubs, or from a connection in Canada. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 did nothing to change the way Spokane’s speakeasies did business. The states could still enact their own laws. Washington allowed beer parlors to operate, providing suds with no more than 3.2 percent alcohol; but it was illegal to sell liquor by the glass. So many clubs, which specialized in moody piano music and healthy shots of bourbon for a quarter, continued to flourish throughoutthe thirties. There were actually more bootleggers in town after Prohibition was repealed than there were during the dry years.
    One big-time mover, Albert Commellini, used to buy corn sugar by the truckload. When Parsons was introduced to him, the rookie asked him what he did with all that sugar. “I make good pies,” Commellini replied. Mangan howled. Commellini was a swell guy—a regular, Mangan said. At first, Parsons didn’t understand what he meant by that. A regular? In his inaugural months on the street he had heard the story about the big shipment of whiskey that arrived one day from Canada, an attempt to horn in on well-marked territory. It was hijacked by a Spokane police officer and promptly delivered to Commellini.
    Every six months or so, the newspapers would call for an investigation, and the federal prosecutor would make alarming sounds in front of a grand jury. Then the clamor would die down; among the clients of some of the best-known and most profitable clubs were assistant prosecutors, defense lawyers, and reporters. By day, they professed to be shocked—
shocked
—at what was going on in the queen city of the self-proclaimed richest empire in the Western Hemisphere. By night, they warmed regular seats at the Cotton Club or at the second-floor speakeasy of Jimmy Young.
    The night shift, midnight to eight, was Mangan’s