As the holiday season approached, her landlady more and more frequently called her to the telephone in the downstairs hall. Soon she began having dates with young men who worked at the store. She was healthy and cheerful, and grinned and laughed a great deal, often for no particular reason. Her favorite dinner was chicken potpie with mushrooms, pecan pie with whipped cream, and coffee. Her favorite lunch was African-lobster-tail salad and Coca-Cola, followed by a junior banana split. She made friends quickly with many of the salesgirls at the store and lunched at a soda fountain every day and dined in a cafeteria almost every night with large groups of them. She hung pink curtains at the one window of her room and bought a lavender coverlet for the studio couch. On the advice of an expensive hairdresser on West End Avenue, she abandoned her blond bangs and thenceforth lifted to her new world a head of carefully tousled blond curls. She began using mascara for the first time, and she settled on a darker shade of lipstick than the girls at Quakertown High had gone in for. She did over both herself and the room almost at once. For a while, she lived with her mother and her stepfather in Brooklyn, but as soon as she got a job-as a salesgirl in a department store-she moved to a furnished room all her own on the upper West Side of Manhattan. She had arrived in the autumn of that same year of 1946, some months after graduating from high school in Quakertown, not far from Philadelphia. Every now and then, she glanced briefly at the tall, dark girl across the aisle, as if to make sure she was still sitting there.Įxcept for two things that happened to her on Christmas Eve, Pearl Lusk had been pleased with New York ever since she came to the city to seek her fortune, and she told everybody so. She held her gift-wrapped package carefully on her lap with both hands. Now, as the subway train jounced and clattered along, she felt excited and happy. Only a week earlier, on the day before Christmas, Pearl had found herself disillusioned with New York and its ways, but the mood hadn’t lasted long. The other girl was barely nineteen and was small and blond. Without thinking much about it, she wondered idly what kind of gift was inside the package. It had an aperture at one end, from which protruded what looked like the lens of a camera. She had noticed that the other girl was carrying a gift-wrapped package about the size of a large shoe box.
WHITE WHISKEY BENT HAT SKIN
One of them was tall, with pale, clear skin and large, dark eyes and shining black hair she was twenty-eight years old, and her face, besides being beautiful, had an interesting, troubled look about it. They were both working girls and more than ordinarily attractive. They had never met, had never spoken, but their lives had been drawn together and the entwinement was a sinister one.
station in Brooklyn, and sat down across from each other in a car as the train moved off toward Manhattan. On the morning of December 31, 1946, two young women, among many other people, got on a subway train separately at the Fifty-fifth Street B.-M.T. Pearl Lusk rides to a police station for questioning after the shooting of Olga Rocco, circa 1947.
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