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 or cigarettes or bars of soap, scores of aviation trophies, plaques, and medals, motion-picture equipment, and finally in one room down at the far end of the hall some valuable antiques—Tiffany lamps, marble statues, bronze figurines, ceramic quails—side by side with cartons of junk: more soap, rolls of paper towels, and dozens of scrapbooks filled with old newspaper clippings about Hughes’s public exploits dating back to the 1930s.
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, names like Nixon, Humphrey, Kennedy, Johnson. He felt not only Hughes’s presence now, but also his power.