Free Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides Page A

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