The Pearl Harbor Murders Read Free Page A

nuts."
    "Why is that?"
    "Well, when the prostitutes around a military base panic, and start headin' for the mainland, you gotta wonder—who is more sensitive to the military mind than a hooker?"
    They were rambling across a long wooden bridge over the Ala Moana Canal, which emptied the city's waste water into the ocean. Their lodgings would be coming up soon, and when the wind blew from the south, no one went down to the hotel's beach to swim—at such times O. B. tended to refer to the otherwise comfortable Niumalu Hotel as "Hovel-on-Sewer."
    Soon they were passing what appeared to be an old Southern mansion set stylishly among the lush shrubbery; but it was actually a Japanese teahouse called Ikesu Villa.
    “Take that place," O. B. said with a nod. "It looks American, but it's Japanese through and through."
    Shortly after, at a fork in the road, Hully's father turned right, into that part of Waikiki which still most nearly remained in its native state.
    "You know," O. B. said reflectively, the antagonism suddenly gone from his voice, "the funny thing is... this is as close as I've ever been to war. I've always been the kind of guy who's late for the thrill—I always seem to get to the fire after it's out."
    Hully took a long sideways look at his rugged, bronzed fattier—a man's man who had been a cowboy and a gold miner, who had served the United States Cavalry in Arizona, who had sailed the Panama Canal. But who—as the creator of Tarzan—had never been to Africa, and not so long ago, when MGM announced its next Weissmuller epic would be shot on the Dark Continent, Hully's pop had been invited to accompany the expedition... only the war in Europe and Africa had changed all that. Africa was off.
    "And now I'm too old," his father was saying, wheeling into and up the Niumalu's crashed coral drive. "One last war, and I'm too damn old."
    For the first time in several weeks, Hully heard the familiar despondency in his father's voice, reminding him why he'd come here for mis "vacation"—a fear in his family that his father might be contemplating suicide.
    And wasn't mat ironic, Hully thought: what a Japanese thing for O. B. to be considering.
     
     
     
     
    TWO
A Nazi at the Niumalu
     
    The mile of romance, the Tourist Bureau called it: that white stretch of sand known as Waikiki, extending from the Halekulani Hotel and the adjacent inns and cottages to the concrete War Memorial Natatorium in whose saltwater pool that former screen Tarzan, Buster Crabbe, had set records, warming up for the Olympics.
    Only one major beachfront hotel rested outside those limits, sequestered from the rest of Waikiki by Fort de Russy: the Niumalu, literally Spreading Coconut, loosely Sheltering Palms, of which the lavishly landscaped grounds, six acres' worth, certainly had their share... and the hotel's hand-lettered sign was rather informally nailed to one leaning palm, establishing a casual tone that permeated the place.
    Thirty clapboard guest cottages were scattered about the Niumalu's pleasant jungle, with all crushed-coral roads leading to an impressive if squatty-looking white stucco main building typical of the Hawaiian style of architecture prevalent since the late twenties, with its lampshadelike double-pitched roof, and a porte cochere supported by columns of lava stone evocative of leopard spots.
    The lodge, as the guests referred to the central building, had an open interior with a central rock-garden courtyard just off a nightclublike dining room with a large dance floor and bandstand. The lobby's large, missionlike arched portals also looked out onto the courtyard, and the effect was open and airy, the wicker furnishings adding to a porchlike effect.
    Edgar Rice Burroughs had been Very happy here, with his wife Florence—his second wife—and he had thought she felt the same.
    Burroughs had well known the risks of marrying a younger woman. He had been sixty and Florence thirty-one—as his daughter Joan had cruelly pointed