Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (28 page)

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,
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thought the man inside the Mustang was "waiting for someone or something." Copeland's colleague, Peggy Hurley,
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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,
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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,
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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,
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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 food
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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,
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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,
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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 footsteps
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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.

23
AT THE RIVER I STAND