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 food342 at your house. Gwen's just too good-looking to make soul food--she can't cook it."
Kyles feigned hurt and displeasure: "Who can't cook soul food?"
Abernathy chimed in: "All right now, Billy. If she's serving up feel-ay meen-yuns or something, then you're gonna flunk."
King was in the bathroom slapping Aramis aftershave lotion on his face--masking the harsh sulfur smell with fine notes of sandalwood, leather, and clove.
Kyles said, "Man, we're gonna be late. You just get ready, Doc, and don't worry about what we gonna have."
Moderately chastened, King got into gear. He put on a dress shirt and tried to fasten the collar button, but it was too tight--he'd gained weight since he last wore it, or perhaps the shirt had shrunk at the cleaners.
One thing was certain, Kyles said in riposte as he walked out the door, they'd be having more food than King's waistline needed. Doc, he said, you getting fat.
"That I am," King agreed, and, his vanity pricked, he cut a glance at Kyles, who fidgeted out on the balcony. Then King changed the subject: "Do I have another shirt here?" He pulled a freshly laundered button-down from his belongings, a white Arrow permanent-press dress shirt, and quickly put it on--finding that the collar buttoned more easily.
"Now," he said, his eyes scanning the room. "Where's my tie? Somebody's moved it." He was looking for his favorite one, a crisp, slender brown silk tie with gold and blue diagonal stripes. King at times enjoyed the role of absentminded professor--dependent on Abernathy to mother him and manage the minutiae of his life--and now he played the part to the hilt. It was the kind of whimsical repartee they'd enacted in a thousand hotel rooms over the past decade, a banal conversational style informed by the real possibility that FBI moles might be listening in. "Hmmm," King said, "someone's definitely moved it."
"Martin," Abernathy scolded, "why don't you just look down at that chair?"
The tie was there, of course, right where he'd left it. King, an adept and fastidious tie tier, quickly threaded the knot and cinched it up to his fleshy neck. He fixed a silver tiepin in place and studied himself in the mirror. About five minutes before six o'clock, he stuffed in his shirttails and ambled out the door to see what was going on with the rest of the party at the Lorraine.
PATROLMAN WILLIE RICHMOND, watching through his binoculars,343 saw King emerge from his room onto the balcony. The firehouse was full of commotion, and Richmond found it hard to concentrate. A special "tactical" unit of the Memphis Police Department--TAC Unit 10--had pulled in to the station's parking lot and come inside for refreshments. The unit was composed of three squad cars, with four men to a car. The twelve officers were hanging out in the lounge, drinking coffee, and joking among themselves. Some of the firemen joined in on the fun.
One of the firemen, a thirty-nine-year-old white lieutenant named George Loenneke,344 passed through the locker room and saw Richmond standing with his binoculars. "There's Dr. King right there," Richmond said. "I presume he's going to supper."
Loenneke walked over to Richmond. "Let me see," he said. "I haven't seen Dr. King since he was in town to do the Meredith march." Richmond handed over the binoculars, and Loenneke got a glimpse through the peephole. "That's him alright. He hasn't changed a bit."
WHAT ERIC GALT did inside 5B between five o'clock and a little before six is not precisely known. Perhaps he read the Memphis Commercial Appeal--he had brought up the paper's first section from the car. Perhaps he listened to the news on his Channel Master pocket radio or mashed a bead of Brylcreem onto his fingertips and worked the unguent through his freshly cut hair. Perhaps he contemplated wrapping his fingertips with the Band-Aids that were among the toiletries in the outer compartment of his zippered blue leatherette bag; it was an old trick to avoid leaving fingerprints, a precaution he customarily liked to take before committing a crime.
But he had no time to fool around with Band-Aids. Suddenly, at about 5:55 p.m., a familiar figure floated across his binocular glass. To Galt's astonishment, Martin Luther King had emerged from his room and was standing on the balcony, right in front of 306, next to a metal service dolly. Standing in his shirtsleeves and a tie, he looked down into the Lorraine parking lot. Above him, a light fixture dangled loosely from the ceiling.
It must have given Galt a start: at last, the man he'd been chasing since he left L.A. was in his sights, suspended in the jittery, fuzzy-edged world of coated optics. He was a perfect target, fully exposed, almost as though he were speaking at a dais.
At 7x magnification, the details would have been startlingly vivid. Galt would have been able to see everything--the pencil mustache on King's face, the laces on his black wing-tip shoes, the gold watch on his left wrist, the crisp diagonal stripes on his silk necktie.
Galt had to make a lightning-fast decision. He might never get a chance like this again. He ran to the communal bathroom to check the view. Charlie Stephens, the sickly drunk across the hall in 6B, could hear the new roomer's footsteps345 as he clomped down the corridor's linoleum floor. The rooming house walls were paper-thin, and Stephens, whose bed backed up to the bathroom wall, listened as "Willard" fumbled around in there. Then Stephens heard him emerge from the bathroom and clomp right back to his room.
The view from the bathroom must have convinced Galt that it was now or never. Back in 5B, Galt frantically pulled together his blue zippered bag, the binoculars, and the boxed rifle still wrapped in its green bedspread. (In his haste, he left behind the two binocular-case straps he'd tossed on the floor earlier.) He scooped up his belongings and dashed down the hall toward the bathroom. Once inside, he slammed and locked the door.
It was about 6:00.
23 AT THE RIVER I STAND
KING LOOKED OUT over the drained swimming pool and inhaled the fresh air. The night was partly cloudy and cool--fifty-five degrees--and a crescent moon climbed in the sky. A slight wind blew off the Mississippi River, only a few blocks to the west but slightly hidden behind the natural rise of the bluff. All around the Lorraine stood the old cotton lofts and classing rooms, the drab brick warehouses of South Main's industrial grid. Off to the north, the Memphis skyscrapers rose over the city--the Gothic Sterick Building, the spectral white Lincoln American Tower, the Union Planters Bank with its revolving restaurant, forty stories up. The downtown lights were just beginning to glitter. On the roof of the Peabody Hotel, the resident mallards were happily ensconced in their mansion for the evening.
As King took in the Memphis night, he leaned against the railing for several long minutes. He was completely vulnerable, but King had refused a Memphis police detail as he nearly always did--"I'd feel like a bird in a cage,"346 he said. He did not believe in bodyguards, certainly not armed ones. No one in his entourage was allowed to carry a gun or nightstick or any other weapon. The very concept of arming oneself was odious to him-
-it violated his Gandhian principles. He wouldn't even let his children carry toy guns.347 In an almost mystical sense, he believed nonviolence was a more potent force for self-protection than any weapon. He understood the threats that were about but refused to let them alter the way he lived. So no one was on the balcony to shield his movements, to shepherd him along, to survey the sight lines and vantage points and anticipate the worst.
If he'd had premonitions of an early death the previous night--sick white brothers--he seemed to have flushed them from his consciousness. Now he was in a jovial mood. Last night's darkness had dissipated. The tornadoes all around Memphis had killed six and injured more than one hundred people, but the storms had passed, leaving nothing more menacing than rain puddles. King had much to look forward to, and he seemed buoyed to have his entourage with him. He was about to head out with comrades to his favorite kind of dinner, to celebrate a victorious day in court. Memphis--maybe the place was redeemable after all.
Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine, noticed King's ebullient mood as he stood there with his staff. "He just act so different,348 so happy," Bailey said. "It looked like they had won the world."
A LITTLE BEFORE six, a guest at Mrs. Brewer's flophouse named Willie Anschutz349 was sitting in his room, 4B, with another tenant, Mrs. Jessie Ledbetter. Anschutz, a nondrinker, was a fifty-seven-year-old laborer at a local moving company. Mrs. Ledbetter, a deaf-mute widow who'd lived in the rooming house for seven years, was short and stout and wore a bright floral-print dress. The two old friends--Anschutz affectionately called her "the dummy"--had been whiling away the afternoon, sipping Cokes and eating cookies and watching a movie on television. At some point, Anschutz took a small tub of dirty dishes down the hall to rinse them in the common bathroom, but he found the door locked. Five minutes later he returned and found that it was still locked. He jiggled the faceted-glass doorknob to let the person inside know he was hogging the lavatory. Slightly peeved, he stuck his head inside Charlie Stephens's room. "Who the hell's in the bathroom?" he griped. "He's been in there a while."
Stephens, still tinkering with his broken radio in the kitchen area of his room, had heard the guy from 5B traipsing into the bathroom and was aware that he'd been in there "an undue length of time."350 Through the thin walls, he could hear all comings and goings at his end of the flophouse. Oddly, the whole time the 5B guest had been in there, he hadn't run any water or flushed the commode.
"Oh, that's the new guy from 5B," Stephens told Anschutz.
"Well, I gotta get in there!" Anschutz complained.
"YOU COMIN', RALPH?" King asked, slightly impatient. He had ducked back into room 306 to get the tailored Petrocelli suit coat, made of fine black silk, he'd bought at Zimmerman's in Atlanta.
"In a second351--thought I'd get some of that Aramis, too," Abernathy said, rummaging through King's shaving kit.
"I'll wait for you out here," King replied, slipping on his jacket. In the pockets of his coat he had a silver Cross pen and a scrap of paper scrawled with notes for a speech he planned to give in Memphis later that week on the Poor People's Campaign. On it was the line "Nothing is gained without sacrifice."352
King rejoined his post, leaning on the balcony just in front of the door. He stood there for a while, looking down at the small crowd again. Solomon Jones, the driver, cranked the Cadillac to get it warmed up.
From the group, Jesse Jackson greeted King. "Our Leader!" he said, in exaggeratedly regal tones.
"Jesse!" King boomed in return. "I want you to come to dinner353 with me tonight." It was a small gesture, but everyone in the entourage knew what it meant; inviting Jackson to dinner was King's first step toward making up with his headstrong apprentice after their fight in Atlanta. King was forgiving him.
Kyles, still standing on the balcony, interrupted. "Doc, Jesse took care of that before you did. He got himself invited!"
Jackson had in fact finagled an invitation for himself, but he didn't look like he was going to a dinner party. He was wearing a mod olive turtleneck sweater and a leather coat, a fashion decidedly out of step with the tie-wearing squares of the inner circle. When someone in the Lorraine parking lot gave him a once-over as if to question his attire, Jackson quipped, "All you need for dinner is an appetite."
King laughed at Jackson's hipster threads and his resourcefulness at adding himself to the guest list. On this night the Leader was full of charity. He zestfully tugged at his coat lapels, as was his habit when he felt confident and ready for the world. He was clean shaven, sweet smelling, and dressed to the nines. He looked at Jackson and flashed a broad smile.
Georgia Davis was down in 201354 with the door slightly ajar. As she fixed her hair in the bathroom mirror, she could hear King carrying on with his staff, could hear the Voice, rich and melodious, booming across the courtyard. She could tell he was in a good mood. She wished he would stop jabbering--she was getting hungry. She looked at her watch: 6:00. They were all supposed to be at Kyles's house by now. Then she glanced out the window and saw King on the balcony. He just stood there, the life of his own party, smiling and joking and talking away.
INSIDE THE MILDEWY bathroom,355 Galt removed the Gamemaster from its box and loaded it with a single Remington-Peters .30-06 round. Galt must have felt he was running out of time--otherwise he would have loaded the clip with more bullets. He jerked the window up with such force that it jammed after opening only five inches. Probably using his rifle tip, he poked the rusted window screen and dislodged it from its groove; the screen tumbled to the weedy lot below.
The bathroom was disgustingly dirty;356 the toilet bowl was streaked, and a dented piece of wainscoting trim ran along peeling walls the color of a robin's egg. Galt climbed into the old claw-footed bathtub, which was scuzzy and stained, its tarnished drain clogged with a tangle of hairs. A flimsy contraption dangling over the tub's rim held a shrunken nub of soap. Galt leaned his body against the wall and rested the rifle on the paint-flaked windowsill.
Squinting through the Redfield scope, he found King, still standing there on the Lorraine balcony. Galt's loafers must have squeaked as they rubbed on the surface of the bathtub, leaving black scuff marks. A television murmured somewhere down the hall; a ventilation fan thumped in a nearby window. The smell of charred burgers tendriled up from Jim's Grill, where happy-hour Budweiser was flowing and intense games of barroom shuffleboard were in session.
Galt likely heard Willie Anschutz rattling the bathroom door, a disruption that doubtless tried his concentration. He had to move fast. He brought King's head within the crosshairs. It was starting to grow dark outside, but the chemical emulsion on his scope's lens enhanced targets in twilight. In the distance behind the Lorraine was the immense gray post office building, a hazy monstrosity looming in the crepuscular light.
King continued to hold court, oblivious to danger. His face nearly filled the scope's optical plane. He was 205 feet away, but with 7x magnification, he appeared only 30 feet away. It was an easy shot, a cinch.
Galt leaned into the rifle and took aim. At 6:01 p.m., he wrapped his index finger around the cool metal trigger.
THE CADILLAC WAS still idling down below, and the various members of the party were edging toward their cars. King did not move from his perch on the balcony--he seemed transfixed by the evening, enchanted by the scene in the courtyard. Andy Young was shadowboxing with James Orange, a wild bearish man as big as an NFL linebacker. "Now you be careful with preachers half your size!" King called out to Orange.
Jackson, standing beside the Cadillac, introduced King to Ben Branch, a saxophonist and bandleader originally from Memphis, who had come down from Chicago to play music in support of the sanitation workers; he and his band had a gig that night over at Mason Temple, where King and his entourage were headed after the Kyles dinner.
"Oh yes," King said. "He's my man. How are ya, Ben?"
"Glad to see you, Doc," Branch called up.
"Ben, I want you to sing for me tonight at the meeting
. I want you to do that song, 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord.'" King had loved the great gospel standard for years. It was a tragic, sweet song written in the depths of the Depression by a black composer named Thomas Dorsey after his wife and baby died in childbirth:
When the darkness appears and the night draws near
And the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand.
"I want you to sing it like you've never sung it before," King told Branch. "Sing it reeeeeeal pretty."
"I sure will, Doc."
Solomon Jones hopped out of the Caddie and yelled up to King. "It's getting chilly," said Jones. "I think you'll need a topcoat."
"Okay, Jonesy," King answered. "You really know how to take good care of me." He fished for a pack of Salem menthols from his pocket and grasped a cigarette in his hand. He straightened up and stepped back from the railing. He was just turning, perhaps to retrieve his cashmere topcoat inside the room, when a ragged belch rang out over the parapets.
THE MEMPHIS POLICEMAN Willie Richmond, watching the Lorraine357 from inside the firehouse, heard the noise. It did not register with him as the report of a rifle--it was just a loud noise, perhaps a backfiring truck, and it seemed to come from somewhere off to the northwest. But fireman George Loenneke saw everything. Through Richmond's field glasses, through the little peephole in the newspapered window, the scene reeled out in slow motion before Loenneke's eyes: King falling backward from the handrail. King tumbling to the balcony floor. King staying there and not getting up. Loenneke gave Richmond the binoculars for a look. No one else inside the station had heard anything or had an inkling of what had happened.