Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [9]
It seemed pointless to attack the seventeen remaining vaults.
The Pro instead moved down the hallway, forcing a couple of doors along the way just to make it look more like a routine prowl, left his partner to check out the antiques collection, and as if drawn by some supernatural force returned to the little room where he had discovered Hughes’s old clothes, wasting valuable time staring again at that haunted closet.
Finally, he started up to the second floor, where the secret Hughes papers lay waiting, where the mystery man had been sent hours earlier, suddenly quite worried again about this half-forgotten stranger and what plans of his own he might have for the break-in, or for the Pro.
But halfway upstairs on the landing he once more encountered that oddly placed wall safe and had to bust in. He quickly punched out the combination lock, opened the steel door, and discovered a whole hidden room, ten feet wide, fifteen feet long, but only four and a half feet high. He crawled in.
The room was filled with green-and-brown boxes, Campbell’s soup cartons, perhaps two hundred of them stacked wall to wall, all of them stuffed with old canceled checks. Personal checks signed by Hughes and made out to various restaurants and nightclubs—the Brown Derby, the Stork Club, and El Morocco—corporate checks from RKO and TWA, thousands upon thousands of checks from the 1920s through the 1950s, all neatly piled in the soup cartons.
They were clearly of no value, but the Pro was entranced. He spent fifteen minutes hunched over in that crawlspace, poring through the checks like some addled bookkeeper until his back ached so badly he had to leave.
Up on the second floor, the mystery man and the Jiggler still stood guard shoulder to shoulder. “We’ll clear a hundred grand easy,” the Pro told them as he went back to work.
For forty-five minutes he and his partner struggled with the Romaine paymaster’s safe, unsuccessfully trying to punch, peel, or pry it open. Finally, they had to lug the acetylene tanks upstairs and burn their way in, turning the small office into a smoke-filled blast furnace, but pocketing another $10,000 in cash as well as Hughes’s personal credit cards, his old pilot’s license, and an expired passport. In a secretary’s office that adjoined the room, they pried open a file cabinet and found a few hundred dollars more.
The Pro and his partner were sopping wet now from the heat of the torch work, from the sheer physical labor, and from the tension; and they were right down to the wire for time. It was almost four A.M. now—the deadline they had set for their getaway—and they knew that the cleaning crew arrived before dawn. His partner wanted to bust some more safes, but the Pro wanted only to get the secret papers and get out.
They headed for the big conference room, where Mr. Inside now joined them. Gesturing toward the documents spread out on the mahogany table, he said, “Let’s take these.” It was the first time anyone had said anything about the papers. It seemed almost an afterthought.
“I’ll hold on to them,” the inside man continued, still entirely offhand, “and if anything goes wrong, use them for blackmail, keep them for insurance to buy our way out.”
“Okey-doke,” said the Pro, as he gathered up the billionaire’s personal papers from the table and swept them into a big cardboard box he had found in the Jane Russell room downstairs.
“There are more in those cabinets,” said Mr. Inside, pointing to four locked five-drawer file cabinets standing side by side against the rear wall, next to a row of windows that looked out on the Romaine parking lot.
The Pro busted the locks easily with a screwdriver and opened drawer after drawer stuffed with thousands more white typewritten documents and yellow handwritten memos, grabbing armful after armful of confidential folders and dropping them all into cardboard Transfile cases until the cabinets were bare. The Pro, his partner, and Mr. Inside carted them all downstairs to a first-floor warehouse space that