by Steve Berry
On the way back from Orlando I’d stopped in Gainesville and retrieved Valdez’s file photos from the Mail ’N More. The cassette tape had remained safe inside the truck’s player. Both items, along with the reel tape from Oliver, were now resting in the lower right drawer of my desk at work. Nobody had a clue I possessed them, which to me seemed the best protection. What to do with them was still up in the air. My assignment called for me to turn them over to Stephanie Nelle.
But I had to speak with Foster.
So I took a personal leave day and drove to Orlando for the funeral.
Another lie to Pam quelled any questions she might have had.
Follow-up to what I just did.
I’ll be home by nightfall.
* * *
Coleen and Nate were laid to rest together in a small cemetery west of Orlando, beyond the sprawl, in what was once orange groves. A perfect bowl of bright blue stretched overhead east to west. About two hundred people came to the graveside service. Foster sat with a few others, whom I assumed were Nate’s family, in rickety wooden chairs as the final words were said. Then everyone filed by and paid their respects. Foster remained in a daze, but seemed mindful of each person, shaking their hand, forcing a sad smile, thanking them for coming.
The crowd progressively thinned, everyone leaving the quiet cemetery in cars parked in an orderly line atop the close-cropped grass. Foster lingered, and a few of the older folks in the crowd remained with him. I loitered off to the side, among the other graves, waiting for a chance to speak with him.
Finally, he walked over.
“What have you told them?” he asked.
Right to the point. “Not a thing.”
“I knew that about you.”
I was puzzled by the observation.
“When I first met you in the house by the lake, I told myself you were a man who could be trusted.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Forty years of trusting other people.”
“Look what price King paid for trusting you.”
He nodded. “His life.”
“You say that as if it means nothing to you.”
“On the contrary, it has ruled my every moment for the past thirty-two years.”
“Coleen died never knowing the truth.”
“I noticed how carefully you chose your words in front of her with Valdez.”
“And you said nothing.”
“It seemed the best course. One thing I never did was lie to Coleen.”
His words came in a low, soft monotone with little emotion accompanying them. I wondered if he really believed his own bullshit.
“You still have the tape and the files?” he asked.
I nodded. “They’re safe. No one knows I have them. I also have the original recording from Oliver.”
Which surprised him.
“I took it off his body.”
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
“You.”
He seemed to consider my dilemma, then said, “It’s not complicated. I was told to find FBI spies within the SCLC. I did, but I sold my silence to Jansen in return for cash that I needed. Then I sold out King, in return for a rare gold coin.”
He seemed to be keeping with his official line. “You should be in jail.”
He gave a slight nod. “A better fate than everyone else. They’re all dead.”
“Except Bruce Lael.”
“You don’t need him. You have the cassette copy and the original tape. All you need is for me to validate those and the files, implicating myself in a murder.”
“Those thoughts had occurred to me.”
“I’m afraid none of that is possible.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that.” I wondered what he expected from me. “I’ll have to arrest you.”
I’d known this man for less than a week. My opinion of him had ranged from none at all, to sympathetic, to outright loathing, to finally pity. His wife died long ago. His daughter and son-in-law were now gone, too. Certainly nothing about him should demand any compassion. He’d brought all of his troubles onto himself.
But something wasn’t right.
My lawyer intuition had been telling me for days that two plus two here did not add up to four. Foster was a man of God. A preacher with a flock. I’d just watched a ton of people shake his hand and hug his neck. Not a perfunctory gesture, expected or required. Those people were hurting, because they knew he was hurting. Many who’d been there had to be members of his church. Nothing but love and respect filled their faces. Either this man was one of the most accomplished phonies in the world, or something else was going on. I’d lied to Stephanie Nelle and kept silent the past three days on the belief that something else was indeed going on.
“It’s time you tell me the truth,” I said. “No more hedging. We’re at the end. I have to make a decision.”
He stared back at me with eyes that genuinely considered the request, which came with the tone of a plea.
“People expect me to come to the gathering at the church for Coleen and Nate. It will be over by 5:00. Come to my house at 6:00. We can talk there in private.”
He gave me the address, then said, “Truth is defined as sincerity in action, character, and utterance. As Christians we believe that every word in the Bible is true. It is the foundation upon which we live our lives. I have counseled many people in need with what the Bible says about truth. I’ve always told them that keeping God’s word in their heart helps them to know when they are listening to the voice of truth. Now it’s my turn to follow that advice. These are the things that you shall do. Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace. Let us hope Zechariah is correct.”
And he walked off.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
I killed time by finding a Cracker Barrel and eating a late lunch, not getting in a hurry and thinking about the past few days. I called Pam and told her that I would be late getting back and, for once, there was no interrogation. The past couple of days had been good between us. We’d even started talking about having a baby. Both of us wanted a child, and perhaps the time had come. With all of the trouble in our marriage, having a baby had never seemed the solution. But maybe we’d turned the corner and could move on, a child providing some additional glue to keep the pieces together. I liked the idea of becoming a father. My own father died when I was ten, so I grew up with my grandfather. I wanted to make a difference in a child’s life. Be there for him or her. Be a part of their growing up. As to my military career, who knew where that was going. My temporary foray into the Justice Department was over. I was back in the navy and a job that I was more and more starting to resent. And I had to fight that. The home front was chaotic enough without work joining in the battle.
A little after 5:30 I left the restaurant and headed toward Foster’s house. I stopped at a local convenience store and purchased a city map. Orlando was a big place. Easy to get lost among its many neighborhoods, but I found the house, a modest one-story, brick home in a quiet subdivision. Foster’s Toyota wasn’t parked in the driveway—probably still in Port Mayaca where I’d left it after Jansen cornered me.
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 aw
ay 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.
“In January of ’68, Martin told Coretta about his love affairs. She’d always known in her heart, even before the FBI sent those tapes to their house three years before, that he’d wandered from the marriage. They’d been steadily growing apart. What many never realized, for all his progressiveness on race, was that Martin was a chauvinist at home. He thought a woman’s place was raising children. Coretta desired a more active role. She wanted to be out on the road with him. He lived in the spotlight, which to a degree she resented. Money was also an issue. He took little salary from the SCLC and accepted no gifts of cash from anyone. He even donated the $54,000 he won for the Nobel Peace Prize to civil rights groups. She wanted it kept as a college fund for their children. They never took a family vacation and rarely went out socially together. His life was the movement, but the movement was leaving him behind.”
I’d never heard these details before on King.
“When we first met you asked me what Martin was like. I told you fiery, with an ego. He liked recognition, adulation, and respect. That’s all true. I remember in early ’68 when a Gallup poll showed that he was no longer in the top ten of admired Americans. That hurt him deeply. By then, SCLC fund-raising was dropping because of his antiwar stance. Universities began to withdraw their lecture invitations. No publisher was eager to sign on with him. Above all, the civil rights movement had split into two factions. One that favored civil disobedience and nonviolence, the other pushing for more militant acts. It hurt to his core that violence was winning out. By the time we arrived in Memphis on April 3, 1968, Martin was politically dead.”
I pointed at the tape recorder. “What is this?”
“In a moment,” Foster said. “You must understand some things first.”
I nodded, conceding that this was his show.
“You heard on the cassette tape when I told Jansen about the March 30 meeting in Atlanta of the SCLC leadership. Everyone was there. Tempers flared. Martin wanted to go back to Memphis, then on to the DC Poor People’s March. Everyone else favored another course. He stormed from the building, angry, more so than I’ve ever seen. A few hours later he called and said he was going to come by my house. He came, and we spoke for about an hour. He brought a recorder and taped every word.”
A tight feeling grabbed my throat.
“He wanted there to be no questions. No misunderstandings. He assumed my house was not being bugged, and it wasn’t.” He pointed at the machine. “This is the original tape from that day.”
He sat at the table.
I did, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
King: Ben, it’s been a year since I stood in the pulpit of the Riverside Church and denounced the war. Three-quarters of America now thinks I was wrong to do that. Nearly 60 percent of Negroes agree with them.
Foster: When have you ever been motivated by public opinion? This whole movement runs counter to everything popular in this country.
King: “You’re a preacher, not a politician. Don’t overstep.” “You’re a Nobel laureate with opinions on race relations that people all over the world listen to.” “A leader of your people.” “Why risk all that by taking a stand on an issue that is irrelevant to your purpose.” Those are the questions I’ve been asked over and over.
[PAUSE]
King: For the past year, I’ve asked myself the same questions. Was I wrong, Ben? Did all
common sense leave me? With all my being I believe the war is wrong. It would have been a sin to remain silent. The worst part, though, is how the war protests have nearly all turned violent. I understand why that has happened. Frustration has brought forth an idea that the solution resides in violence. I simply cannot get across to those young people that I embrace everything they feel. It’s just tactics we can’t agree on. I feel their rage, their pain. But the system is choking them, and us, to death.
Foster: It can’t be the entire system. Parts have worked in our favor. The other parts you can fix.
King: No. I can’t. I’ve tried and look where we are. The reality is we live in a failed system. Capitalism will never permit an even flow of economic resources. A privileged few will be rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level.
Foster: But we’ve had successes. Desegregation is happening.
King: I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.
Foster: What would you have us do?
King: It’s time, Ben, we become firemen.
[PAUSE]
Foster: No. No. Not that.
King: We’ve talked about this at length. You knew this day would come.
Foster: I’m not going there.
King: Ben, it’s vitally important you listen to me. Don’t you think I’ve considered this in every way possible? I’ve thought of little else these past few months. Can’t you see how hard this is for me? And don’t forget, it’s not you who’s going to die.
Foster: It doesn’t have to be you, either.
King: There is no other way. You’ve seen what we’re facing. The SCLC is in peril. I want to keep going, stay the course, go back to Memphis, take a stand on poverty. All of my aides, my associates, my friends, they all have a different opinion. Even you have doubts. There was a time when none of you would challenge me. Not anymore. I’m smart enough to see that the world has changed.
Foster: That’s all thanks to you. You changed it. You stood in the face of hate and never retreated. I was there with you in Selma, Birmingham, St. Augustine. You made those victories possible.