Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

21 A ROOM WITH A VIEW

ON THE BRIGHT, warm morning of April 4, Eric Galt slept in at the New Rebel Motel. Around 9:30 the maid knocked on his door to pick up his bed linen. "Yes?" he said, slightly startled, and she replied, "Oh, I'll come back later."³¹⁷

Galt ate breakfast, most likely at the New Rebel restaurant, and then checked out, taking several small bars of Cashmere soap from the bathroom. He bought a copy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. In its copious coverage of the strike, the paper featured a page-one photograph of King standing in front of room 306 at the Lorraine.

Through the middle of the day, Galt spent some time "just stalling around," as he later put it, in the Memphis suburbs. He went to a tavern--he referred to it as a "beer house"³¹⁸--and made a long-distance call from a phone booth. The call was to his brother who lived in the suburbs of Chicago. According to a journalist who later interviewed the brother at length, Galt said: "Soon it will all be over.³¹⁹ I might not see you for a while. But don't worry about me. I'll be all right."

THAT MORNING, KING woke up early for an eight o'clock staff meeting to discuss the day's efforts in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Tennessee. Even after the late night, he ran the meeting with a sense of urgency and moment. Andrew Young would serve as King's plenipotentiary before Judge Bailey Brown. It would be the job of attorney Lucius Burch to marshal Young's considerable eloquence and experience. Through deft examination on the witness stand, Burch would use Young (as well as Lawson, who would speak for the local cause) to show how vital this march really was, not just for King, but for the concept of peaceful protest in America and the world. If necessary, it would become a symposium on the First Amendment. King's vision of the future was on the line.

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house³²⁰ run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 4221/2 Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry's Wink soda--THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer's rooming house would later describe the place as "a half-step up from homelessness." Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer's establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks--rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim's Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim's kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer's tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer's office admonished, "No Curseing or Foul Talk."

AT AROUND THREE o'clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer's shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim's Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim's Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer's rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 4221/2 Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer's office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

"Got any vacancies?"³²¹ he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man's checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he'd gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place--and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. "We got six rooms available," she said. "You stayin' just the night?"

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. "Our nicest one," she said. "It's $10.50 a week. You can cook in there."

Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn't do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River.

"No, see, I won't be doing any cooking," he mumbled. "You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping."

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a "smirk" and a "sneer," as though he were "trying to smile for no reason." She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. "This one's $8.50 for the week," she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it--a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, "No Smoking in Bed Allowed." The ceiling's wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt's eye: the window wasn't boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

"Yeah," Galt abruptly said, "this'll do just fine."

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

While they stood talking in the corridor, one of the tenants across the hall emerged from his room and got a look at his new neighbor. Charlie Stephens,³²² a balding former heavy-equipment operator and a disabled World War II veteran, had been severely wounded during the liberation of Italy and still had shrapnel embedded in his left leg. Now unemployed, he was fifty-one years old and sickly. That afternoon, Stephens was trying to repair an old radio that had been on the fritz. He'd been living at Mrs. Brewer's for some time, sharing room 6B with his common-law wife, a mentally disturbed woman named Grace Walden³²³ who spent most of her days in bed.

Charlie Stephens, for his part, suffered from tuberculosis and was a bad alcoholic--in fact, he was already well in his cups as he eyed, through thick tortoiseshell glasses, the new guest across the hall. Down the hall, out of earshot from Stephens, Mrs. Brewer told Galt under her breath that the people who lived around 5B were usually quiet, but that the guy next to him--Stephens--drank a bit too much.

"Well," Galt volunteered, "I take a beer once in a while myself."

Mrs. Brewer told him that was fine as long as he stayed in his room and kept quiet. Then she led Galt back to her office, where he presented her with a twenty-dollar bill, snapping it crisply. She gave him $11.50 in change. She did not give him a key--the door to 5B, rigged as it was with a bent coat hanger in lieu of a knob, had no lock.

"And what's the name?" Mrs. Brewer asked, pointing to her spotty registration book.

"It's John Willard," he replied. He did not volunteer any information about himself--where he was from, what he drove, what brought him to town. As she jotted the name in her logbook, she noticed that he flashed his smile once again.