Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [6]
Mr. Inside opened the door without ceremony. Red and the Jiggler slid in. The Pro couldn’t believe what was going down. He’d had more trouble breaking into a vending machine. Something smelled wrong. He remained outside.
Red came back to the door, said, “Come on, come in.”
“I don’t have my tools,” said the Pro.
Red said, “No, just come in and look around.”
Mr. Inside joined them. “Just make yourself at home,” he told the Pro, inviting him in. “Don’t worry. There’s no one else here.”
The Pro couldn’t resist. He went in and right away came face-to-face with a solid wall of Mosler walk-in vaults. A block-long hallway lined with nineteen massive old steel-doored floor-to-ceiling safes. The Pro figured he must be dreaming. Or maybe he’d died and gone to heaven.
“What do you think this joint will go for?” he asked Mr. Inside.
“At least a million,” said the inside man. “Millions. No telling how much. Some of those vaults are filled to the ceiling with silver dollars. There’s cash everywhere.”
The Pro looked around at Red and the Jiggler. He felt like one of the Beagle Boys inside Scrooge McDuck’s money bin.
It was only later, after he left, that the Pro began to wonder who was really behind this job and what they were really after. And one other thing. Was he being called in as a professional or set up as a fall guy?
But a week later the Pro was back at Romaine, casing the joint, taking it apart.
Again, he was there just to look, get the layout, size up the safes, open everything that was unlocked—the offices, the desks, the filing cabinets—light-finger everything, see what Hughes had hidden away in his fabled fortress.
The place was a maze, dark and eerie. A concrete hallway ran the full length of the building, leading off into numerous side corridors with sudden turns and hidden passageways, all studded with vaults and lined with doors, all of them unmarked, with no hint of what lay on the other side.
The Pro began to check out the vaults. One was unlocked, but it had not been entered for so many years that it was still hard to pull open the heavy steel door. It creaked and grated with a noise that echoed throughout the vast empty building, and when he was finally able to peer inside, the Pro was more than disappointed. The big vault was filled with cans of film, hundreds of them, the prints and negatives of Hughes’s old movies. Nothing else. Not a single silver dollar.
But in an office next door, in the first drawer of the first filing cabinet he opened, the Pro spotted the tip of a red money wrapper. He slid it out, saw that it was marked “$10,000,” and pushed it back in. Bingo! Right then and there, the Pro was committed.
This might be the come-on for a setup, but he had to go ahead. And in a desk drawer in the same office he found keys to the rest of the building.
Starting down the hallway he tried one door after another, excited now, like a kid on a treasure hunt. First he entered a conference room, empty except for two glass-walled cubby-hole offices, both of them filled with model airplanes. Nothing else. Just model airplanes.
Across the hall he fumbled with the mess of keys and finally opened the door to another room. Inside were three cases of liquor, old bottles of whiskey and wine that had belonged to Hughes’s father, dead half a century, and at least a hundred gift-wrapped packages, none of them ever opened, the ribbons still tied, most with cards still attached, birthday and Christmas presents sent over the years to the indifferent billionaire.
Leaning against one wall were eight or ten pictures of Jane Russell, oil paintings on wood, four feet tall, one depicting the buxom actress nearly nude, all of them scenes from her first movie, a 1941 Hughes production, The Outlaw.
It went on like that as the Pro reeled from one bizarre room to the next, only to discover discarded furniture, rolls of carpet, parts of old movie sets, odd cartons filled with cheap watches