Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [39]
Hughes was in a jealous rage. He wanted to know just what Maheu was doing down in Miami, and he wanted him back in Los Angeles immediately. Now Maheu really had a problem. The Castro plot was the most closely held secret in CIA history, known to no more than a dozen people directly involved, perhaps not including the president of the United States. Maheu asked the CIA if he could tell Hughes. The answer from Langley—sure, go right ahead. Apparently without a second thought.
Maheu hurried down to a phone booth—not on orders from the Agency, but from Hughes, who always insisted on stringent security measures—and told the billionaire that he was on a top-secret mission to “dispose of Castro in connection with a pending invasion of Cuba.”
Hughes received the news sitting naked on a white leather chair in the “germ-free zone” of his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow, a pink napkin on his lap for the sake of modesty, surrounded by mountains of dirty Kleenex. The thirteenth person made privy to the assassination plot. He took it all in over the phone held to his hearing-aid box, then told Maheu to fly right back to Los Angeles. Immediately. He promised to keep him there no more than forty-eight hours, then let him return to his mission in Miami.
But the Castro murder would have to be his final fling. After that, the billionaire expected absolute fidelity.
Maheu returned from the Cuban debacle just in time to take on his most critical mission for Hughes. He was now the man in charge of the most important thing in the billionaire’s life—keeping him hidden. Hughes had become the object of an intense manhunt. His battle with the bankers over TWA had exploded into an all-out war. An army of process servers was trying to slap him with a subpoena, trying to force him out of hiding and haul him into court. It was Maheu’s job to keep them at bay.
He brought all the black arts of his clandestine world into play, deploying doubles, creating false trails, renting hideaways in Mexico and Canada, making TWA think Hughes was here, there, and everywhere, while the billionaire just lay on his bed in Bel Air.
Maheu himself moved out to Los Angeles, leaving his other clients behind in Washington. Now Robert A. Maheu Associates had only one client: Howard Hughes. The one-time private eye was not only in charge of secrecy but also secret money. He emerged as the billionaire’s top bagman, a position heralded by his attendance as Hughes’s representative at the 1961 Kennedy inaugural, where he flew in with a planeload of Hollywood stars and purchased four boxes at $10,000 apiece.
It was a key role, but their relationship was still one-sided. Hughes continued to play the field, while Maheu remained monogamous. For all his new power, he was still just the house dick, a glorified gumshoe, certainly no rival to the top executives in the empire. The long courtship might never have achieved real intimacy had it not been for the billionaire’s sudden move to Las Vegas in 1966.
Robert Maheu was waiting out in the Nevada desert at four A.M. when Howard Hughes arrived. He had handled security for the big move and averted a major crisis when the train fell behind schedule, threatening to bring the recluse to his secret rendezvous point in broad daylight. Maheu commandeered a private locomotive and got Hughes into town before dawn.
But he missed his last chance to see his phantom boss.
Out in the dark silent desert, Maheu again heard the cracked, reedy voice he had come to know so well, heard it barking commands, giving detailed instructions about the delicate transfer from the train to the van, knew that any second he would finally get to see the hidden man whose bidding he had done for a dozen years, his eyes straining against the darkness to catch sight of the figure he had fleetingly glimpsed just once ten years earlier, the mystery man no one had seen since, the phantom