Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (9 page)

Now the cameraman was poised to snap the picture. Galt stood next to Lau, who fairly beamed with pride at his new graduate. Galt stared anxiously at the lens and concentrated on the photographer's movements. Though he had made failing attempts at proficiency
behind
a camera, and had almost obsessively taken Polaroid mug shots of himself while in Puerto Vallarta, he hated being photographed by others, hated the whole tedious ritual--the pointless lingering, the sense of momentary entrapment, the knowledge that his image would reside in another's hands.

Galt's posture grew rigid. He fidgeted, tightened his lips, and cocked his head slightly. Then he did something strange: at the last possible moment, Galt closed his eyes and kept them mashed shut until he was sure the portrait was taken.

IF ERIC GALT had enjoyed an interlude of carefree freedom while slumming in Puerto Vallarta, he had known something deeper and more fulfilling these past few months in Los Angeles. He'd arrived in L.A. on November 19 and soon found himself drawn to the city's restless energy. He eventually made a home at the St. Francis Hotel
¹⁰⁵
on Hollywood Boulevard, in a drab room that cost eighty-five dollars a month. There was a bar downstairs on the ground floor of the blond brick building, a smoky little joint called the Sultan Room, where he liked to while away the nights watching prizefights on the TV set or shooting pool on an old scuffed table while nursing sixty-cent drinks. When he got bored, he'd head out on the town, nosing his Mustang through the freeway traffic, listening to country-and-western songs on his car's push-button radio--he particularly liked Johnny Cash. He took comfort in knowing that if he ran into trouble, he still had his loaded "equalizer" hidden under the seat.

Over the past few months Galt had enjoyed his share of the considerable good life that Southern California had to offer single men of appetites in the go-go days of the late 1960s--self-realization, alternative lifestyles, transcendence, casual sex, drugs. He had a fast car with a V-8 engine and a hot red interior--the windows affixed with Mexican "Turista" stickers that seemed to advertise his wide-ranging prowls. He had some money to spend, money apparently derived from various robberies and smuggling schemes, and from the sale of the marijuana he'd brought back from Mexico. He had girls on those nights when he wanted them--"exotic dancers" he met at clubs along Hollywood Boulevard. It's likely that he had amphetamines,
¹⁰⁶
which he liked to use to sharpen his thoughts as he burned through the lonely nights.

At his hotel, he would turn on his Channel Master transistor radio and burrow into books--he was a fan of detective thrillers and Ian Fleming's James Bond. There, he would read far into the night, as a fizzly neon sign
¹⁰⁷
outside his hotel window shot his room--403--with shards of tangerine light. He was intensely, almost desperately focused on improving himself, as though he were running out of time to make something stick. He wanted to do something purposeful with his life and find some kind of happiness. He still nursed dreams of getting into the porn business--while in L.A. he bought sex manuals and a set of Japanese chrome handcuffs and even corresponded with a local club for swingers--but that idea had foundered a bit since leaving Puerto Vallarta. Instead, he enrolled in a correspondence locksmithing course offered by a company in New Jersey, for he was seized with the notion of becoming a first-rate thief, a safecracker, a moonlight yegg. He took dance lessons, read self-help books, and even consulted a cosmetic surgeon to see about making a few small repairs. Now he'd "graduated" from bartending school.

It was, for Eric Galt, a time of branching out, of creative and eclectic if somewhat frantic growth. He was like an empty vessel for all the trends of the zeitgeist. He tried on different lives for himself, fresh looks and new styles. He began to think about moving permanently to a foreign country--New Zealand, perhaps, or someplace in South America or southern Africa. He talked vaguely about starting an orphanage for neglected children--child abuse being his soft spot, the one subject that consistently aroused in him noticeable stirrings of empathy. Other times he dreamed of working in the merchant marine or using his newfound bartending skills to open up a pub in Ireland. Here in the bright forgiving anonymity of L.A., in the early spring of 1968, Eric Galt thought he could do just about anything.

And what a boomtime it was to be in L.A.--this twitchy young metropolis of starlets and jet-setters, webbed with highways, exploding with myriad fads, its multiple skylines sprouting new stalagmites of mirrored glass, its hectic airport presided over by a futuristic tower that looked like a flying saucer on four legs. Lew Alcindor was perfecting his skyhook for UCLA, while Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were riding high with the Lakers. The Doors' third studio album,
Waiting for the Sun
, was deep in gestation. Rosey Grier had just finished his last season with the Rams, as part of the "Fearsome Foursome," perhaps the greatest defensive line in football history. Popular TV shows coming out of Los Angeles included
Laugh-In, Gunsmoke, Star Trek
, and
The Beverly Hillbillies
. While Galt was gaining proficiency with a shaker and a shot glass, a new movie hit theaters that perfectly captured the country's restive, contrarian mood. It was called
The Graduate
.

ERIC STARVO GALT was forty years old, clean in his appearance, his skin smooth and clear but of an almost fish-belly wanness--whatever tan he had acquired on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta had long since faded. He lived on aspirin, and complained of headaches, insomnia, and nameless concerns. His heart raced, and he felt odd pains in his chest. Though a recent eye test revealed that he had twenty-twenty vision, he sometimes worried that he was going blind. He was constantly adjusting his medications, refining his regimes of self-maintenance. He took One A Day vitamins and various supplements. If he was a bit scrawny, he kept his muscles lean and tough with regular calisthenics and weight lifting--he'd recently bought himself a set of barbells.
¹⁰⁸

Though Galt dressed cheaply, he dressed with neatness and exactitude. He buffed his fake-alligator loafers to a fine polish. He made sure his tailored suit was crisp and sharp and took his clothes every Saturday afternoon to the Home Service Laundry on Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from his hotel.

In like fashion, Galt fussed with his grooming and was no stranger to a mirror. He kept his face clean shaven, his nails trim, his charcoal hair combed straight back and oiled with Brylcreem, so that it gave off a petroleum sheen in the light. His tidiness and hygiene were a source of special pride; though he frequented the sorriest flophouses and dives, and felt at home among the most unsavory characters, he took satisfaction in knowing that, in his way, he'd risen above the filth around him.

For all his preening, Galt lacked confidence about his looks; he seemed an oddly skittish man, awkward around people and hard to pin in a conversation. He gave off the appearance of a hustler preoccupied with sub-rosa enterprises he did not wish to divulge. Most people took the cue and left him alone.

Those who did speak with him found him hard to understand, for he blurted out words in unrhythmic spates and monosyllables, mumbling softly, his lips cramped in an uncomfortable-looking construction, as though his mouth were full of sharp rocks. He spoke in a drawl that was hard to place; it was the drawl of rural Illinois, along the Mississippi River valley, where he had grown up during the Depression in a succession of impoverished towns. It was the drawl of St. Louis, the city he and his family had lived in and out of--the city that, in his drifter's way, Galt considered home.

Galt was willing to spend good money on certain prescribed things--like dance lessons and bartending school or his portable Zenith television--but at heart he was a cheapskate. He darned his own clothes, sewed buttons on his fraying shirts, drank horse-piss beer, lived in prideful squalor, rarely tipped in restaurants, and prowled drugstores for bargain-basement sales on toiletry items. If he dined out, he usually ordered greasy hamburgers at drive-ins, but more often he ate in his room, subsisting on crackers, canned food, and powdered soups that he warmed in a mug with an electric immersion heater. "He was tight as a tick," said one acquaintance; his expenses amounted to scarcely more than five dollars a day.

Galt was equally stingy with his words and thoughts. His emotional life was a mystery. He rarely gestured and almost never laughed. He liked to leave people guessing and once described his personal motto as "Never let the left hand know what the right is doing." He once said, in the manner of a boast, that he had not cried since he was twelve years old.

His sexual relationships were fleeting and superficial. Women, he had said, were to use and forget. He'd never married, and he'd never been in love--indeed, he hated the word "love." "I don't think that a man
¹⁰⁹
sits around talking about love and so on. It sounds sort of odd to me. Women--they'll break down and cry and all that stuff." As he had in Puerto Vallarta, Galt frequented hookers, and according to one acquaintance his preferred mode of pleasure was "to get his knob polished."
¹¹⁰
His life seemed devoid of romance. "You can't trust anyone too far, especially the women type," Galt later wrote. "No woman has ever thought much of me--and anyways, marrying would have interfered with my travels."

Those who conversed with Galt often came away with the unsettling realization that he had revealed nothing of pinpointable substance--and that he rarely returned a gaze. An introduction to Eric Galt was an unsatisfying affair--his handshake was limp and unresponsive. Blinking rapidly, Galt would turn his head and look downward or sideways, so that even close up it was hard to appraise the man. Like a squid, he seemed to throw up clouds of obscuring ink, hoping to screen himself from scrutiny and keep others guessing who he was and where he stood.

Students at the National Dance Studio, where Galt took rumba and cha-cha lessons for several months, quickly noticed his mysterious reticence. The school, on Pacific Avenue in Long Beach, was a melancholy place where lonely hearts came to meet under the net of easy intimacy that close dancing threw over strangers. Galt, however, would not interact with the other students, and refused to join in the fun. He was grimly determined to learn his moves; he said he might soon relocate to a Hispanic country. "I find myself attracted
¹¹¹
to the Latins," he said. "They're easygoing. They're not too bothered by rules and regulations." But, he said, "it helps socially if you know a little something about the Latin dances." He did in fact memorize the steps, but he was stiff and ungraceful. He got the mechanics of the rumba, but none of its soul.

Galt was especially self-conscious around his female partners and would not allow himself to succumb to their harmless flirtations. He would just shiver bashfully in their arms and look down.

"He was shy," one instructor said. "One time I talked with him for an hour and tried to break him down. When the conversation got personal, he became quiet." Rod Arvidson, the manager of the National Dance Studio, concurred: "He was the withdrawn type,
¹¹²
the type that often
needs
to learn to dance."

Nearly everything about Eric Galt seemed bland and retiring, the details of his appearance falling somewhere in the statistical middle: average height, average weight, average build, average age. The cumulative effect of all these milquetoast qualities made him strangely forgettable.

If one lingered and studied him awhile, though, certain attributes began to reveal themselves, like previously unnoticed images rising in the chemicals of a darkroom sink. There was the crooked grin on his face, which, though subtle, was a nearly permanent feature--a smirk that curled with irony and seemed to suggest he knew something he would never tell. There was the tiny dimple on his chin, the touch of gray in his sideburns, the thick cross-hatching of dark hair on his forearms, and a small scar in the center of his forehead. There was his lumbering, slough-footed gait, the stride of a much older man, punctuated by a faint limp. There, too, were the rabbity little tics: the way he constantly tugged on his left ear, the weak nervous giggle, the compulsive habit he had of shuttling his glass of vodka--back and forth, back and forth--on the lacquered wood of the bar.