From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:
JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.
A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.
The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”
AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.
Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.
Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.
Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.
“Got any vacancies?” he asked.
A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.
Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”
No, Galt replied, for the week.
Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”
Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.
Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.
“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”
Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.
Far Outliers 