A lot had happened right here.
But I also noticed that the Plaza de la Constitución still contained a huge contradiction. Its largest monument was a towering coquina obelisk, topped by cannonballs, dedicated to the local Confederate war dead. To me it resembled a giant middle finger. Not a single reminder existed anywhere of what happened here in the summer of 1964. It would not be until 2011 that a civil rights memorial was finally erected, one that faced the old Woolworths where four black teenagers were arrested, and spent six months in jail, for simply trying to order a hamburger and a Coke. Not surprisingly, it took a change to the city code to make the monument happen, as memorials to events that occurred after 1821 were inexplicably banned.
“What about my father?” Coleen asked. “Tell me what you know about him.”
Veddern pointed at the coin I still held. “I was actually hoping you could tell me.”
She didn’t reply.
I slipped the coin back into my pocket. “Tell us what you know.”
He shrugged. “Are you asking if he was a spy for us? The FBI had informants all over the SCLC, the Progressive Labor Movement, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That’s how a lot of inside information made its way to Hoover’s desk. I can say that I’ve never seen any report that mentions your father as being part of that. In fact, nothing on Bishop’s Pawn, outside of Valdez’s blackmail, has ever surfaced.” He pointed at the backpack. “Until now. I was involved with both congressional investigations into the King assassination. I’m the bureau’s recognized expert on that event, so I would know.”
“Provided you’re telling us the truth,” she said.
My gaze swept the plaza and the border streets. People moved everywhere, as did cars, trollies, and horse-drawn carriages, the clip-clop of their hooves on the pavement as monotonous as a clock ticking. Veddern was definitely not here alone, so I was trying to assess any threats while Coleen held his attention. Veddern was trying hard to be the guy on the white horse, but I wasn’t ready, just yet, to play the trust game. Particularly given the two men who loitered toward the far end of the plaza, near Government House. Definitely not tourists.
I decided to do a little diverging myself.
What I’d read last night was fairly specific on the lead-up to the assassination, but not so much on what happened afterward. So I asked the bureau’s recognized expert, “Did the FBI help Ray escape Memphis?”
“Why do you ask such a thing?”
I reiterated what some of the memos had stated, adding, “Ray fired the shot, then fled the rooming house. He was supposed to get in his car and leave town. He was carrying the rifle, rolled inside a bedspread, out on the street and saw a couple of Memphis police cars. For once in his life he panicked and ditched the bundle in an entryway. What he didn’t know was that someone was inside that store, so the rifle was found quickly and that same somebody saw Ray drive off in a white Mustang. It should have been an easy matter to catch him before he made it far. What’s the old saying? You can’t outrun the radio?”
“I know what you’re getting at. It’s part of the official assassination file.”
We listened as he explained that less than ten minutes after the shooting, the Memphis police put out an alert for the Mustang, driven by a well-dressed white male. Twenty-five minutes after the shooting, reports placed the Mustang heading north out of the city. Then, thirty-five minutes after the shooting, a car chase began to be heard across local CB radio. A 1966 Pontiac was apparently in hot pursuit of a fast-fleeing Mustang. The voice broadcasting the report said the Mustang was being driven by the man who shot King. The Memphis police tried to establish two-way communication with the Pontiac, but the voice on the other end would not reply. The chase seemed to be happening on the east side of Memphis, the shooter apparently making a run for the Tennessee hill country. The Memphis police dispatched cruisers. Roadblocks were erected. The highway patrol alerted.
And then things turned even stranger.
The Pontiac’s driver reported over the radio that the Mustang was shooting at him and that his windshield had been hit. The police asked if the driver could see the Mustang’s license plate and, for the first time, the man replied saying that he feared for his life getting that close.
Then the transmissions ended.
Nothing more was heard from the Pontiac.
“Reports from the official assassination file quote interviews with people who listened to the exchange on CB radio. They all said the voice was incredibly calm for someone in a high-speed car chase with shots being fired at him. And it was odd that he wouldn’t identify himself. The guy was willing to risk going after the Mustang, but not willing to tell the police who he was. Then there was the S-meter. One person listening noticed on his own CB radio that the signal strength never diminished, even though the transmission came from a moving vehicle. The signal stayed constant. That meant it was coming from a stationary source.”
“But no one paid attention to those details,” I said. “They were all caught up in the moment and thought they had the killer.”
“That’s right.”
I began to connect the dots with what I’d read. “COINTELPRO may have been a lot of things, but those guys weren’t stupid. On the one hand they engineered the killing. On the other, they sat back and allowed the rest of the FBI to organize the largest manhunt in history to find Ray.”
“Which was easy for them to do,” Veddern said. “Within the bureau only Oliver, Jansen, Lael, and Hoover knew about Bishop’s Pawn, and probably only Oliver and Hoover knew it all. There have been countless investigations into King’s death. Lots of innuendo. Speculation. Guesses. But nothing has ever pointed to the FBI. They did know how to keep a secret back then. Hoover publicly proclaimed that the FBI would stop at nothing to find King’s killer. That was the reputation he’d forged for his bureau. It’s what the public expected from him. Ray should have made it to Rhodesia, out of reach, long before the FBI ever closed in. My God, he was on the run for two months. But when you pick an idiot for a job, you have to expect idiocy, and that’s what they got.”
“But why plead guilty?” I asked. “Why didn’t Ray just rat them out?”
“Nobody knows. He had a great defense for trial. No discernible motive. No fingerprints of his in the rooming house. No prints found in the car he was driving. No ballistics report that established the rifle was the murder weapon. Even worse, an FBI accuracy test on the rifle showed it consistently fired both left and below the intended target. Ray was not a marksman, and knew little to nothing about guns. The only eyewitness to place him at the scene was blind drunk at the time, and never made a positive ID until years later. It was a defense lawyer’s dream.”
Veddern pointed another finger my way.
“Once the FBI publicly identified Ray as the killer, which was about two weeks after the assassination, Hoover made sure the bureau focused on Ray, and Ray alone. I’ve read every directive issued at that time. The field offices were ordered to stay on Ray. No conspiracy was ever investigated.”
I knew something this man didn’t. “Right before his trial, word was sent to him that once George Wallace was elected president, he’d be pardoned. Ray was a strong Wallace supporter and believed them. That’s why he agreed to plead guilty.”
I could see that was news to him.
“That actually makes sense,” Veddern said.