Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (39 page)

When Galt passed through Florence, Alabama, he considered abandoning the car and taking a bus the rest of the way to Atlanta, but then he thought better of it. He paused only twice during the night. At one point, he got out beneath the crescent moon and tried to wipe the Mustang's surfaces clean of fingerprints. "I knew that the car could be hot
⁴⁴⁹
for some time," he would write, "and I didn't want to leave any calling cards in or on the vehicle before abandoning it once I got to Atlanta." Then somewhere in Alabama, Galt pulled off at a secluded spot, opened his trunk, and dumped his camera equipment in a ditch, all the expensive gear he'd bought with an eye to becoming a porn director--the projector, the splicer, the movie camera, everything but the Polaroid, which was light and portable enough. Porno was one career dream he'd just have to set aside. "I just wanted to get rid
⁴⁵⁰
of everything that would connect me with the Mustang--or with anything, anything that would leave any type of trail to me or help the police in any manner," Galt later said.

As soon as he reached Atlanta in the morning, he knew he'd have to park the Mustang and travel light; the camera gear would only slow him down.

29
POWER IN THE BLOOD

AT THE LORRAINE Motel, most of the members of King's entourage reconvened--the inner circle, now bereft of their leader. Slumped and spent, they sat together in 306, with King's briefcase and personal effects still scattered about the room. Andy Young was there, as well as James Bevel, Bernard Lee, Hosea Williams, James Orange, and Chauncey Eskridge. As sirens cried through the night, the men gathered around their organization's new president, Ralph Abernathy, whose election, according to SCLC bylaws already in place, was automatic. Abernathy didn't have King's charisma or organizational elan, yet his succession was beyond question. "King wouldn't make a decision without him,"
⁴⁵¹
Williams said. "He trusted Ralph like he trusted Jesus."

Around them, Memphis roared and raged. Helicopters whirred in the sky, and the half-tracks of the National Guard grumbled down Main and Beale, their metallic treads leaving enormous zippers in the pavement. Downstairs, a gang of young black thugs backed two white newsmen into a corner and briefly scuffled with them, shouting, "You're going to get yours next, and it ain't going to be too long!" On the Lorraine balcony, noted one reporter, "flashbulbs still blinked
⁴⁵²
repeatedly against the room number, like summer lightning."

In those awful hours immediately following the murder, people in the King entourage didn't quite know what to do or how to comport themselves. They made a few calls to friends of the movement. They talked about the future. They tried to catch some news on the television, but most of the broadcasts had flickered off the air. All they could really do, Andy Young said, was "sleepwalk through the night"
⁴⁵³
--trying as best they could to process what had happened that terrible day. Seldom do organizations suffer such a profound and surreal shock: to be gathered in one place with their leader, only to see him struck down from above, as though the tragedy were a ritual enacted upon a public stage.

Thoughts of the previous night's speech turned over in their minds.
Longevity has its place ... I may not get there with you ... I'm not fearing any man
. Over the past year, King had often invoked similar themes in other speeches and sermons--but never quite so forcefully, never with such pathos in his voice. Had King foreseen his own death? Had he felt the sniper's presence as he tarried for so many dangerous minutes on the Lorraine balcony? Abernathy, for one, was convinced that his friend not only had a premonition but in fact had been forwarded specific information about his impending death. As Abernathy later testified before the U.S. Congress, he believed King "had received, through letter or telephone,
⁴⁵⁴
some knowledge that something was going to happen ... some word from some source that he was going to be assassinated."

Andy Young thought it was clear that King wasn't the only intended victim of the murder. Others in the group may have been in danger, and in a larger sense the entire civil rights movement was in the assassin's crosshairs. King had often said that after any horrible setback--like the death of Medgar Evers or the shooting of James Meredith--others must immediately rush in to take up the fallen person's cause or else the enemy gathers the impression that by killing the leaders he can kill the movement. Therefore, that night the group at the Lorraine resolved that the work must go on: the Beale Street march, the garbage strike, the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, all of it. "We can't let Martin down
⁴⁵⁵
by staying in the graveyard with him," James Bevel told the group. "He wouldn't want that. Everything he planned has to go forward. Ralph Abernathy is our leader now and we have to go to work behind him."

Everyone at the Lorraine began to mourn in his own manner. "People freaked out and did strange things that reflected their own insecurities," Young recalled. A. D. King had become seriously drunk and was now storming around the Lorraine, screaming and swearing. "They got him,
⁴⁵⁶
the motherfuckers finally got my brother!" King shouted. He vowed to get a pistol and "kill all the motherfuckers who killed my brother." But then he would punctuate his tirades with moments of recognition. "My God, what am I talking about?" he'd say. "We've got to be nonviolent. That's what Martin would want." AD was so unstable that friends in the group took turns shielding him from reporters so he wouldn't embarrass himself.

Downstairs, Georgia Davis went back to her room, 201, the room she and King had shared the night before. King's whispered words rang in her ears: "Our time together is so short." "I touched the pillow,
⁴⁵⁷
searching for some lingering contact, some connection with him. But all I felt were the cold, clean sheets." Suddenly she felt a consuming dread. "The vision of his body flashed through my mind," she later wrote. "I remembered all the preachers I had ever heard, describing the fiery furnaces." And she thought:
I am descending into hell
.

At one point, Abernathy emerged from room 306 holding the cardboard backing from a laundered shirt and began scraping King's congealed blood into a jar. As he did so, he wept, and said to those assembled on the balcony, "This is Martin's precious blood.
⁴⁵⁸
This blood was shed for us." The Memphis photographer Ernest Withers took several shots
⁴⁵⁹
of the blood--to his eyes, the puddle's shape bore a curious resemblance to King's silhouette. Using a small vial, Withers scooped up some of the blood for himself; he would keep it in his refrigerator for many years.

Jesse Jackson went a step further. Young recalled seeing Jackson leaning over and pressing his palms down flat in the pool of drying blood. Then he stood up, raised his crimson hands to the sky, and wiped them down the front of his shirt.
⁴⁶⁰
Minutes later, Jackson, not bothering to change his stained shirt, left for the airport to catch the last flight to Chicago. "There's nothing that unusual
⁴⁶¹
about it," Young later said. "We Baptists, you know, we believe there's power in the blood--power that's transferable."

CORETTA KING RETURNED home from the Atlanta airport and began to deal with the avalanche of phone calls and telegrams while greeting the tearful well-wishers who streamed into her house. Within hours, a greenhouse's worth of flowers had materialized, and phone company workmen came to install a bank of three telephones to handle the swelling volume of calls.

A newspaper reporter described the newly widowed Mrs. King as "composed but dazed"
⁴⁶²
as she moved through the rooms at 234 Sunset, brushing past the portrait of Mahatma Gandhi on the wall and the bouquet of fake carnations King had recently given her. Financially, she had serious concerns about how she was going to carry on--King had not written a will,
⁴⁶³
had only a minimum life insurance policy, and left scarcely any savings, other than this cozy little brick home on the southwest side of Atlanta, not far from the slums. The house, together with two joint checking accounts he shared with Coretta, would be judged too small in value to probate.

Yet already Coretta seemed profoundly resigned to her husband's death. "I do think it's the will of God," she said. "We always knew this could happen." It was something she had been preparing for, and even publicly speaking about, for years. Three years earlier, in Seattle, she had told a crowd, "If something happens
⁴⁶⁴
to my husband, the cause will continue. It may even be helped."

All his campaigns had been dangerous, she said, "but there was something a little different
⁴⁶⁵
about Memphis. Martin didn't say directly to me that it's going to happen in Memphis, but I think he felt that time was running out." Coretta said her husband had long felt "a mystical identity with the meaning of Christ's Passion" and that it seemed appropriate that his death should come during the Easter season.

After President Johnson's call, the newly installed phones began to ring ceaselessly. The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, called, offering a chartered plane for her use. The comedian Bill Cosby called, offering to come and entertain her kids. Senator Robert Kennedy called, offering
another
plane. Attorney General Clark conveyed his condolences and assured her that the FBI was on the case. Harry Belafonte, the calypso singer, phoned to say he'd be there the next day, "just to do any little menial thing
⁴⁶⁶
--I want to share this sorrow with you."

Among the offerings from Western Union, a telegram arrived from the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in Addis Ababa. "It is with profound grief," the Lion of Judah said, "that we have learned the shocking news of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King whose valiant struggles for the cause of human dignity shall long be remembered by all peace loving peoples."

Coretta slipped away from the commotion and went back to the kids' rooms to put them to bed. As she later recalled in her memoir, it was clear that Dexter didn't fully comprehend what had happened. "Mommy," he said, "when is Daddy coming home?"
⁴⁶⁷

"He was hurt very badly," Coretta answered, realizing she was unable at this late and frantic hour to face a conversation about death. "You go to sleep, and I'll tell you about it in the morning."

Then she spoke with Yolanda, her eldest child, with whom she'd been shopping all afternoon for an Easter dress. "Mommy, I'm not going to cry," Yoki said resolutely. "I'll see him again in heaven."

But something was bothering her, something clearly nagged at her young conscience. "Should I hate the man who killed my father?" she asked.

Coretta shook her head. "No, darling,
⁴⁶⁸
your daddy wouldn't want you to do that."

WITHIN AN HOUR of King's death, authorities transported his body across town to the office of the chief medical examiner at John Gaston Hospital on Madison Avenue, where it was promptly taken to a pathology suite in the basement. The corpse was placed on a stainless steel table in a room with a sloping tile floor equipped with a drain. A set of implements lay gleaming beneath the bright lamps--chisels, vibrating saws, an array of scalpels and forceps. The body was covered with a sheet of thick, crinkly medical paper. From beneath the sheet, a tag marked "A-68-252" dangled from the subject's big toe.