Breaking Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

most lucrative time. Making the rounds, he could count on at least one envelope from a club—the usual price of doing business. Sometimes, Mangan told young Parsons, you could double your salary just by knowing which way to walk. Parsons was appalled. He wanted to tell somebody what he’d seen and heard. But of course there was no one to tell.
    On duty, Officer Mangan was especially good at working with his hands. He knew how to pry open a slot machine and was quick enough that he never got caught. He could crack virtually any lock with a flick of a small tool—a skill that came in handy at a butcher shop on his beat. Mangan and his circle of police friends and hangers-on ate well during the dark days of 1935. Another shop, a candy store north of the river, was also a favorite target of Officer Mangan. He knew how to loosen a back window so it would pop open, allowing him enough space to crawl through. Inside, he would find sugar, butter,tools, occasional cash. Back at the station, Mangan made no effort to conceal the fruits of his labors; he shared the booty with his regular friends and boasted of how he had done it.
    The small-time merchants Mangan was stealing from were people living on the edge, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days to take home thirty dollars a week. In a year when 40 percent of the state’s citizens were without steady income, it burned in Parsons’s gut to think that a cop, whose salary was paid by their taxes, was taking from the few people trying to hold on. He didn’t consider himself a snitch. You could call a guy an Okie, a Red, a nigger, a bindle stiff; but to be labeled a snitch was a death sentence. Turning away from the talk among other officers, Parsons was determined to do legitimate police work, something to make him stand out, to justify his selection above the hungry hundreds who wanted his job. When the civil service commissioner included him as one of the “fine … bunch of men” upholding the laws of the city of Spokane, Parsons wore the compliment like ranch initials engraved on cowhide.
    Walking his beat in the summer of 1935, the rookie wondered what he could do about the surge in burglaries. Across the state line, in Idaho a young sheriff’s deputy was celebrated as a hero when he caught somebody in the act of stealing beans and wheat from a farm. The thief was loading up a truck with food in the middle of the night when the deputy nabbed him. The arrest spurred talk among the merchants and creamery men: if only they could get a similar break in the Spokane area.… Parsons was ambitious. To catch the butter thief—that would be a coup.
    But what Parsons was learning from veteran cops had very little to do with police work. The other officers were starting to turn away from him, keeping their secrets in a circle which broke up when Parsons came near. They had nice clothes to change into when the shift was up, cars that could make a fellow proud, and cash for food, whiskey, a hunting rifle. Parsons took home his twenty-seven dollars a week, but after paying for rent and food and giving a bit to his family, he had very little left. The rap on Parsons, early on, was that he wasn’t a go-along-and-get-along guy.
    By contrast, William Harrison “Hacker” Cox, who had joined thedepartment just before Parsons, was already deemed one of the boys and had become a drinking buddy of Mangan’s. Cox was chunky and loud, in a patronizing, back-slapping way. While waiting to be hired by the police department—he had scored high enough on the civil service test to be ranked near the top—Cox had been arrested for bootlegging and brawling in a hotel room one night. On his way to the station, he told Officer Clyde Phelps that the arrest would ruin his chances of joining the force. So he was booked under the name William Harrison, and when his number came up for hire at the police department and he was asked if he’d ever been arrested, he shook his head, knowing his real name