Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (26 page)

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house
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run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 4221/2 Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry's Wink soda--THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer's rooming house would later describe the place as "a half-step up from homelessness." Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer's establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks--rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim's Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim's kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer's tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer's office admonished, "No Curseing or Foul Talk."

AT AROUND THREE o'clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer's shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim's Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim's Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer's rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 4221/2 Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer's office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

"Got any vacancies?"
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he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man's checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he'd gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place--and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. "We got six rooms available," she said. "You stayin' just the night?"

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. "Our nicest one," she said. "It's $10.50 a week. You can cook in there."

Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn't do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River.

"No, see, I won't be doing any cooking," he mumbled. "You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping."

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a "smirk" and a "sneer," as though he were "trying to smile for no reason." She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. "This one's $8.50 for the week," she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it--a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, "No Smoking in Bed Allowed." The ceiling's wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt's eye: the window
wasn't
boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

"Yeah," Galt abruptly said, "this'll do just fine."

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had
died
several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

While they stood talking in the corridor, one of the tenants across the hall emerged from his room and got a look at his new neighbor. Charlie Stephens,
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a balding former heavy-equipment operator and a disabled World War II veteran, had been severely wounded during the liberation of Italy and still had shrapnel embedded in his left leg. Now unemployed, he was fifty-one years old and sickly. That afternoon, Stephens was trying to repair an old radio that had been on the fritz. He'd been living at Mrs. Brewer's for some time, sharing room 6B with his common-law wife, a mentally disturbed woman named Grace Walden
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who spent most of her days in bed.

Charlie Stephens, for his part, suffered from tuberculosis and was a bad alcoholic--in fact, he was already well in his cups as he eyed, through thick tortoiseshell glasses, the new guest across the hall. Down the hall, out of earshot from Stephens, Mrs. Brewer told Galt under her breath that the people who lived around 5B were usually quiet, but that the guy next to him--Stephens--drank a bit too much.

"Well," Galt volunteered, "I take a beer once in a while myself."

Mrs. Brewer told him that was fine as long as he stayed in his room and kept quiet. Then she led Galt back to her office, where he presented her with a twenty-dollar bill, snapping it crisply. She gave him $11.50 in change. She did not give him a key--the door to 5B, rigged as it was with a bent coat hanger in lieu of a knob, had no lock.

"And what's the name?" Mrs. Brewer asked, pointing to her spotty registration book.

"It's John Willard," he replied. He did not volunteer any information about himself--where he was from, what he drove, what brought him to town. As she jotted the name in her logbook, she noticed that he flashed his smile once again.

22
THE MAN IN 5B

KING AND ABERNATHY went down to the Lorraine restaurant that afternoon and ordered a mess of fried Mississippi River catfish
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for a late lunch. The waitress slightly botched the order--instead of bringing two plates, she brought one giant platter, piled high with crunchy fish. That was fine with King. "We'll just share," he said, and so the two old friends ate together, washing the catfish down with big glasses of sugary-sweet iced tea.

They brought the fish back up to 306 and kept nibbling while King placed a series of telephone calls around the country. He was worried about what was going on in court that day. "Where is Andy?" King fretted. "Why hasn't he called us?"

GALT BROUGHT UP some toiletries from the Mustang in his blue plastic zippered bag and settled into his new digs at Bessie Brewer's flophouse. The room was indistinguishable from a hundred others he'd frequented over the years. There was a small defunct fireplace, cracked floors that vaguely smelled of uric acid, walls of peeling paper, and a low wainscoting of smudged white bead board. Galt hardly noticed the lumpy mattress, the sagging springs, the faded bedspread.

Galt was much more interested in what was
outside
the room. He slid the blond dresser to the side, adjusted the curtains, and savored a mostly unobstructed view of the Lorraine. He dragged a straight-backed chair to the window and surveyed the scene more closely. The rooming house's backyard was grown up in spindly leafless brush and littered with liquor bottles and other trash. At the far edge of the unkempt lot, Galt could make out the lip of a large retaining wall that dropped eight feet down to Mulberry Street. Across Mulberry, a finny Cadillac glimmered in the Lorraine parking lot next to the drained swimming pool, which was partially hidden by a privacy wall.

Rising above it all was the two-story motel with its mustard yellow cinder-block walls and metal-framed windows and doors of soft turquoise. A bright arrowed sign, a classic piece of roadside Americana, stood at the corner, its neon tubes not yet turned on. The main wing of the motel, styled in a kind of modern-deco minimalism, was dominated by a long balcony--the same balcony where King stood in the photo Galt had seen in the
Commercial Appeal
. King's room was only two hundred feet away--and some twelve feet lower than Galt's perch inside 5B.

The view of the Lorraine was even better than Galt had guessed from his initial inspection. More study revealed a small problem, however: to get a bead on the area right in front of King's door, Galt would have to open his window, lean over the sill, and fire his weapon with the rifle tip protruding several feet outside the rooming house's walls. Exposing his position in this way would run a high risk of detection.

Galt found a solution: just down the hall, the moldy communal bathroom afforded a more promising angle. There, all he'd have to do was crack the window, rest the rifle barrel on the sill, and take aim. It was a direct yet largely concealed shot, and an easy one at that--through the magnification of a 7x scope, a man standing on the balcony would appear to be only thirty feet away.

Galt couldn't have asked for a better vantage point than Bessie Brewer's rooming house. From the privacy of 5B, Galt could monitor the goings-on at the Lorraine--and from the shared bathroom a mere thirteen paces away, he could raise his rifle with little fear of detection and fire directly at, and slightly down upon, his target.