The Pearl Harbor Murders Read Online Free

liked him—for some reason, those simple words had inflicted a wound that had never heated. Many people—friends and strangers alike, their appetites for the misfortunes of others fed by lice tike Walter Winchell and other low-life gossipmongers—assumed his relationship with Florence preceded, even initiated, the breakup with Emma.
    It was true he'd known Florence for some years, had admired her at a distance (she was the wife of a Mend, the producer of his ill-fated Tarzan movie, which he'd backed as an antidote to the unfaithful MGM versions of his work). He'd felt unrequited schoolboy pangs of love for her, before she even knew he existed.
    With her fair, curly hair, and her apple-cheeked wholesome beauty, Florence had been a popular child actress in the silent-movie days, a second Mary Pick-ford with a series of two-reelers for Mack Sennett leading to starring roles in features. When talkies came in, she had begun to raise a family with her producer husband, Ashton Dearholt, that good friend of Burroughs. But Burroughs and Florence had been thrown together when his own separation was quickly followed by Florence's husband throwing her over—for an actress he had met on the Guatemala film shoot of the ill-starred Tarzan picture! Hell, even Burroughs wouldn't have dared put together a plot so contrived—but, like two lost souls, he and Florence had drifted together.
    That Florence and Burroughs's daughter Joan had been good friends made the awkward situation ever more strained. Hully and Jack, who had witnessed their mother's alcoholic madness, understood far better, and tried to make peace, but Joan avoided him, for years, and never spoke to Florence again.
    Perhaps it was inevitable that he and Florence would wind up in Hawaii—they had honeymooned there, delightfully, in 1935. But his return to Oahu in 1940 had been in part financially motivated. The pulp magazines—his major serialization market—had lowered their pay rates, due to the squeeze of the Depression, and the European war cut off most of his foreign markets. In Hawaii, he could drop his expenses to a third of what they'd been in California.
    His financial state, too, he knew was his own damn fault—despite his businesslike attitudes toward writing, he was lousy at managing money, and he knew it—anyway, he knew it now. From buying the Tarzana Ranch back in 1919—since sold off for subdivided lots, his precious unspoiled land turned into another goddamn suburb—to the acquisition of cars, horses, and planes, Burroughs was a classic case of a man living beyond his means.
    Considering his earnings over the last thirty years, the creator of Tarzan should have been poised for wealthy retirement. Instead, he was an aging small businessman supporting three grown children, an ex-wife, a new wife and her two children, as well as an executive secretary and stenographer back in California, not to mention a Japanese maid in Hawaii.
    Florence had always said that his fame was not what attracted her to him; she spoke of his self-deprecatory sense of humor, and the "fun and games" of his life, the outdoor sports, parties, dinner and theater. And in the first five years of their marriage, every evening seemed to begin—and, often, end—with cocktails at their own Rodeo Drive home or someone else's. On the rare night the couple wasn't making the restaurant/ club/theater circuit, they were up till all hours playing backgammon, bridge, or mah-jongg with movie-star friends.
    He'd always been an early riser, but the dazzle of a young wife and the bright lights of Southern California had seduced him into turning his schedule upside down—and his writing, the quantity and the quality, suffered accordingly.
    Perhaps he had tried too hard to keep up with his young wife, burning the candle at both ends, and she eventually accused him of trying so hard to act youthfully that he had instead behaved childishly. In Hawaii, he had planned to crawl in and curl up in a hole to