Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [18]
It was less Sherlock Holmes than a lot of legwork, and a bit of luck, following up leads the police had failed to, going down several blind alleys, playing one hunch and then another, just pulling at all the loose threads until the whole strange mystery finally unraveled. And when I had put it all together, when the evidence seemed absolute, I went looking for the man who had the secrets that the FBI and the CIA had been afraid to find.
“I can prove that you did it,” I told the Pro.
We were sitting alone in the back of a bar. It was the first time we had met. I could see a gun stuck into the waistband of his pants. It wasn’t well concealed.
“I’m going to write a book,” I continued. “It’s either going to be about you and the break-in or it’s going to be about Howard Hughes. It’s your choice. But if it’s going to be a book about Hughes, I’ll need your help. I’ll need the papers.”
The Pro said nothing. Not a word. He just threw me a hard look and waited for me to go on. I confronted him with the evidence. He listened without comment.
I hadn’t scared him. I got the feeling no one ever had. Except Howard Hughes. I tried to keep the conversation going, to ease the tension, and as we talked I began to realize that this thief was totally obsessed with Hughes, that the obsession had nearly destroyed him, and that the secret papers he wouldn’t admit to having had become a curse.
That was my way in. He actually wanted to unload those dread documents. But how could I get him to give them to me? One thing I knew about people with secrets: deep down they all really wanted to tell. What good was it to have pulled off this great caper if no one knew he had done it?
I had to get him to trust me. We spent the next two days together. We talked for fourteen hours straight the first day, in the bar, in a hotel lobby, walking the streets, sitting in a park. We slept five hours and met again the next day for breakfast. Again, we talked nonstop all day and into the night.
He wanted to talk about Hughes. For two years he had been wanting to talk about Hughes, wanting to tell what he alone knew. But first he wanted to know more about me, why I’d come after him.
I told him who I was. A former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, now a free lance on assignment from New Times magazine. I told him how I had gotten into the Romaine story, searching for the answer to another unsolved mystery, a top-secret military project that supposedly involved the Glomar and a fantastic plot to deploy missiles at the bottom of the ocean.
None of that got to him. What got to him first was the discovery that I had been in jail. That I had done more time than he had.
“What were you in for?” asked the Pro.
“Protecting a source,” I said. “Refusing to give up a guy to a grand jury.”
He liked that. We began to talk about his crime. He still wasn’t admitting anything, but I talked about the break-in as if he had done it, I talked about the papers as if he had them, and gradually he began to talk about it that way too. I told him I didn’t think he had done anything wrong, that in fact I admired what he had done, thought that he had pulled off one of the great capers of all time, and that he had gotten hold of something truly important, secrets the American people had a right to know.
“What does that make me?” asked the Pro. “An investigative thief?”
“Precisely,” I told him. “And the real criminal is Hughes. He tried to steal our entire country.”
“I don’t know,” said the Pro, taking exception. “I like the guy. You know, I really liked him.”
He sounded a bit wistful. Howard Hughes was dead. He had died just a few months earlier. Without ever exactly saying he had committed the break-in, without ever exactly admitting he had the secret papers, the Pro began to tell me his fantasy—his long-nurtured plan to play pair poker with Hughes.
“In my own mind I saw myself actually sitting there in the penthouse playing cards with Hughes,” he said. “I was suddenly his equal for that moment.