Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (45 page)

After a few hours, the solemn and awkward meeting broke up with promises of goodwill but no hard-and-fast resolutions. With some of the black leaders around him, Johnson made a brief statement on national television. "Violence," he said, "must be denied its victory."

Now ravenous, Johnson tried to steal a few minutes to grab a bite. He bowed his head with the others at the table and said a perfunctory but heartfelt grace: "Help us, Lord,
⁵²⁰
to know what to do."

Justice Abe Fortas, who, oddly enough, was born and raised in Memphis, talked to the president for a while about the search for King's killer, but the main topic of conversation was the fragile state of security in the nation's capital. Through much of the day, troubling reports from the White House message center had been piling up, rumors that a full-scale riot was being planned for the streets of downtown Washington. The word flowing into the White House was that the previous night's disturbances were mere child's play; tonight, the whole city was going to blow.

Though the morning had started off peacefully enough, by midday the feel on the streets had begun to change. Following a viral logic, the city descended into fear and then hysteria. The rhetoric turned ugly. Stokely Carmichael had been outdoing himself, feeding the press outlandish calls to violence--at one point urging Washington blacks to "take as many white people
⁵²¹
with them as possible." All whites, he insisted, were complicit in King's death: "The honky, from honky Lyndon Johnson to honky Bobby Kennedy, will not co-opt King. Bobby Kennedy pulled that trigger just as well as anybody else."

Through the early afternoon, the feverish rumors grew. Black store owners began to cover their plate-glass windows with plywood and scrawled entrances with the words SOUL BROTHER in hopeful attempts to differentiate their businesses from white-owned stores--the mercantile equivalent of Israelites smearing their door frames with lamb's blood.

Finally, as though belatedly reading the path of a glowering storm, people panicked. The large department stores downtown discreetly began to close up, removing merchandise from windows. Hundreds and then thousands simply got up and left their places of work, yanked their kids from school, and began to walk, then run down the streets, hurrying to bus stops and train stations and the Potomac River bridges. Idling in clogged traffic, frightened motorists abandoned their cars on the streets and took off on foot. It looked like a Hollywood disaster film--as Washingtonians, black and white, evacuated the District en masse.

As Johnson tried to eat lunch, an aide who'd been looking out the window toward Pennsylvania Avenue interrupted the president and his fellow diners. "Gentlemen," he said. "I think you better see this."
⁵²²

Johnson stood up and, with a hint of trepidation in his step, wandered over to the window. The president didn't say a word; he only pointed: toward the east, an immense pillar of fire climbed over the cornices of downtown Washington and billowed in the sky. Soon the corridors of the White House smelled of smoke.

The president was almost philosophical. "What did you expect?" he later told one adviser. "I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off."

A FEW HUNDRED yards away, at FBI headquarters in the Justice Department building, the crime lab technicians remained burrowed in their work. While fingerprint experts combed through hundreds of thousands of stored print cards, other analysts sifted through the physical evidence that had been flown up from Memphis. Taken together, these dozens of objects formed a vast puzzle. The significant and the random, the potentially crucial and the probably meaningless, were all assembled in a forensic riddle on a well-lit table in the crime lab. The search for the man in 5B was moving not only outward into the country but downward into the close realm of slides and tiny threads teased from artifacts, downward into the swimming lenses of laboratory microscopes. Quite apart from fingerprints, the assailant had left faint trails that he was not aware of--traces of his physiology, hints of his movements, windows into the habits of his mind.

That afternoon, the fiber expert Morris S. Clark
⁵²³
began to microscopically examine the green herringbone bedspread that was twirled around the gun in front of Canipe's. He found human hairs--dark brown Caucasian hairs--entangled in the picked and faded fabric, as well as in the teeth of "Willard's" hairbrush, in the clothes, and on some of the other belongings in the bundle. The hairs, oily and fine, all seemed to come from the same man.

Down the hall, meanwhile, another search was in progress. On the handle of the duckbill pliers found in the blue zippered bag, FBI investigators took note of a little price sticker stamped with the word "Rompage." A quick telephone call to the National Retail Hardware Association in Indianapolis revealed that Rompage was a large hardware store in Los Angeles, located at 5542 Hollywood Boulevard. This presented something of a left turn: suddenly, in a single phone call, the manhunt had been enlarged two thousand miles to the West Coast.

Agents from the Los Angeles field office were quickly dispatched to Rompage,
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armed with the crude portrait of "John Willard" that Jensen's artist had sketched in Memphis. Tom Ware, the Rompage manager, didn't recognize the unprepossessing man in the sketch, which was no surprise. But he knew the pliers well. In October 1966, his logbook showed, he had bought a large "seconds" order of duckbill pliers at a bargain-basement price. He'd slapped the "Rompage" stickers on them and displayed them in a big barrel of discounted items near the store entrance. They were hot sellers.

And so the niggling but possibly salient question arose: Did the slayer of Martin Luther King buy a pair of pliers in Los Angeles sometime over the past year and a half? Did he once
live
in Los Angeles, perhaps in the vicinity of the store? FBI agents began to interview every known regular customer of Rompage Hardware--contractors, plumbers, carpenters, electricians. Their efforts proved little more than a goose chase.

But another hunt now under way at FBI headquarters was leading somewhere. Examiners had found laundry tags stamped in the inseams of the undershirt and the pair of boxer shorts left in Willard's bag. The tiny tag was made of white tape
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and bore the number "02B-6." Investigators contacted experts in the laundry industry and eventually reached the Textile Marking Machine Company in Syracuse, New York, whose representatives soon confirmed that the laundry tag in question was made by a stamping appliance manufactured by their plant. The tag was a relatively new proprietary material known as Thermo-Seal Tape, and the Syracuse company kept a thorough log of all the laundries throughout the nation that had bought the Thermo-Seal marking machine. Digging deeper into their books, company accountants found no record of any purchases by laundries in Memphis or Birmingham--the two cities the FBI was mainly focusing on. Most of the Thermo-Seal machines now in use were on the West Coast.

Where
on the West Coast? the agent following up this particular lead wanted to know.

The Thermo-Seal rep consulted his records and replied, "Out in California. Mainly in the Los Angeles area." In fact, he said, close to a hundred laundries in Los Angeles had adopted the Thermo-Seal system. At the FBI's request, the company quickly began to compile a comprehensive list of them all.

THE ELECTRA PROP jet sped for Atlanta, bringing Martin Luther King home to the city of his birth, the city of his alma mater and his church and his family. About thirty-five people sat on the plane, with the coffin parked in the rear, where several seats had been removed. The short journey of 398 miles seemed long and tedious, and most people just stared out the window as the engines droned on. In one hour, the plane arced over the same rural countryside that Eric Galt had taken twelve hours to drive across, on meandering back roads, the previous night.

Ralph Abernathy sat in silence, thinking of the curious and dreadful turn of fate that had transpired over the past three days. He remembered how King had reacted to the bomb threat on the flight from Atlanta to Memphis that Wednesday morning. "I thought of the brittle smile
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on his face when the captain announced the threat and reassured us that everything was safe," Abernathy said in his memoirs. "There had been a normal and very human fear behind that smile." Now, three days later, King lay in a coffin in the rear of a plane going in the opposite direction. Abernathy peered out the window, at the wet Southland surging with spring. "Martin was unworried,
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at peace," he said. "For just an instant, staring at the greening woods below and thinking of what was to come, I almost envied him." Abernathy knew he'd be returning to Memphis in three days to lead the memorial march down Beale Street, and the thought occurred to him that he might end up flying home in his own bronze box.

The plane landed in Atlanta, where the rain had turned to a gentle, all-suffusing mist. Coretta's four children, all dressed up, had been brought to the airport tarmac, and now they climbed the portable stairs and boarded the plane. Bernice, who was five, practically skipped down the aisle, seemingly without a care. Andy Young gathered her up in his arms. Bunny--as everyone called her--looked around the cabin, and then a puzzled expression formed on her little face. "Where's Daddy?" she said. "Mommy, where is Daddy?"

Coretta's heart ached. "Bunny," she said, taking her daughter in her arms. "Daddy is lying down in the back
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of the plane. When you see him, he won't be able to speak to you. Daddy has gone to live with God, and he won't be coming back."

Little Dexter, who was seven, understood the meaning of the big box in the rear of the plane but was leery of confronting the full truth. "I'd look around
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at the plane's interior, anywhere but at the coffin," he later wrote. "I didn't want to think about my father in there, unable to get out." He kept asking Coretta random questions--"What's
this?
What's
that
?"--while fidgeting and pointing to different features of the aircraft. "Mother knew I was avoiding
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the fact of our father's corpse. I was curious about him being in the casket, but I didn't want to face it."

The casket was removed from the rear of the plane and loaded into a hearse. Everyone disembarked, formed a motorcade, and followed the King family to the Hanley Bell Street Funeral Home, where crowds were already forming outside.

Coretta asked the funeral director to open the coffin. She fretted that the morticians in Memphis had botched their work, that they'd failed to "fix his face," as she put it. But when the lid swung open, she was pleased. His countenance "looked so young and smooth
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and unworried against the white-satin lining of the casket," she wrote. "There was hardly any visible damage."

The children were brought in to see their father. They stared and stared, in disbelief, in curiosity, in dread. Andy Young was standing nearby when Dexter said, "Uncle Andy, this man
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didn't know our Daddy, did he?" speaking of King's killer.

Why do you say that? Young asked.

"Because if he had, he wouldn't have shot him. He was just an ignorant man who didn't know any better."