The Camera Eye

When this dark young guy gave her the long look in a New York subway car, something happened to blonde, empty-headed Pearl Lusk. Here was Mr. Excitement in person--sharp, smiling, hefty; a lonesome Latin with a George Raft face, and a slow burn in his eye. The minute 19-year-old Pearl saw him, she began to feel pleasantly jittery.

The dark man said his name was Allen La Rue. Over drinks, he told Pearl that he was an insurance detective. He was after one jewel thief in particular--a woman he said toted her loot in a hip-belt under her dress. Somehow, he had to catch her with the jewels on her.

A couple of weeks, and many dates later, La Rue told Pearl that if he could just get a picture of this loot with a powerful X-ray camera he had, he could run the dame in and collect a big bonus. By the time he dropped Pearl at her pink-curtained, $5-a-week room on Manhattan's grimy West Side, La Rue had asked how she would like to take the picture. Jobless, not-too-bright Pearl Lusk was thrilled.

La Rue took Pearl to an office where the jewel woman worked as a secretary, and pointed her out. She was slim, dark and glamorous. Pearl studied her face, as the detectives do in the cheap detective-story magazines. Later she began to shadow the woman.

Snap that Shutter. When she had the route cold, La Rue gave her the X-ray camera: a contraption about as long as a shoebox and camouflaged in Christmas paper. Pearl tried it out on the woman as she left her office, pulling the wire that clicked the shutter. But La Rue said the picture was no good. He would improve the camera, he said, and make it "super-X-ray."

Pearl never bothered to ask La Rue who the jewel thief was. But La Rue could have told her. In the days when he used his real name, Al Rocco, he had married the pretty secretary, gone to live with her in her parents' home in Brooklyn. They had no trouble until his wife began to grill him about his past (he had served a year for car theft). Then she sent him packing.

Week after week, Rocco had called his wife's office to threaten her. He hung like a shadow around her home neighborhood. One day he poked a gun in her ribs, drove her to a mountain resort where he kept her stripped for three days. He pleaded to let him come back. She refused. One day, a shot ripped through the kitchen window of his wife's home and hit her in the thigh.

Follow that Woman. When he gave Pearl the new camera he had made, Rocco-La Rue told Pearl to go to Brooklyn and follow the jewel woman on her way to work. For Pearl the subway ride was more thrilling than anything she had ever read. She went over her instructions --wait until the train reaches Manhattan's Times Square Station, then shoot the picture at hip level, and beat it.

The new camera was longer and heavier than the first one. Under the Christmas wrapping, Pearl could feel that it had a trigger attachment instead of a string to click the shutter. She gripped the stock hard as the train clattered into the station.

When the jewel woman stepped out onto the jammed platform, Pearl was three steps behind her. She walked steadily, one, two, three, then dropped to one knee and pulled the camera trigger.

Instead of a click, there was a blast which echoed down the great tubes. While Pearl stood frozen, people began running, yelling, and pointing to her Christmas-wrapped camera (which police later found to be two long wooden boxes with a sawed-off shotgun wired between). Slowly, stupidly, Pearl walked up to the dark woman who lay in a widening pool of blood.

"I took a picture and a gun went off," she mumbled.

Mrs. Rocco did not answer her. She was muttering to herself: "He can have me now if he wants me."

But Mr. Rocco would not be wanting anyone. While his wife lay in a Manhattan hospital with her leg amputated, and Pearl remained in police custody, detectives combed the state for him. After five days they flushed him, crouching in a sleeping bag near a farmhouse in the Catskills. He opened fire with a German automatic. Moments later, Mr. Excitement was dead, with nine slugs in him.

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