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

Through the afternoon, Georgia thought King seemed distracted and tired but happy. She saw a look of resignation on his face, a look of acceptance, that she'd seen many times the past year. "He really sensed 333his time was not long," she said. "He felt he'd fulfilled his mission on earth. He said on many occasions that he would not live to be an elderly person. He'd say, you know, there are a lot of kooks out there. Sometimes I thought that he almost welcomed it."

That night, King and a large entourage were supposed to go to the home of the local minister Billy Kyles for dinner. The word was that Kyles's wife, Gwen, was making a soul food feast. "Senator," King now said, "you like soul food?" 334Georgia said she did, and he said she should come to dinner as his guest.

Finally, about five o'clock, Andy Young, fresh from court, arrived at the Lorraine, with the SCLC lawyer Chauncey Eskridge soon following on his heels. King was in a teasing mood, and he assaulted Young with a mock tirade: Where you been all day? 335 How come you never call? Why do you keep your leader so ill informed! Abernathy, aroused from his nap, came down and joined in. King hurled mock invectives at Young, then he hurled a pillow, and then Young hurled it back. Soon they were in a full-scale pillow fight 336and wrestling match--the King brothers, Abernathy, and Young--the men all yelling, snorting, horselaughing like a scrum of kids.

Once things settled down, Young and Eskridge gave their report from the U.S. District Court. Attorney Lucius Burch had been masterful. After listening to nearly eight hours of heated testimony on both sides, Judge Bailey Brown had agreed to modify the federal injunction to accommodate a tightly controlled demonstration. King and Lawson would have to make myriad assurances as to the route, size, organization, and policing of the march, and they would have to cooperate with authorities at every turn. The details would be hammered out the next day, but here was the essence of it: the show would go on as scheduled for Monday morning, April 8.

They'd won.

ERIC GALT RETURNED to the area around Bessie Brewer's rooming house about 4:30 to find that he'd lost his parking space in front of Jim's Grill. He was forced to park some sixty feet farther away, just south of Canipe's Amusement Company, a shop that leased and serviced jukeboxes and pinball machines all over town. He took the binoculars up to his room but almost immediately returned to his car, apparently with the idea of retrieving the Remington from the trunk. He realized that with this new parking space, he'd have to be much more careful about hauling up the rifle; on this busy street, toting a long narrow box could be risky. So he remained in his car awhile--fifteen minutes or more--and waited for the traffic on South Main to ebb.

Two women who worked across the street at the Seabrook paint and wallpaper company saw him sitting in his Mustang. Having just completed the day's work shift at 4:30, they were standing by the large showroom window, gazing out on the street, waiting for their spouses to pick them up. One of the workers, Elizabeth Copeland, 337thought the man inside the Mustang was "waiting for someone or something." Copeland's colleague, Peggy Hurley, 338stood by the window until 4:45, when her husband arrived. As she walked toward her husband's car, Hurley noticed that the man in the Mustang was still there, patiently sitting behind the wheel. He was a white man, wearing a dark suit.

It is likely that Galt had spotted the two women as they lingered by the window and thought it prudent to wait until they left before undertaking his risky errand. Whatever the case, sometime between 4:45 and 5:00, Galt opened up his trunk and wrapped the long box in an old green herringbone bedspread he'd stashed in the car. Clutching the bundle, he moved briskly toward the rooming house.

Once inside 5B, 339Galt laid down the Gamemaster and removed his new field glasses from the York Arms bag. Sitting in the straight-backed chair by the window, he fiddled with the Bushnells and trained the lenses on the Lorraine. He never bothered with the straps designed to attach to the leather binocular case--he merely tossed them aside.

Galt adjusted the Bushnells to their highest setting, 7x, the same magnification power as his Redfield scope. People were standing in the Lorraine courtyard by a white Cadillac. The parking lot was splotched with rain puddles, remnants of the previous night's storm. In the foreground, down in the rooming house's backyard, tangled branches bobbed in the faint breeze. The binoculars must have created the illusion of an odd intimacy: enlarged through Galt's lenses, King's comrades in the parking lot appeared to be less than twenty feet away, and yet they betrayed no awareness of his presence as they joked and milled about. Sweeping the Bushnells slightly upward, Galt could easily make out the number affixed to King's room--306--but the door was closed and the orange window drapes were drawn. Just outside his door, a fire extinguisher, slightly askew, was lodged on the wall.

AT THAT MOMENT, King was inside the room with Abernathy, 340getting ready for dinner at the Reverend Billy Kyles's house. The room was cluttered with newspapers and coffee cups and other detritus of the day. The bony ruins of King's catfish lunch clung to a plate. King's heavy black briefcase squatted like an anvil on the table, the gold initials "MLK" embossed near the latch. The orange bedspreads lay rumpled and twisted. The Huntley-Brinkley Report flickered on the TV.

King was half-listening as he shaved in the bathroom--a process that, for him, was both laborious and smelly. King, who had a thick beard but sensitive skin, had found years earlier that shaving with a conventional razor and cream caused him to break out in a bumpy rash. So he had taken to using a potent depilatory called Magic Shaving Powder, 341a product widely used by Orthodox Jews whose strictures forbade them to touch a razor to the face. King's elaborate shaving ritual was said to be one of the reasons he so often ran late.

Now King, standing before the mirror in his suit slacks and an undershirt, was mixing the fine white powder in a cup of warm water and stirring it into a thick paste. The concoction gave off the sulfurous stench of rancid eggs. King, who'd become inured to the smell, spread the goop over his face and let the hair-removing chemicals (bearing ghastly names like calcium thioglycolate, guanidine carbonate, and nonoxynol-10) do their work.

Abernathy shrank from the smell as he always did--he grabbed a chair across the room by the window and teased King about it. From the bathroom, King asked Abernathy to call the Kyles home and see what was on the menu for tonight. Abernathy balked at the assignment but then picked up the phone and soon had Gwen Kyles on the line. He hung up and reported to King: "Roast beef, candied yams, pig's feet, neck bones, chitlins, turnip greens, corn pone."

It would be a down-home dinner, King's favorite. The news seemed to put him in an even better frame of mind. After a few minutes, he meticulously scraped off the Magic Shaving Powder paste with a spatula-like tool. The gunk swirled down the drain, taking a thousand little hairs with it. He patted his face dry with a towel, only to be interrupted by a crisp knock at the door. The Reverend Billy Kyles, a tall, gangling extrovert wearing dark-rimmed glasses, stood at the threshold and said they'd better hurry--the hour was getting late, and Gwen was expecting everyone.

Pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis, Kyles had known King and Abernathy for ten years. The two men began to gang up on their old friend. "Billy," Kyles later recalled King saying, "we're not going to get real soul food 342at your house. Gwen's just too good-looking to make soul food--she can't cook it."