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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.
“Three days later,” I continued, “his narcissistic personality took over and he recanted. He realized that he was the man of the hour. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. So he talked. And talked. And talked. So much that no one, other than conspiratorialists out to make a name for themselves, ever listened to him. He became the perfect smoke screen.”
“Yes he did,” Veddern said. “In the decades since, the mafia, racists, segregationists, the Klan, communists, labor unions, the military, leftists, the government, and the Memphis police have all been implicated in theories to kill Martin Luther King Jr. I’m wagering, though, that those files you have from Valdez are an entirely different matter.”
His tone had grown more serious, and I assumed the attempt at reasoning was ending. His words were driving toward a point.
He pointed at Coleen.
“I want them. Now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I really, really didn’t like this guy.
But I knew to keep cool.
“This can’t escalate beyond what it already has,” Veddern said. “We thought it was containable when the boat sank. But Stephanie Nelle managed to find herself someone who resurrected the problem.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“Don’t. But you can redeem yourself. Hand over those files and the coin and w
alk away. Mission done.”
“Without those, there’s no proof of anything,” Coleen noted.
“Exactly my point. Did you hear me? This. Has. To. End.”
“I don’t work for you,” I said.
“A fact I fully realize. Look, I understand. Tom Oliver has been a problem for a long time. He’s old school, rising up in the ranks from a field agent to deputy director. Along the way he oversaw a lot of our departments. COINTELPRO was just one of many. He has a lot of friends in the bureau that owe him lots of favors. He thinks of the FBI like in the old days, when Hoover was there, when they could do whatever they wanted. And though retired he still has friends in high places, friends the attorney general wants to expunge. We want those people gone, too. But we prefer to clean our own house.”
“Just like the fox cleans the henhouse?” I asked.
“We’re not all bad,” Veddern said. “Most of us do our job the right way.”
“And yet you’ve known about Bishop’s Pawn and never said a word.”
“I know little to nothing about it, and I have no proof of anything.”
I pointed at the backpack. “You do now.”
“Those files, and Juan Lopez Valdez, should have stayed in Cuba.”
“We’ve both read them,” I pointed out again.
He shrugged. “So what? You’ll be just two more crazies expounding wild theories with nothing to back them up.”
“I want to know more about those FBI spies,” Coleen said.
She kept coming back to that subject. Like a bird dog on a scent.
“I told you all I know,” Veddern said. “And I’m not being evasive. Just honest. The documentation on all of that no longer exists.”
Which I could see made Coleen even more anxious to find her father.
“You’re going to have—”
Veddern’s body suddenly lurched.
Odd.
Then he shuddered.
I stared at the man and saw first puzzlement, then pain, and finally fear fill his eyes. A small hole appeared at his right shoulder, from which dark rivulets began to seep.
