Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

In the morning he found a locksmith who made a new key. (Although he was taking a locksmithing correspondence course, his skills were not yet up to snuff.) Then Galt placed a long-distance call to the authorities at the motor vehicle division in Alabama and, for a nominal fee, arranged for a new license to be sent to him in Los Angeles, marked "General Delivery."

9 RED CARNATIONS

"DID YOU GET them?" Martin Luther King asked his wife over the telephone from his office. "Did you get the flowers?" 151

It was wintertime, and King was about to go away on one of his many trips. Coretta Scott King, his wife of fifteen years, was recuperating from a recent hysterectomy after a tumor was discovered in her abdomen. Knowing that she felt tender and vulnerable, he was moved to send her flowers, through an Atlanta florist delivery service. The gift arrived at the King home, a modest split-level at 234 Sunset, nestled among red clay hills in the Vine City section of Atlanta, not far from King's alma mater, Morehouse. The house was sparsely furnished, with a few heirloom pieces and a portrait of Gandhi on the wall.

The flowers were carnations, a shock of deep red. "They're very beautiful," Coretta said. "And they're ... artificial."

Over the years, King had given Coretta flowers countless times, but never fake ones. She was not miffed or insulted by the choice--merely puzzled. "Why?" she asked.

There was a long pause. Then King said, "I wanted to give you something that would last. Something you could always keep."

Coretta thought that her husband was "a guilt-ridden man." 152He felt unqualified in his role as a symbol, as the representative of black America. "He never felt he was adequate to his position," she wrote. King often said he was "mystified" by his own career, from the moment he was catapulted onto the world stage as one of the architects of the Montgomery campaign against segregated seating on city buses. But in recent years the movement had truly consumed him, taken him far from his wife and family, and left him feeling more regretful than ever. He was married to the movement. "Tonight I have taken a vow," 153King once told an SCLC audience. "I, Martin Luther King, take thee, nonviolence, to be my wedded wife."

That winter, just after Christmas, he sat Coretta down and confessed to her 154about one of his several mistresses--the most important one, the one he had grown closest to. She was an alumna of Fisk University in Nashville, a dignified lady who now lived in Los Angeles and was married to a prominent black dentist. The affair had lasted for years, and King made no promises that it was over. King did not tell her about the other women in his life--the mistress in Louisville, the one in Atlanta, and other women of lesser consequence. In his sermons, he hinted at his failings with increasing frequency. "Each of us is two selves," 155he once told his congregation. The "great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command."

His confession must have devastated Coretta, and yet she must have suspected something for a long time. They'd been growing apart for years, and the tensions were palpable. "That poor man 156was so harassed at home," said one SCLC member. "Had the man lived, the marriage wouldn't have survived. Coretta King was most certainly a widow long before Dr. King died."

King's affairs and escapades were only one source of their marital stress. Coretta was unhappy in her role as a traditional housewife, stuck at home with their four children while her husband lived in the international spotlight. She rarely got to use her considerable gifts--as a singer and speaker--for the good of the movement. The fact was King wanted her at home. He was a traditionalist, some might say a chauvinist, but he also feared what would happen to the children if they were both killed. "Martin had, all through his life, an ambivalent attitude 157toward the role of women," Coretta later said. "On the one hand, he believed that women are just as intelligent and capable as men and that they should hold positions of authority and influence ... But when it came to his own situation, he thought in terms of his wife being a homemaker and a mother for his children. He was very definite that he would expect whoever he married to be home waiting for him."

Like most married couples, they argued about money. When they met at Boston University in the early 1950s, King was a bit of a dandy--he lived in a swell apartment, drove a nice car, wore immaculate clothes. Now King was all but an ascetic. His salary as co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church was only six thousand dollars a year, and he drew no stipend from the SCLC. Much to Coretta's chagrin, he donated nearly all his other income to the movement--his speaking fees, his grants, even his fifty-four thousand dollars from the Nobel Prize. They almost never went out together and rarely took vacations. Through most of their married life they'd lived in a small rented house, had no servants, and drove only one car. The place on Sunset was a recent acquisition, and it was very basic indeed. "There was nothing fashionable 158about his neighborhood," Andrew Young said. "It was all but a slum." Coretta was irritated that King had not set aside money for an education fund for their children. He hadn't even written a will. "I won't have any money 159to leave behind," King said in a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist. "I won't have the fine and luxurious things to leave behind. I just want to leave a committed life behind."

King once said that his weaknesses "are not in the area of coveting wealth. My wife knows this well. In fact, she feels that I overdo it." He knew that Coretta would have liked some of the finer things of life--and that, too, was a source of abiding guilt.

Ever since King struck upon the Poor People's Campaign, Coretta noticed a change in her husband, a frantic urgency, as he flew about the country. "We had a sense of fate 160closing in," she later wrote. "It seemed almost as if there were great forces driving him. He worked as if it was to be his final assignment."

In those last months, she often recalled how her husband had reacted to the news, in 1963, of President Kennedy's assassination. He stared at the television screen and said, matter-of-factly, "This is what will happen to me." 161Coretta said nothing in reply. She had no words of solace for him. She did not say, "It won't happen to you." Even then, she felt he was right.

"It was a painfully agonizing silence," she later wrote. "I moved closer to him and gripped his hand in mine."

10 AN ORANGE CHRISTMAS

IN THE FIRST weeks of December, Eric Galt became acquainted with a young woman named Marie Tomaso, 162a cocktail waitress at the Sultan Room, the bar on the ground floor of his hotel. She was an olive-skinned, dark-eyed woman from New Orleans who had a Rubenesque figure and wore a striking black wig. Some nights she worked as an "exotic dancer" at a club nearby on Hollywood Boulevard.

Marie Tomaso thought Galt seemed completely out of place in the Sultan Room. He wore a nice dark suit and kept to himself, hardly speaking a word. She noticed that his skin had an unhealthy pallor, "like he didn't get out too often." 163He told her he'd lived in Guadalajara for six years and had operated a bar down there. They became friends, and one night he drove her home, where she introduced him to her cousin, a go-go dancer named Rita Stein. The three began to hang out together.

Rita Stein was a young mother whose life had recently been plunged into emotional turmoil; she had left her eight-year-old twin girls in New Orleans with her mom, but apparently a child services official there had threatened to place them in a foster home. Now Rita desperately needed to fetch her children--but she had no car and no money and could not easily break away from her job as a dancer. Eventually, Rita and Marie prevailed upon Galt. He told them he'd be glad to help. He had a soft spot for kids in trouble--and needed to attend to some "business" in New Orleans, anyway. Besides, he could use a break from Los Angeles.