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

22 THE MAN IN 5B

KING AND ABERNATHY went down to the Lorraine restaurant that afternoon and ordered a mess of fried Mississippi River catfish³²⁴ for a late lunch. The waitress slightly botched the order--instead of bringing two plates, she brought one giant platter, piled high with crunchy fish. That was fine with King. "We'll just share," he said, and so the two old friends ate together, washing the catfish down with big glasses of sugary-sweet iced tea.

They brought the fish back up to 306 and kept nibbling while King placed a series of telephone calls around the country. He was worried about what was going on in court that day. "Where is Andy?" King fretted. "Why hasn't he called us?"

GALT BROUGHT UP some toiletries from the Mustang in his blue plastic zippered bag and settled into his new digs at Bessie Brewer's flophouse. The room was indistinguishable from a hundred others he'd frequented over the years. There was a small defunct fireplace, cracked floors that vaguely smelled of uric acid, walls of peeling paper, and a low wainscoting of smudged white bead board. Galt hardly noticed the lumpy mattress, the sagging springs, the faded bedspread.

Galt was much more interested in what was outside the room. He slid the blond dresser to the side, adjusted the curtains, and savored a mostly unobstructed view of the Lorraine. He dragged a straight-backed chair to the window and surveyed the scene more closely. The rooming house's backyard was grown up in spindly leafless brush and littered with liquor bottles and other trash. At the far edge of the unkempt lot, Galt could make out the lip of a large retaining wall that dropped eight feet down to Mulberry Street. Across Mulberry, a finny Cadillac glimmered in the Lorraine parking lot next to the drained swimming pool, which was partially hidden by a privacy wall.

Rising above it all was the two-story motel with its mustard yellow cinder-block walls and metal-framed windows and doors of soft turquoise. A bright arrowed sign, a classic piece of roadside Americana, stood at the corner, its neon tubes not yet turned on. The main wing of the motel, styled in a kind of modern-deco minimalism, was dominated by a long balcony--the same balcony where King stood in the photo Galt had seen in the Commercial Appeal. King's room was only two hundred feet away--and some twelve feet lower than Galt's perch inside 5B.

The view of the Lorraine was even better than Galt had guessed from his initial inspection. More study revealed a small problem, however: to get a bead on the area right in front of King's door, Galt would have to open his window, lean over the sill, and fire his weapon with the rifle tip protruding several feet outside the rooming house's walls. Exposing his position in this way would run a high risk of detection.

Galt found a solution: just down the hall, the moldy communal bathroom afforded a more promising angle. There, all he'd have to do was crack the window, rest the rifle barrel on the sill, and take aim. It was a direct yet largely concealed shot, and an easy one at that--through the magnification of a 7x scope, a man standing on the balcony would appear to be only thirty feet away.

Galt couldn't have asked for a better vantage point than Bessie Brewer's rooming house. From the privacy of 5B, Galt could monitor the goings-on at the Lorraine--and from the shared bathroom a mere thirteen paces away, he could raise his rifle with little fear of detection and fire directly at, and slightly down upon, his target.

Then he realized he was missing something, a lookout's most important tool. The Lorraine was just far enough away that he couldn't make out faces or other details with the naked eye. Galt could use the Redfield scope on his Remington, but he didn't want to bring his rifle up yet--lugging the weapon in its cumbersome box might draw too much attention, especially in broad daylight. In any case, a rifle scope was impractical for long-term surveillance work. For all Galt knew, he could be stuck here for days, possibly a whole week, snooping on the SCLC entourage. He would have to improve on his equipment.

THROUGHOUT THE AFTERNOON, King held meetings to talk about what to do with the Invaders. Two members of his staff--Hosea Williams and James Bevel--had been negotiating with the Invaders for days, trying to extract a promise that they would help with the march and not resort to violence. King wanted the Invaders to be included in the planning and to serve as marshals along the march route. But the Invaders were unwilling to make any promises unless King's SCLC gave them a significant sum of cash--by some accounts, they demanded ten thousand dollars.³²⁵ Hosea Williams refused to commit any money, but he did provide the Invaders with a room at the Lorraine while suggesting to one Invader leader, Charles Cabbage, that he come on board for the week as hired SCLC staff.

King grew angry when he learned of these developments. "Hosea," he fumed, "no one will be on our payroll³²⁶ who accepts violence as a means of social change." When he found out that the Invaders were trying to extort money from the SCLC, King became even more furious, saying, "I don't negotiate with brothers."³²⁷

Cabbage and his Invaders were told they were no longer welcome at the Lorraine, that their room had been promised to someone else. Cabbage stormed out³²⁸ of the Lorraine late that afternoon, toting a small arsenal of rifles and guns wrapped in a blanket under his arm.

AROUND 4:00 P.M., Galt trundled down the narrow staircase of Bessie Brewer's rooming house and got in his car. He drove the short distance to the York Arms Company, a sporting goods store located several blocks north at 162 Main, close by a movie theater that was showing The Graduate. York Arms, which carried rifles and shotguns among other merchandise, was one of the stores that had been looted the previous week when King's march turned ugly. This afternoon, as Galt walked in the front door, a clutch of striking garbage workers--many carrying placards that said, I AM A MAN--strolled down Main Street, not far from the York Arms storefront.

"Got any binoculars?"³²⁹ Galt asked the first salesman he met, Ralph Carpenter. "I'd be interested in some infrared ones if you got any--for night vision."

Carpenter looked at the new customer and would later describe him as having an "average face, average hands, average neck--he was a neat, average-looking fellow and there was nothing outstanding about him." The man wore a dark, smooth-finish suit, a wide-collared white shirt, and a tie whose knot was slightly off center.

Carpenter told the customer he didn't carry any infrared binoculars, then showed the customer several brands of regular, high-end binoculars that cost upwards of $100. Galt balked at the prices. Then Carpenter remembered that he had several cheaper pairs in the show window. They were 7x35 Banners, manufactured by Bushnell, with fully coated optics. "These only cost $39.95," Carpenter said brightly as he retrieved a pair from the window. "They're imports, from Japan."

Galt seemed to like the price and put the binoculars up to his eyes. He said they were acceptable.

Carpenter tallied the tax and said the total would be $41.55.

Galt retrieved a roll of neatly folded bills from his right front pants pocket, from which he peeled off two twenties and a one, and then found fifty-five cents in another pocket. The salesclerk demonstrated how to focus and adjust the eyepieces on the Bushnells and then began to box up the merchandise, noting that the binoculars also came with a black leather case and accompanying straps. Carpenter slipped the box into a gray-blue paper sack--marked "York Arms Company." As Galt aimed for the door, Carpenter said, "Hurry back."

Galt said something in reply, but Carpenter couldn't quite catch what he said--he spoke in a soft mumble.

AT FIRE STATION No. 2, across Mulberry Street from the Lorraine, the black police officers Ed Redditt and Willie Richmond were back at their surveillance post,³³⁰ keeping a close eye on the comings and goings at the motel. Holed up in the locker room, they took turns with the binoculars, peering through the slits in the newspapers that were still taped to a rear window. Off in the background, they could hear the murmur of a television in the station's lounge and occasionally the friendly commotion of Ping-Pong matches.

There was a pay telephone in the firehouse, and that afternoon, to everyone's surprise, the phone rang. One of the firemen picked up the receiver to hear a woman on the line. She didn't say her name, but her voice had a distinct edge. "We know Detective Redditt is in there, spying on King. You tell him he is doing the black people wrong. Now we're going to do him wrong." Then the caller hung up.

Ed Redditt's superiors at police headquarters, interpreting the call as a possible death threat, decided it best to remove him from the situation; his cover had been blown, at the very least. Redditt wanted to stay, but headquarters was adamant. His boss took him off the case, assigned him an armed police guard, and advised him to go into hiding with his family for a few days.

Willie Richmond was told to remain in the firehouse and stay on the job for the rest of the afternoon. Since the anonymous caller hadn't mentioned him, Richmond's department superiors felt he was safe, his usefulness uncompromised.

He raised the field glasses to his face and turned his gaze back on the Lorraine.

KING EMERGED FROM 306 and walked down the balcony toward the stairs. After their late lunch together, Abernathy had fallen asleep, and King had made a few calls, but he was bored now and in search of company. He was anxious to hear from Andy Young and learn how the day's courtroom session was faring. He wandered down to Georgia Davis's room, 201, where he found his brother, AD, and Lucretia Ward, as well as Senator Davis. They all sat around joking,³³¹ gossiping, mimicking different preachers. King lay across the bed, his eyes closed, half following the dance of conversation.

After a while, he and AD decided to call their mother³³² in Atlanta. Once Mama King answered, they played a little prank, each pretending to be the other, thoroughly confusing her. King was pleased to hear the delight in her voice when she realized that her two boys were together in Memphis. They spoke for nearly an hour. Near the end Daddy King got on the line as well.

Through the afternoon, Georgia thought King seemed distracted and tired but happy. She saw a look of resignation on his face, a look of acceptance, that she'd seen many times the past year. "He really sensed³³³ his time was not long," she said. "He felt he'd fulfilled his mission on earth. He said on many occasions that he would not live to be an elderly person. He'd say, you know, there are a lot of kooks out there. Sometimes I thought that he almost welcomed it."

That night, King and a large entourage were supposed to go to the home of the local minister Billy Kyles for dinner. The word was that Kyles's wife, Gwen, was making a soul food feast. "Senator," King now said, "you like soul food?"³³⁴ Georgia said she did, and he said she should come to dinner as his guest.

Finally, about five o'clock, Andy Young, fresh from court, arrived at the Lorraine, with the SCLC lawyer Chauncey Eskridge soon following on his heels. King was in a teasing mood, and he assaulted Young with a mock tirade: Where you been all day?³³⁵ How come you never call? Why do you keep your leader so ill informed! Abernathy, aroused from his nap, came down and joined in. King hurled mock invectives at Young, then he hurled a pillow, and then Young hurled it back. Soon they were in a full-scale pillow fight³³⁶ and wrestling match--the King brothers, Abernathy, and Young--the men all yelling, snorting, horselaughing like a scrum of kids.

Once things settled down, Young and Eskridge gave their report from the U.S. District Court. Attorney Lucius Burch had been masterful. After listening to nearly eight hours of heated testimony on both sides, Judge Bailey Brown had agreed to modify the federal injunction to accommodate a tightly controlled demonstration. King and Lawson would have to make myriad assurances as to the route, size, organization, and policing of the march, and they would have to cooperate with authorities at every turn. The details would be hammered out the next day, but here was the essence of it: the show would go on as scheduled for Monday morning, April 8.

They'd won.

ERIC GALT RETURNED to the area around Bessie Brewer's rooming house about 4:30 to find that he'd lost his parking space in front of Jim's Grill. He was forced to park some sixty feet farther away, just south of Canipe's Amusement Company, a shop that leased and serviced jukeboxes and pinball machines all over town. He took the binoculars up to his room but almost immediately returned to his car, apparently with the idea of retrieving the Remington from the trunk. He realized that with this new parking space, he'd have to be much more careful about hauling up the rifle; on this busy street, toting a long narrow box could be risky. So he remained in his car awhile--fifteen minutes or more--and waited for the traffic on South Main to ebb.

Two women who worked across the street at the Seabrook paint and wallpaper company saw him sitting in his Mustang. Having just completed the day's work shift at 4:30, they were standing by the large showroom window, gazing out on the street, waiting for their spouses to pick them up. One of the workers, Elizabeth Copeland,³³⁷ thought the man inside the Mustang was "waiting for someone or something." Copeland's colleague, Peggy Hurley,³³⁸ stood by the window until 4:45, when her husband arrived. As she walked toward her husband's car, Hurley noticed that the man in the Mustang was still there, patiently sitting behind the wheel. He was a white man, wearing a dark suit.

It is likely that Galt had spotted the two women as they lingered by the window and thought it prudent to wait until they left before undertaking his risky errand. Whatever the case, sometime between 4:45 and 5:00, Galt opened up his trunk and wrapped the long box in an old green herringbone bedspread he'd stashed in the car. Clutching the bundle, he moved briskly toward the rooming house.

Once inside 5B,³³⁹ Galt laid down the Gamemaster and removed his new field glasses from the York Arms bag. Sitting in the straight-backed chair by the window, he fiddled with the Bushnells and trained the lenses on the Lorraine. He never bothered with the straps designed to attach to the leather binocular case--he merely tossed them aside.

Galt adjusted the Bushnells to their highest setting, 7x, the same magnification power as his Redfield scope. People were standing in the Lorraine courtyard by a white Cadillac. The parking lot was splotched with rain puddles, remnants of the previous night's storm. In the foreground, down in the rooming house's backyard, tangled branches bobbed in the faint breeze. The binoculars must have created the illusion of an odd intimacy: enlarged through Galt's lenses, King's comrades in the parking lot appeared to be less than twenty feet away, and yet they betrayed no awareness of his presence as they joked and milled about. Sweeping the Bushnells slightly upward, Galt could easily make out the number affixed to King's room--306--but the door was closed and the orange window drapes were drawn. Just outside his door, a fire extinguisher, slightly askew, was lodged on the wall.

AT THAT MOMENT, King was inside the room with Abernathy,³⁴⁰ getting ready for dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyles's house. The room was cluttered with newspapers and coffee cups and other detritus of the day. The bony ruins of King's catfish lunch clung to a plate. King's heavy black briefcase squatted like an anvil on the table, the gold initials "MLK" embossed near the latch. The orange bedspreads lay rumpled and twisted. The Huntley-Brinkley Report flickered on the TV.

King was half-listening as he shaved in the bathroom--a process that, for him, was both laborious and smelly. King, who had a thick beard but sensitive skin, had found years earlier that shaving with a conventional razor and cream caused him to break out in a bumpy rash. So he had taken to using a potent depilatory called Magic Shaving Powder,³⁴¹ a product widely used by Orthodox Jews whose strictures forbade them to touch a razor to the face. King's elaborate shaving ritual was said to be one of the reasons he so often ran late.

Now King, standing before the mirror in his suit slacks and an undershirt, was mixing the fine white powder in a cup of warm water and stirring it into a thick paste. The concoction gave off the sulfurous stench of rancid eggs. King, who'd become inured to the smell, spread the goop over his face and let the hair-removing chemicals (bearing ghastly names like calcium thioglycolate, guanidine carbonate, and nonoxynol-10) do their work.

Abernathy shrank from the smell as he always did--he grabbed a chair across the room by the window and teased King about it. From the bathroom, King asked Abernathy to call the Kyles home and see what was on the menu for tonight. Abernathy balked at the assignment but then picked up the phone and soon had Gwen Kyles on the line. He hung up and reported to King: "Roast beef, candied yams, pig's feet, neck bones, chitlins, turnip greens, corn pone."

It would be a down-home dinner, King's favorite. The news seemed to put him in an even better frame of mind. After a few minutes, he meticulously scraped off the Magic Shaving Powder paste with a spatula-like tool. The gunk swirled down the drain, taking a thousand little hairs with it. He patted his face dry with a towel, only to be interrupted by a crisp knock at the door. The Reverend Billy Kyles, a tall, gangling extrovert wearing dark-rimmed glasses, stood at the threshold and said they'd better hurry--the hour was getting late, and Gwen was expecting everyone.

Pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis, Kyles had known King and Abernathy for ten years. The two men began to gang up on their old friend. "Billy," Kyles later recalled King saying, "we're not going to get real soul food³⁴² at your house. Gwen's just too good-looking to make soul food--she can't cook it."

Kyles feigned hurt and displeasure: "Who can't cook soul food?"

Abernathy chimed in: "All right now, Billy. If she's serving up feel-ay meen-yuns or something, then you're gonna flunk."

King was in the bathroom slapping Aramis aftershave lotion on his face--masking the harsh sulfur smell with fine notes of sandalwood, leather, and clove.

Kyles said, "Man, we're gonna be late. You just get ready, Doc, and don't worry about what we gonna have."

Moderately chastened, King got into gear. He put on a dress shirt and tried to fasten the collar button, but it was too tight--he'd gained weight since he last wore it, or perhaps the shirt had shrunk at the cleaners.

One thing was certain, Kyles said in riposte as he walked out the door, they'd be having more food than King's waistline needed. Doc, he said, you getting fat.

"That I am," King agreed, and, his vanity pricked, he cut a glance at Kyles, who fidgeted out on the balcony. Then King changed the subject: "Do I have another shirt here?" He pulled a freshly laundered button-down from his belongings, a white Arrow permanent-press dress shirt, and quickly put it on--finding that the collar buttoned more easily.

"Now," he said, his eyes scanning the room. "Where's my tie? Somebody's moved it." He was looking for his favorite one, a crisp, slender brown silk tie with gold and blue diagonal stripes. King at times enjoyed the role of absentminded professor--dependent on Abernathy to mother him and manage the minutiae of his life--and now he played the part to the hilt. It was the kind of whimsical repartee they'd enacted in a thousand hotel rooms over the past decade, a banal conversational style informed by the real possibility that FBI moles might be listening in. "Hmmm," King said, "someone's definitely moved it."

"Martin," Abernathy scolded, "why don't you just look down at that chair?"

The tie was there, of course, right where he'd left it. King, an adept and fastidious tie tier, quickly threaded the knot and cinched it up to his fleshy neck. He fixed a silver tiepin in place and studied himself in the mirror. About five minutes before six o'clock, he stuffed in his shirttails and ambled out the door to see what was going on with the rest of the party at the Lorraine.

PATROLMAN WILLIE RICHMOND, watching through his binoculars,³⁴³ saw King emerge from his room onto the balcony. The firehouse was full of commotion, and Richmond found it hard to concentrate. A special "tactical" unit of the Memphis Police Department--TAC Unit 10--had pulled in to the station's parking lot and come inside for refreshments. The unit was composed of three squad cars, with four men to a car. The twelve officers were hanging out in the lounge, drinking coffee, and joking among themselves. Some of the firemen joined in on the fun.

One of the firemen, a thirty-nine-year-old white lieutenant named George Loenneke,³⁴⁴ passed through the locker room and saw Richmond standing with his binoculars. "There's Dr. King right there," Richmond said. "I presume he's going to supper."

Loenneke walked over to Richmond. "Let me see," he said. "I haven't seen Dr. King since he was in town to do the Meredith march." Richmond handed over the binoculars, and Loenneke got a glimpse through the peephole. "That's him alright. He hasn't changed a bit."

WHAT ERIC GALT did inside 5B between five o'clock and a little before six is not precisely known. Perhaps he read the Memphis Commercial Appeal--he had brought up the paper's first section from the car. Perhaps he listened to the news on his Channel Master pocket radio or mashed a bead of Brylcreem onto his fingertips and worked the unguent through his freshly cut hair. Perhaps he contemplated wrapping his fingertips with the Band-Aids that were among the toiletries in the outer compartment of his zippered blue leatherette bag; it was an old trick to avoid leaving fingerprints, a precaution he customarily liked to take before committing a crime.

But he had no time to fool around with Band-Aids. Suddenly, at about 5:55 p.m., a familiar figure floated across his binocular glass. To Galt's astonishment, Martin Luther King had emerged from his room and was standing on the balcony, right in front of 306, next to a metal service dolly. Standing in his shirtsleeves and a tie, he looked down into the Lorraine parking lot. Above him, a light fixture dangled loosely from the ceiling.

It must have given Galt a start: at last, the man he'd been chasing since he left L.A. was in his sights, suspended in the jittery, fuzzy-edged world of coated optics. He was a perfect target, fully exposed, almost as though he were speaking at a dais.

At 7x magnification, the details would have been startlingly vivid. Galt would have been able to see everything--the pencil mustache on King's face, the laces on his black wing-tip shoes, the gold watch on his left wrist, the crisp diagonal stripes on his silk necktie.

Galt had to make a lightning-fast decision. He might never get a chance like this again. He ran to the communal bathroom to check the view. Charlie Stephens, the sickly drunk across the hall in 6B, could hear the new roomer's footsteps³⁴⁵ as he clomped down the corridor's linoleum floor. The rooming house walls were paper-thin, and Stephens, whose bed backed up to the bathroom wall, listened as "Willard" fumbled around in there. Then Stephens heard him emerge from the bathroom and clomp right back to his room.

The view from the bathroom must have convinced Galt that it was now or never. Back in 5B, Galt frantically pulled together his blue zippered bag, the binoculars, and the boxed rifle still wrapped in its green bedspread. (In his haste, he left behind the two binocular-case straps he'd tossed on the floor earlier.) He scooped up his belongings and dashed down the hall toward the bathroom. Once inside, he slammed and locked the door.

It was about 6:00.