The Paul Cain Omnibus Read Online Free PDF

men—we’ll meet you there—you can work on books and stories nightstand Sundays,’ I’d be there so fast it would make all our Ruric heads spin.
    Peggy, who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, still keeps these letters, along with other mementos of their relationship. He never stopped writing to her, and she responded when she could, even after remarrying in June 1962. Suffused with charm and punctured by whispered sorrow, Sims’s letters may be his last great work. They offer us a fleeting glimpse of the man behind the fiction, who had found happiness in family life and was desperate to recapture it.
    Sims died of ureter and lung cancer on June 23, 1966. His last known address was a small bungalow at 6127 Glen Holly Street; he passed away at the Toluca Lake Convalescent Hospital. His death certificate states that he had made Los Angeles his home for 48 years, and had been an author for 43 of them. Sims’s first bold autobiographical statement supports this claim, by hook or by crook. He might have been telling the truth when he listed himself as an “author” in the 1923 L. A. City Directory, although no one has yet found any of his writing from that period. And if he had been lying, then that listing was his first work of fiction, published 43 years before his death.
    Bowman tracked Sims’s posthumous fate to another dead end: “His body was cremated, and the box of ashes sat in a Glendale cemetery’s storage room until 1968 when it was shipped to Hawaii to the care of a woman who was either an old lover or an old friend.” 24
    The ashes were stored at Glendale’s Grand View Memorial Park, and dispatched to Honolulu’s Nuuanu Memorial Park on May 24, 1968. At that time, Peggy and her boys were living in Honolulu, where her second husband, a neurologist, was stationed during the Vietnam War. Peggy did not claim the ashes, but Sims had known that she and the kids would be in Hawaii. She conjectures that he arranged for a friend to scatter his ashes near his family.
    This friend was likely Tita D’Oporto, who appears to have been as close to the man in the final years of his life as anyone. The “Peter Ruric AKA George Sims” file at the Crippen Mortuary in La Crescenta, which bought the Eckerman-Heisman Mortuary that had handled Sims’s cremation, contains letters and notes from D’Oporto, her attorney, and Sims’s maternal aunt, Alma E. Winkler. It is D’Oporto who took the greatest interest in Sims’s affairs. She lived next door to him on Glen Holly Street, but was abroad when he passed. Upon her return, she contacted the mortuary and informed them that his wishes were to have his cremains scattered at sea. She herself passed away in Hawaii in 1976.
    In 1965, D’Oporto sent a letter to Sims’s aunt, enclosing a Western Union telegram that a young George Sims had wired to his grandmother on October 31, 1919. D’Oporto’s letter hints at the dire straits in which Sims found himself in his final years and points to the lingering mysteries of his life:
    Peter is 63 years old, his birthday was May 30th, 1902. The enclosed wire is dated 1919, so he would have been 17 years then and maybe they have a record of his service in the Navy in Des Moines. Would you try to find out? I was at the navy Recruiting Office in L–A– and could not get anywhere. They told me I would have to write to Washington D.C. but have to have his service number—but if he was stationed in Des Moines, it may be easier to get it there.
    Peter gets now $ 52.– Social Security and $ 75.– disability check. They said he should get about $ 100 from the Navy if he is disabled. When in the Hospital, he does not get the disability check, but a bill for over $ 40 a day, which, I believe, is a matter of form and they will not collect it unless he should be able to work again. He does not remember anything about the Navy and I did not show him the wire. He never told me that he was George Sims. There is no use to bring it up unless