Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (29 page)

KING LOOKED OUT over the drained swimming pool and inhaled the fresh air. The night was partly cloudy and cool--fifty-five degrees--and a crescent moon climbed in the sky. A slight wind blew off the Mississippi River, only a few blocks to the west but slightly hidden behind the natural rise of the bluff. All around the Lorraine stood the old cotton lofts and classing rooms, the drab brick warehouses of South Main's industrial grid. Off to the north, the Memphis skyscrapers rose over the city--the Gothic Sterick Building, the spectral white Lincoln American Tower, the Union Planters Bank with its revolving restaurant, forty stories up. The downtown lights were just beginning to glitter. On the roof of the Peabody Hotel, the resident mallards were happily ensconced in their mansion for the evening.

As King took in the Memphis night, he leaned against the railing for several long minutes. He was completely vulnerable, but King had refused a Memphis police detail as he nearly always did--"I'd feel like a bird in a cage,"
³⁴⁶
he said. He did not believe in bodyguards, certainly not armed ones. No one in his entourage was allowed to carry a gun or nightstick or any other weapon. The very concept of arming oneself was odious to him--it violated his Gandhian principles. He wouldn't even let his children carry
toy
guns.
³⁴⁷
In an almost mystical sense, he believed nonviolence was a more potent force for self-protection than any weapon. He understood the threats that were about but refused to let them alter the way he lived. So no one was on the balcony to shield his movements, to shepherd him along, to survey the sight lines and vantage points and anticipate the worst.

If he'd had premonitions of an early death the previous night--
sick white brothers
--he seemed to have flushed them from his consciousness. Now he was in a jovial mood. Last night's darkness had dissipated. The tornadoes all around Memphis had killed six and injured more than one hundred people, but the storms had passed, leaving nothing more menacing than rain puddles. King had much to look forward to, and he seemed buoyed to have his entourage with him. He was about to head out with comrades to his favorite kind of dinner, to celebrate a victorious day in court.
Memphis
--maybe the place was redeemable after all.

Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine, noticed King's ebullient mood as he stood there with his staff. "He just act so different,
³⁴⁸
so happy," Bailey said. "It looked like they had won the world."

A LITTLE BEFORE six, a guest at Mrs. Brewer's flophouse named Willie Anschutz
³⁴⁹
was sitting in his room, 4B, with another tenant, Mrs. Jessie Ledbetter. Anschutz, a nondrinker, was a fifty-seven-year-old laborer at a local moving company. Mrs. Ledbetter, a deaf-mute widow who'd lived in the rooming house for seven years, was short and stout and wore a bright floral-print dress. The two old friends--Anschutz affectionately called her "the dummy"--had been whiling away the afternoon, sipping Cokes and eating cookies and watching a movie on television. At some point, Anschutz took a small tub of dirty dishes down the hall to rinse them in the common bathroom, but he found the door locked. Five minutes later he returned and found that it was
still
locked. He jiggled the faceted-glass doorknob to let the person inside know he was hogging the lavatory. Slightly peeved, he stuck his head inside Charlie Stephens's room. "Who the hell's in the bathroom?" he griped. "He's been in there a while."

Stephens, still tinkering with his broken radio in the kitchen area of his room, had heard the guy from 5B traipsing into the bathroom and was aware that he'd been in there "an undue length of time."
³⁵⁰
Through the thin walls, he could hear all comings and goings at his end of the flophouse. Oddly, the whole time the 5B guest had been in there, he hadn't run any water or flushed the commode.

"Oh, that's the new guy from 5B," Stephens told Anschutz.

"Well, I gotta get in there!" Anschutz complained.

"YOU COMIN', RALPH?" King asked, slightly impatient. He had ducked back into room 306 to get the tailored Petrocelli suit coat, made of fine black silk, he'd bought at Zimmerman's in Atlanta.

"In a second
³⁵¹
--thought I'd get some of that Aramis, too," Abernathy said, rummaging through King's shaving kit.

"I'll wait for you out here," King replied, slipping on his jacket. In the pockets of his coat he had a silver Cross pen and a scrap of paper scrawled with notes for a speech he planned to give in Memphis later that week on the Poor People's Campaign. On it was the line "Nothing is gained without sacrifice."
³⁵²

King rejoined his post, leaning on the balcony just in front of the door. He stood there for a while, looking down at the small crowd again. Solomon Jones, the driver, cranked the Cadillac to get it warmed up.

From the group, Jesse Jackson greeted King. "Our Leader!" he said, in exaggeratedly regal tones.

"Jesse!" King boomed in return. "I want you to come to dinner
³⁵³
with me tonight." It was a small gesture, but everyone in the entourage knew what it meant; inviting Jackson to dinner was King's first step toward making up with his headstrong apprentice after their fight in Atlanta. King was
forgiving
him.

Kyles, still standing on the balcony, interrupted. "Doc, Jesse took care of that before you did. He got himself invited!"

Jackson had in fact finagled an invitation for himself, but he didn't look like he was going to a dinner party. He was wearing a mod olive turtleneck sweater and a leather coat, a fashion decidedly out of step with the tie-wearing squares of the inner circle. When someone in the Lorraine parking lot gave him a once-over as if to question his attire, Jackson quipped, "All you need for dinner is an appetite."

King laughed at Jackson's hipster threads and his resourcefulness at adding himself to the guest list. On this night the Leader was full of charity. He zestfully tugged at his coat lapels, as was his habit when he felt confident and ready for the world. He was clean shaven, sweet smelling, and dressed to the nines. He looked at Jackson and flashed a broad smile.

Georgia Davis was down in 201
³⁵⁴
with the door slightly ajar. As she fixed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she could hear King carrying on with his staff, could hear the Voice, rich and melodious, booming across the courtyard. She could tell he was in a good mood. She wished he would stop jabbering--she was getting hungry. She looked at her watch: 6:00. They were all supposed to be at Kyles's house by now. Then she glanced out the window and saw King on the balcony. He just stood there, the life of his own party, smiling and joking and talking away.

INSIDE THE MILDEWY bathroom,
³⁵⁵
Galt removed the Gamemaster from its box and loaded it with a single Remington-Peters .30-06 round. Galt must have felt he was running out of time--otherwise he would have loaded the clip with more bullets. He jerked the window up with such force that it jammed after opening only five inches. Probably using his rifle tip, he poked the rusted window screen and dislodged it from its groove; the screen tumbled to the weedy lot below.

The bathroom was disgustingly dirty;
³⁵⁶
the toilet bowl was streaked, and a dented piece of wainscoting trim ran along peeling walls the color of a robin's egg. Galt climbed into the old claw-footed bathtub, which was scuzzy and stained, its tarnished drain clogged with a tangle of hairs. A flimsy contraption dangling over the tub's rim held a shrunken nub of soap. Galt leaned his body against the wall and rested the rifle on the paint-flaked windowsill.

Squinting through the Redfield scope, he found King, still standing there on the Lorraine balcony. Galt's loafers must have squeaked as they rubbed on the surface of the bathtub, leaving black scuff marks. A television murmured somewhere down the hall; a ventilation fan thumped in a nearby window. The smell of charred burgers tendriled up from Jim's Grill, where happy-hour Budweiser was flowing and intense games of barroom shuffleboard were in session.

Galt likely heard Willie Anschutz rattling the bathroom door, a disruption that doubtless tried his concentration. He had to move fast. He brought King's head within the crosshairs. It was starting to grow dark outside, but the chemical emulsion on his scope's lens enhanced targets in twilight. In the distance behind the Lorraine was the immense gray post office building, a hazy monstrosity looming in the crepuscular light.

King continued to hold court, oblivious to danger. His face nearly filled the scope's optical plane. He was 205 feet away, but with 7x magnification, he appeared only 30 feet away. It was an easy shot, a cinch.

Galt leaned into the rifle and took aim. At 6:01 p.m., he wrapped his index finger around the cool metal trigger.

THE CADILLAC WAS still idling down below, and the various members of the party were edging toward their cars. King did not move from his perch on the balcony--he seemed transfixed by the evening, enchanted by the scene in the courtyard. Andy Young was shadowboxing with James Orange, a wild bearish man as big as an NFL linebacker. "Now you be careful with preachers half your size!" King called out to Orange.

Jackson, standing beside the Cadillac, introduced King to Ben Branch, a saxophonist and bandleader originally from Memphis, who had come down from Chicago to play music in support of the sanitation workers; he and his band had a gig that night over at Mason Temple, where King and his entourage were headed after the Kyles dinner.

"Oh yes," King said. "He's my man. How are ya, Ben?"

"Glad to see you, Doc," Branch called up.

"Ben, I want you to sing for me tonight at the meeting. I want you to do that song, 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord.'" King had loved the great gospel standard for years. It was a tragic, sweet song written in the depths of the Depression by a black composer named Thomas Dorsey after his wife and baby died in childbirth:

When the darkness appears and the night draws near

And the day is past and gone

At the river I stand