Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [7]
Nothing made any sense. The Pro had burglarized every kind of company in creation, but he had never before encountered anything remotely like this. Romaine was not a corporate headquarters but a warehouse of Hughes memorabilia. The Pro was dismayed. There was obviously cash here, even some valuables, and he did not know what was hidden in the other eighteen locked vaults, but what was out in the open made it look less like a money bin than his grandmother’s attic. It was like Hughes had stored away his life in this cavernous old place.
The Pro started back down the hall, and between the antiques room and a row of computer banks unlocked another door. It led into a small dark room cluttered with cartons, several bulky humidifiers, a cot, and a rollaway bed. As the Pro shone his flashlight over to the far wall he saw an open closet, looked inside, and nearly fell over in a dead faint.
For one horrible moment he felt the presence of Howard Hughes. Actually thought he saw him standing there in the closet. In fact, it was just his old clothes, eight or nine double-breasted suits hanging there, along with one white sports coat and an old leather flight jacket, the clothes not merely hanging but sagging from the hangers, rotting on them, obviously untouched for decades.
On a shelf above lay an assortment of brown glass medicine bottles and several hats, snap-brim Stetsons and a couple of white yachting caps. On the floor below was a pair of old tennis shoes and a half-dozen pairs of aged wingtip brown oxfords with the toes curled all the way up. The Pro couldn’t tear his eyes away from that closet. It was the curled-up shoes that really got to him.
He spent at least twenty minutes standing in that haunted room, staring at that decaying wardrobe, feeling about as frightened as he had ever felt in his life but unable to leave, repeatedly looking over his shoulder, expecting Hughes to materialize at any moment, to walk out of the shadows of that closet, or worse yet, to reach out and pull him in there.
Suddenly he felt less like a burglar than a grave robber, opening up a pharaoh’s tomb, fearing the mummy’s curse.
Now completely drawn into the Hughes mystique and the madness of this place, the Pro made his way up a flight of metal stairs leading to the second floor, half afraid to find out what was there but compelled to look. At a landing halfway up, there was a safe built into the wall. It seemed like an odd place to have one, and although the building was filled with larger, more imposing vaults, he noted it as a prime target. For now, however, he continued upstairs.
He entered another block-long hallway running the full length of the second floor, also lined with unmarked doors. Most of the offices were empty, but the Pro spotted loose cash, perhaps a thousand in twenties, fifties, and hundreds, inside a desk of an office he knew belonged to the Romaine paymaster; saw a couple of other rooms that looked promising; and then opened a set of heavy walnut double doors with big brass knobs.
Inside was a reception room with four wall safes, beyond that a large plush office, and beyond that a thirty-foot-long beige-carpeted conference room rich with dark wood paneling and lined with leather-bound law books.
In the center of that room stood a twelve-foot-long mahogany table, and on that table in very neat rows were ten piles of white paper with typewritten memos and ten piles of yellow legal-pad pages with handwritten messages. All the yellow papers were signed “Howard.”
His heart pounding, the Pro leafed through them. He saw numbers in the millions, talk of dealings with mobsters and politicians,