The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(92)

I approached the front door and rang the bell.

The door opened a few moments later and Foster invited me inside.

“I told everyone that I wanted to be alone,” he said. “We should not be disturbed.”

The house was clean and spacious, the walls papered and ornamented with pictures of Coleen and another older woman, surely her mother.

He noticed my interest.

“I was so proud of her. She was a good daughter. Not a follower in any way. She had a mind of her own, never craving the strength of others.”

I also noticed the photos of a much younger Benjamin Foster and Martin Luther King Jr. Some just the two of them, standing together, smiling. Others in the presence of a crowd. A few during a march or a sit-in. One had them being forcibly taken away by police. In another they were behind bars.

“We were both arrested in Mobile,” Foster said. “We spent three days in jail together. That was 1966.”

“How could you sell him out?” I asked.

“Jansen paid me over twenty thousand dollars to be his spy. In those days that was a lot of money.”

“Nobody noticed you had that money?”

He shook his head. “It all went to bookies and car dealers. No one paid me any mind.”

That feeling swept through me again. “You’re lying.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You worked with the FBI and set King up to die. I heard you on the recording. Yet you keep these pictures on the wall? You say King was the man you admired the most. You call him Martin. Then you watched as he was shot down. Either you have no conscience or morals at all, which I doubt, or you’re lying.”

“Coleen challenged me, too, right here in this room. Of course, she was not aware of all that you know.” He paused. “She called me a liar when I told her that I was given the coin by someone else. Which probably only propelled her to make the call to Valdez even quicker. I handled the situation with her terribly. I’ve decided to handle this one better.”

He motioned and we entered a dining room filled with a shiny mahogany table, four chairs, and a sideboard. The windows, sheathed in opaque curtains, allowed in only a halo of late-afternoon sun. Atop the table sat an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. I hadn’t seen one since I was a kid. Cassettes and CDs were the norm now. I noticed that a half-full reel was already threaded to a blank spool.

“I need to explain a few things,” Foster said. “Some of which we discussed in Micanopy, some we did not.”

I recalled the conversation.

“The years 1965 and ’66 were relatively calm for Martin. After the incident with the lurid recordings sent to the King house, the FBI seemed to keep their distance. But when Martin came out against the Vietnam War in April of ’67, the FBI again increased their surveillance. Hoover also gradually became terrified of a messiah who might unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Jansen spoke of that to me. Malcom X could have been that messiah, but he was killed. Hoover was deathly afraid that Martin would abandon his obedience to nonviolence and embrace black nationalism, becoming their messiah. Of course, that would have never happened. It ran contrary to everything Martin believed. But Hoover didn’t know Martin Luther King Jr.”

“That may explain why they wanted him dead,” I said. “But it doesn’t explain why you wanted him dead.”

“It actually doesn’t explain their motives, either. Martin always sought to work with the federal government, not against it. Federal judges were our closest allies. The federal government was all we had in the fight with state and local authorities. Martin was no danger to the United States. He was liberal to moderate compared with Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, or Roy Wilkins. Hoover had the situation read all wrong.”

“Hoover hated King. It was personal between them.”

He nodded. “We know that now. In ’62, when Martin questioned the FBI’s credibility and motives on civil rights, he made an enemy for life.”

Foster pointed toward me.

“But the differing sexual mores between the two men certainly came into play. Hoover was either asexual or homosexual. We’ll never know for sure. Martin was pure heterosexual. He loved women. He routinely cheated on his wife, and that repulsed Hoover. To him it showed a man who could not be trusted by anyone. Martin was greatly conflicted by that weakness, knowing it was a contradiction to all he preached. But he accepted the flaw as a human frailty.”

I wondered about the point of all this but kept my mouth shut.

“By the fall of 1967, Martin was in dire trouble,” Foster said. “He’d been working nonstop for twelve years, and the strain had taken an enormous toll. He smoked, drank, and downed sleeping pills almost every day. His marriage was crumbling, and his criticisms of the Vietnam War cost him valuable allies, which included the president of the United States. He was no longer welcome at the White House. His base of support, which had once been enormous, had eroded. Nonviolence was losing its appeal, dismissed by many blacks as out of touch. George Wallace was running for president, and his segregationist message had begun to take hold. Martin felt frustrated, like all of his work had been in vain. A great depression came over him.”

I could see that the memories were painful. Whatever was racking this man’s conscience seemed to be finally bubbling to the surface. His expression, tone, even his posture, all signaled that he was telling the truth.