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

Throughout his remarks, Clark was repeatedly interrupted by militants from the Invaders and other groups. Some were suspicious of Clark's quick pronouncement that no conspiracy was involved in the shooting. How could he possibly know this already? Their criticisms quickly devolved into shouting and incendiary diatribes for the benefit of the cameras. When Clark left the room, he was livid. "A lot of phonies," he vented to DeLoach. "They'll just make things worse."

Clark soon received word that Coretta King's plane had arrived, so he and DeLoach made for the airport. When they got there, the bronze casket was being loaded onto the rear of the Electra prop jet, by means of a hydraulic conveyor belt ramp. Clark and Roger Wilkins climbed on board to greet Mrs. King, A. D. King, Abernathy, and the others gathered sorrowfully on the plane. DeLoach lingered on the tarmac. "In view of Mr. Hoover's 512longtime feud with her husband," he said, "I thought she might resent my coming"--probably a prudent assessment on his part.

On board, Clark offered his deepest sympathy, both on his own behalf and on that of the government. Wilkins thought Coretta was "courageous and calm 513and gracious" as she received them. "People were crying--it was all very hard. But Coretta was simply regal." Farther back in the cabin, A. D. King was having a rough time. To Wilkins, he looked like "a bloated and faded version 514of Martin--it was said AD drank too much."

Outside, in the bright humidity of the forenoon, DeLoach awkwardly sidled up to Andy Young, who was standing on the hot pavement. Over the whine of jet engines, DeLoach tried to express his condolences. "We'll do everything we can," 515he told Young. "I'm sure we'll get him."

Young nodded blankly. Exhausted and grieving, he was, at that moment, emphatically uninterested in exchanging pleasantries with any FBI official--especially DeLoach, who Young knew was complicit in many of the dirty tricks the FBI had pulled on King over the years. DeLoach thought Young was "somewhere else," which was true enough. Finding and punishing the assassin were surprisingly low in the SCLC's scheme of priorities. Young felt that carrying on King's work was a far more important task than fixating on the crime itself, or on legal retribution. Throughout the movement, King had seldom vilified individuals--even Bull Connor or George Wallace; instead he'd tried to focus on engaging the larger social forces at work in any given situation. This same strain of transcendent "love-your-enemies" thinking guided Young, Abernathy, and the others as they began to contemplate their leader's death. As Young put it, "We aren't so much concerned 516with who killed Martin, as with what killed him."

It was the kind of sentiment that mystified a G-man like DeLoach.

In a few minutes, Ramsey Clark stepped off the plane and rejoined DeLoach on the tarmac. Coretta never left the plane; she had no interest in putting a toe on Memphis soil. Amazingly, no city official--neither Mayor Loeb, nor Director Holloman, nor a single city councilman, black or white--had come to greet her at the airport. She had flown here for one errand only: to claim her husband's body and get home.

Now the Electra's hatch doors heaved shut, and the plane taxied and climbed into the bright hazy skies, banking southeast toward Atlanta. Along the runway, several hundred mourners, some with fists held high, bade their farewell to Martin Luther King. Some tried to sing a stanza of "We Shall Overcome," but the spirit wasn't there, and the song soon withered into silence.

AT THE CAPITOL HOMES project in Atlanta, the white Mustang sat parked all day, its windshield beaded with rain--the car that held hard clues and hidden imprimaturs that might lead to the identity, if not the whereabouts, of Martin Luther King's killer. Mary Bridges and her daughter Wanda weren't the only ones who had seen the mystery car pull in to the parking lot that morning. A few buildings away, Mrs. Lucy Cayton had been standing on her front stoop with a broom in her hands, when she saw the driver emerge from the Mustang. "He was nice looking," she thought. "That's why I stood with my broom and watched."

Several doors down, Mrs. Ernest Payne had also gotten a glimpse of the man who parked the Mustang that morning, had watched him step out and "fool with the car door" before heading off toward Memorial Drive. He wore a dark suit and carried what she thought was a "little black book" under his arm.

Mrs. John Riley lived in a unit just across the parking lot from the Mustang. She too had spotted the car but didn't pay much attention to it. But her thirteen-year-old son, Johnny, a car buff, feasted his eyes on it as soon as he got home from school. He noticed the Alabama tag, the rust red mud inside the car, and the two stickers in the window that said, "Turista." The teenager observed that the Mustang, unlike every other car in the Capitol Homes lot, was backed into its parking space; he could only surmise that the guy who left it didn't want passersby to readily spot the out-of-state tag.

Mrs. Riley sat in her kitchen, visiting with a few neighbors over coffee. They got to talking about the assassination and the riots. One neighbor said she'd heard the authorities were looking for a white Mustang.

Mrs. Riley tittered and pointed out the window. "Why," she said, "it's sitting right out there 517in the parking lot." Everyone laughed a nervous laugh--a laugh that said, Wouldn't that be something? --and then the ladies resumed their klatch without another thought.

33 1812 REDUX

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, in Washington, President Johnson was taking a late lunch in the White House with the Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas and several advisers. The King assassination had taken a toll on everyone at the White House, and President Johnson looked haggard as he sat down at the table in the White House residence. He'd already had a long and exhausting Friday. After attending a King memorial service at the National Cathedral, he'd spent most of the day in the Cabinet Room meeting with a conclave of the nation's most prominent black leaders--among them Justice Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights stalwart Bayard Rustin, the D.C. minister Walter Fauntroy, and the heads of the established civil rights organizations. Johnson had invited Martin Luther King Sr. to the meeting as well, but the minister was too racked with grief to contemplate such a trip. He did send a telegram, which Johnson read aloud to the assembled group. "Please know," King said, "that I join you 518in your plea to American citizens to desist from violence so that the cause for which my son died will not be in vain."

Moved nearly to tears, Johnson looked up from the telegram and spoke off the cuff. "If I were a kid in Harlem," 519he said, "I know what I'd be thinking. I'd be thinking that whites had declared open season on my people--that they're going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first."

After a few hours, the solemn and awkward meeting broke up with promises of goodwill but no hard-and-fast resolutions. With some of the black leaders around him, Johnson made a brief statement on national television. "Violence," he said, "must be denied its victory."

Now ravenous, Johnson tried to steal a few minutes to grab a bite. He bowed his head with the others at the table and said a perfunctory but heartfelt grace: "Help us, Lord, 520to know what to do."

Justice Abe Fortas, who, oddly enough, was born and raised in Memphis, talked to the president for a while about the search for King's killer, but the main topic of conversation was the fragile state of security in the nation's capital. Through much of the day, troubling reports from the White House message center had been piling up, rumors that a full-scale riot was being planned for the streets of downtown Washington. The word flowing into the White House was that the previous night's disturbances were mere child's play; tonight, the whole city was going to blow.