3

"Oh, no way, dude…" Raj was first to remark. Jimmy's address was one of the big homes on Ocean Grove all right and one of the most largest. It was a large walled in property with trails, trees and shrubbery covering an entire block. The house itself looked like something from a Stephen King novel. It was a two story tall brick and mortar structure with a front walkway that wrapped around the left of the house toward a distant attached greenhouse and an elaborate baroque roof with garret windows and wooden balustrades. Howard almost expected to see Bruce Wayne perched on the ledge as Batman. The driveway was lined from the gate and ended at a circled courtyard with a fountain at the middle and then a second narrow drive around the house. It must have had a hundred rooms inside. Leonard knew Jimmy had implied it was a big house, but this was a mansion with an elaborate style and detailed features that would have taken over a hundred Mexican laborers to build at the turn of the Nineteenth Century.

"This is Jimmy's place?" Howard was grinning.

"Must be…" Leonard stood amazed.

"Oh, big deal…" Sheldon acted like Sheldon. "It's just a large house. There are dozens of big houses in Pasadena."

"With unpublished research of one of NASA's founding fathers inside?" Leonard led the way up on to the porch where the roof extended over the front walkway.

"Well, that might be the one redeeming feature it has."

"Hey," Raj had been daydreaming. "Maybe it has a Bat-Cave."

"I seriously think it has a Bat-Cave." Leonard turned round to his friends at the double-doors of front entryway.

"Why?"

"Because we're not in a comic book!"

"The people in comic books don't know they're in comic books…" Howard pointed out.

"Look, guys…" Leonard rang the bell. "Please, just don't embarrass me."

"What could we possibly do to embarrass you?" Sheldon responded sourly. "Honestly…" The doorbell rang through the mansion a short staccato that sounded like a funeral dirge played through a nursery rhyme. Howard and Raj looked at each other as a sound of white noise squawked through a speaker system in the exterior entryway under the extended roof.

"Yes?" Jimmy's barely recognizable voice came out of it. "Can I help you?"

"Jimmy, it's me Leonard…" Leonard spoke up. "I came by to see the room."

"Hey, Leonard!" Jimmy's voice was much more animated in the returning message. "I'm on my way." The speaker squawked off. Behind Leonard, all he could hear was Sheldon's disapproving and disparaging tone while passing judgment. Leonard looked at him.

"What is your problem?" Howard asked.

"I don't have a problem…" Sheldon intoned. "I'm trying to keep you from making a mistake."

"What mistake?"

"I can't believe we're getting to see the inside of this place." Raj was as giddy as a kid on Christmas. "This place is almost as big as my parent's place in India. Do you know how many times I driven past this place? Lots!"

"Good for you…" Leonard heard Jimmy undoing the interior locks and latches before pulling on the heavy oak door to get it open. They almost expected to see him in a smoking jacket and smoking a pipe, but he instead appeared pretty much as they saw him at the Cheesecake Factory with the blue t-shirt and dark blue jeans with his mullet of dark hair crested on his shoulders.

"Hey, guys…" He waved them in. "Come on in…" He started pushing the door shut as the guys stepped on to polished black and white parquet floors and looked up to a domed ceiling with a round skylight in the ceiling flooding the room with natural light. The room was big enough to park a fleet of busses. It had two staircases before them to a balcony over the front door and a walkway heading straight back to the back of the room. It was bright and airy and reflected both wealth with the security of a nice home. The walls were painted white with black trim and wall niches for artwork. The floor itself looked like a huge white and black checkerboard leading to a long rear hall to a distant ballroom. To their left, they could see a dining room filled with a table and chairs; its entryway marked by two suits of armor while across from that was the library study, it's doors open to a bear head looking down over a grand desk with a modern computer on top. Howard walked around with his jaw hanging open, but Leonard took his glasses off, cleaned them and looked again to appreciate the interior even more. As Raj strolled over to look at the trophy case off to the side of the library entrance, Sheldon stood where he had stopped, arms behind him and head turning around like an eagle studying the horizons.

"Late Victorian…" He observed. "Some British and French influence… The suits of armor are reproductions…" He glanced to Jimmy. "Hardly original."

"Sheldon…" Leonard tried to control him.

"Is that your grandfather's study?" Sheldon looked to the right of the entryway and asked.

"No, it's mine…" Jimmy came around Howard ogling the statue of Venus on the second floor landing. "My grandfather liked peace and quiet when he worked so he knocked down the walls of a few upstairs bedrooms to create a study in the upstairs north wing." He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, would you like to see the room?"

"Yeah, sure!" Leonard followed Jimmy toward the staircase. "Jimmy, you didn't tell me you were rich." The guys followed behind him like tourists looking around and pointing out the bric-a-brac and furnishings. Sheldon followed behind disapprovingly listening but barely interested.

"I'm not rich." Jimmy lightly chuckled. "I've got a trust fund, but the house and grounds are covered by my grandfather's estate. I have to share ownership with my sisters even though they're married and live out of state." He reached the top landing, which ended at a balcony and a long hallway to the back of the house. "The house was originally built for a former governor of California in the 1890s, but he passed away before it was finished. It's been a hotel, stagecoach stop, dry goods store, meeting hall, brothel and even a saloon at one time or another." He entered the top corridor lined by old kerosene lamps re-wired into modern electric lights every fifteen feet. The ceiling was arched, and every twenty feet was another oak door to another room.

"Brothel…" Howard smirked trying to picture it.

"During Prohibition," Jimmy continued. "The house was owned by a mob figure named Ernie "The Tombstone" Brunner…"

"Why was he called that?" Raj asked.

"Because he used to be a funeral director before manufacturing illegal liquor…" Jimmy added. "And he hid the bodies of his dead rivals in the coffins of his normal clients." He headed to the end of the hall near a set of double doors before a balcony overlooking the back hall with high ceiling level windows with the view of the swimming pool. "After the FBI got him, they seized the house, and it stood empty for fifteen years until it was given as a gift to my grandfather for his work in the space program. The house has been modernized three times." He looked over to Sheldon shaking the locked doorknobs to the two-doored suite across from the bedroom. He shook them once, he shook them twice then he pressed his face to the crack trying to peek inside.

"I notice your friend has found grandpa's study." Jimmy watched Sheldon acting like a little boy on Christmas.

"You'll have to excuse Sheldon…" Leonard tried to apologize. "He's kind of got a one-track mind."

"And it frequently jumps the tracks." Howard quipped as Jimmy opened the bedroom. It was a large open room without a window, but it had two glass doors to an exterior balcony and a door to a personal bathroom. The bathroom was lightly dusty, just a small sink, toilet and a shower stall big enough for one person. Raj had opened one of the French doors to the closet, which was the same size as the bathroom in dimension but with a rack down one side for clothes and shelves along the other side. The bathroom had a small plate glass window and a tiled floor but except for a few pieces of furniture and the light fabric curtains on the doors, the room was very bare. It just had a double bed, a dresser and an old shelf with a few forgotten books on it. Howard picked up one of the books. It was a novel named "Percy Constance And the Road To Perdition" by Walt H. Birschott.

"Yeah…" Jimmy turned on the lamp. There weren't any bulbs in the overhead light fixture. "The author was a friend of my father. He crashed here a lot when I was a kid." Raj entered the bathroom and turned on the water to wash his hands with the tiny sliver of soap in the soap dish under the mirror. "Anyway, the back stairway goes down to the kitchen and the dining room. There's also a back entryway to the pool area with a shortcut to the garage if you prefer your own entry way, but you can pretty much get to any part of the house from anywhere through the front and back halls."

"This room is bigger than the one already got!" Leonard commented with a happy grin on his face. Sheldon meanwhile made a low nasally sound like a dying woodland creature trapped in a trap. Everyone heard it and looked at him in the hall.

"I mean…" Leonard looked back to Jimmy. "I could do so much with it."

Sheldon made the sound again.

"Dude…" Raj came out of the bathroom drying his hands with the one clean rag he found. "This place is so cool! If you don't move in here, I'll take it!"

Sheldon now sounded like a beached beluga whale trapped on its side on the rocks on Catalina Island. He paced backward and back again outside the room. Everyone looked out at him. Leonard just took an embarrassed deep breath, rolled his frustrated eyes and postured very humiliated over Sheldon's wounded antics.

"One question…" Howard had checked out the view and noticed teenaged girls sunbathing next door. He tried waving to them, but the trees obstructed much of his line of sight of them bouncing off their diving board. "Where do you play your computer games?"

"Game room." Jimmy answered.

"Can I see that?" Leonard asked.

"Sure…" Jimmy fastidiously relocked the balcony doors behind Howard and led the way out of the room. Instead of heading back to the front of the house, he turned left out of the room, through the arch outside the bedroom and left again down a curved stairway that ended at the bottom of the two rear twenty-foot high windows overlooking the garden and grounds. At the bottom, Jimmy passed the rear kitchen entrance to his right and passed through the grand dining room, a thirty-foot long room with a huge sectioned oak table for twenty guests. The walls were decorated with guns, swords and animals heads staring back with glass eyes. There was a full-figured bear, a moose head, a small aged alligator on the mantel and several small critters, birds and fish. Bringing up the rear, Sheldon sighed out of boredom then made the noise again.

"Stop making that noise!" Leonard stopped and confronted him.

"What noise?" Sheldon scoffed and continued through the other doors into the game room. While it was not as big as the dining room, it was large enough for two pool tables, a poker table and a chess game that had been log ago left unfinished. A large exterior closet was partially open and stocked with toys and games, but a few movie posters in glass frames decorated the paneled walls along with a sitting area off to the side under a huge flat screen mounted on the wall. The cabinet and floor under it was littered with a few games left over from Jimmy's youth.

"To tell the truth…" Jimmy apologized. "I don't come in here like I use to. I pretty much use it to entertain guests, but my nephews practically live down here when my sisters come home for Christmas and the summer."

"How long do they usually stay?" Leonard asked.

Sheldon made the noise again this time a bit louder than before. Leonard rolled his eyes up embarrassingly frustrated while Jimmy looked at him. Howard and Raj were checking out the old vintage games on the floor with the state of the art screen and entertainment system.

"Anywhere from a few weeks to two months…" Jimmy answered. "I've got five older sisters… almost had a older brother but he died before I was born." He looked to the guys. "So, Leonard… what do you think?"

"Well, I…"

"You know… this is all very well and good…" Sheldon cleared his throat, spoke up and acted as if he had Leonard's best interests at heart as he smirked and snidely postured his head back and forth trying to be cagey. "It's a big house. I'll give you that. It may have a lot of nice things in it…" He picked up one of the computer games. "Scooby Doo and the Secret of Skull Island." He shook his head disapproving. "I solved this when I was eight…" He tossed it into the chair behind Howard. "But Leonard isn't considering anything until I scrutinize the roommate agreement for him."

Leonard rolled his eyes.

"What kind of fascist forces someone to sign a roommate agreement?" Jimmy answered matter-of-factly.

Sheldon now made a face. Leonard changed his face as well from miserable embarrassment to choking back a laugh and hiding his huge grin.

"This place is looking better and better!" Leonard grinned ear to ear.

"Leonard…" Howard ecstatically strolled over. "You have got to move in here! Can you imagine us playing Worlds of Warcraft on that!" He pointed to the big screen. "It's practically big enough for us to play our characters full size!"

"Dude…" Raj was also grinning. "If you don't move in, I'm moving in!" He paused a second. "Can you imagine the chicks I'd be getting when I tell them I live in a mansion?"

"But who's going to talk to them." Sheldon reminded Raj of his selective mutism around the opposite sex. "Leonard…" He pulled Leonard aside. "You can't move in here. It's not normal. Living without a roommate agreement is chaos. No schedule, no rules, no co-habital routine… It would be anarchy. You wouldn't even have me to liven up your day with my intellectual observations and witty repertoire." He paused to make his queer lop-sided grin. "I'm telling you, if you might as well grow your hair out, get rid of your shoes and move to live in San Francisco with the other beatniks and hippies."

"Actually, I was thinking it sounds great." Leonard was grinning. "You know what the best part about this place is?"

"One flight of stairs?"

"You don't live here!" He screamed back. "Jimmy…" His voice had lowered when turned to his new best friend trying to straighten the room. A few errand game pieces from the floor into a bowl, the chair back under the poker table and the white rook back to the chess table, Jimmy turned back to Leonard. "I am so tempted to move in here."

Sheldon made that long grinding noise again. Everyone looked at him once more, but this time, Leonard was looking more angry than annoyed.

"It's a beautiful house."

Sheldon groaned again.

"The room is perfect."

Sheldon sounded as if he was an android winding down.

"It more than cuts down in my commute to work…"

The beached whale groan returned again.

"I'd be a fool to turn it down, but…"

Sheldon now sounded like one of the main characters in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.

"I'll take it!" Leonard suddenly announced out of nowhere. "Two hundred a month rent?"

Howard and Rajesh cheered and started dancing ready to install and play their own games. Sheldon finally drew quiet. His mouth fell open, and his body lightly trembled and quivered like a small cat hanging on to a branch in a huge wind. Big deal. His next roommate at the apartment would be better. He will just find a guy three times better than Leonard, someone would be his mental and intellectual equal in any way. His eyes, however, now glared toward Jimmy the same way John Wilkes Booth must have stared the first time to a presidential speech by Abraham Lincoln. It was a combination of hurt pride, shattered ego and upset anger.

"I can let you do better than that." He directed Leonard and the guys back through the dining room. "Come on, I'll show you the side driveway to get your stuff in…" He stopped smiling, hesitated and stood face to face with Sheldon. "Dude, I've got five older sisters… I've already been to hell and back."