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

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.

23 AT THE RIVER I STAND

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 Anschutz³⁴⁹ 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 second³⁵¹--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 dinner³⁵³ 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