Six rooms on the same floor as Ray’s shared a dingy bathroom at the end of a linoleum hallway. The faded green walls were smudged and peeling. The only light was a bulb screwed into a ceiling socket. There was a toilet, a small sink below a pitted mirror, and, off to the left underneath the single window, a bathtub. From Room 5B it was ten steps down the hallway.
The occupants of Room 6B, next to Ray’s, were Charles Stephens and his bedridden, common-law wife, Grace.7 Stephens was forty-six, a heavy equipment operator who had been forced by tuberculosis to retire when he was not yet thirty. He would tell investigators that in the late afternoon he heard the scraping of furniture being moved across the floor of the new lodger’s room. It was the sound of Ray pushing the chest of drawers away from the lone window. He might have heard Ray moving a straight-backed wooden chair and positioning it close to the window.
When Ray sat in the chair and leaned far out the window, the Lorraine came fully into view. But from that vantage point the motel lay at an angle that would complicate firing a bullet in that direction. Still, it afforded him an adequate perch for watching the Lorraine.
As his new neighbor stirred, Stephens continued to listen through the thin walls. He heard footsteps as Ray strode to the end of the hall and entered the bathroom. Stephens would recall that the man entered the bathroom twice, each time staying only a few minutes. One time Ray flushed the toilet. He returned to the bathroom yet a third time, staying what seemed like a long time to Stephens. He listened impatiently for the man to leave because he was anxious to use the toilet. He was not alone. Willie Anschutz, who occupied Room 4B, also needed the toilet. Anschutz knocked on the bathroom door, which was latched. No response.
Before Ray entered the bathroom, he likely had been peering from the window of Room 5B, his eyes glued on the Lorraine. It is probable that he saw King leave Room 201 at about 5:30 and climb the exterior stairway of the motel to the second floor before entering his room. It was another lucky break. The timing coincided with Stephens’s estimate of when Ray padded to the bathroom the third time.8
Fortunate to have the bathroom available at that moment, Ray latched the door and prepared a sniper’s nest. Off to one side next to the only window stood a claw-foot bathtub. It was small and antique, with sides that were rust-stained and chipped. Ray climbed into the tub and crouched next to the window. He must have been elated when he looked out the window. He had an excellent view of the Lorraine. The whole of the motel came into clear focus two hundred and seven feet away.
Ray yanked the window open and shoved its mesh screen outward. The screen clattered into the backyard. Through the binoculars the Lorraine appeared to be thirty feet away. The Redfield scope mounted on his Remington Gamemaster had the same magnification. He unsheathed the rifle from its blue, zippered carrying case and flipped open the box of soft-point ammunition.9
The army had taught Ray to fire a rifle with a degree of accuracy. He knew enough to pose the Gamemaster firmly on the window ledge. He pressed the muzzle down hard enough to dent the ledge slightly. And he waited.
Chapter 21
Dark Night
In a sense our nation is climbing a mountain . . . and now we are in the most difficult and trying stages.
—MLK, talk at Waycross, Georgia, March 22, 1968
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 4. The temperature in Memphis was in the mid-fifties, down from the seventies that morning. Despite the chill, King was not warmly dressed as he exited Room 306. He was wearing his customary dark suit, a conservative yellow and black tie, white shirt, and black shoes.
Freshly shaved, with cologne refreshing his face, he was primed for the much-anticipated dinner at Billy Kyles’s house. To finish shaving and dressing for the occasion, Abernathy stayed behind in their room. He wanted to look his best for the night out. He told King that he would be along directly.
King walked the few steps from Room 306 to the adjacent second-story balcony and paused to wait. He had a commanding view of the Lorraine parking lot below. His aides—Young, Bevel, Williams, Lee, Jackson, and Orange—had gathered in the parking lot. They would be going with him to the Kyles’s party. Kyles was waiting for King on the balcony. “People started waving at him,” Kyles would recall. “Hey,” King hollered, waving back. “Hey. Hey.”
In the brisk air, Young and Orange were frolicking about, shadowboxing like kids in a schoolyard. The massive Orange, six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds, towered over Young. Orange’s roughneck appearance was deceiving. He was a gentle, nonviolent guy (“sweet” was Young’s word for him), but the world did not know that. The sight of his imposing heft added a measure of security on the road for King and his entourage. “Nobody would try to be physical with us with James around,” Young would say.1
Bemused by the sight of the two men engaged in mock fighting, King bellowed to Young: “Don’t hurt him, Andy!”
King spotted Jesse Jackson standing in the parking lot. There had been tension between the two men since their exchange of acid words at the staff meeting in Atlanta on Saturday. In a fence-mending gesture King called down to Jackson: “Jesse, I want you to come to dinner with me.”2
“Jesse already took care of that,” Kyles said, as he started down the stairs from the balcony.
Not to let the matter drop quickly, King shouted: “Jesse, we’re going to Billy Kyles’s, and you don’t even have a tie on.”3 Jackson was dressed in the ruggedly mod style
