A Death of No Importance--A Novel

by Mariah Fredericks

  The bodies were laid out on the sidewalk before being taken to a makeshift morgue at the pier at East Twenty-sixth Street. The police called for a hundred coffins, but the city did not have enough. If the bodies were not too badly burned, they were wrapped in shrouds. As one newspaper wrote, “Men and women, boys and girls were of the dead that littered the street: That is actually the condition—the streets were littered with bodies.”

  The precinct at Mercer Street was overwhelmed. A search was made of every body for some kind of identification. When a name was found, it was written on a scrap of cloth and pinned to the body. Six bodies were never identified.

  For that day and a few days after, all the city’s energies were concentrated on the victims of the Triangle Fire. Everyone, it seemed, from the grand dames of Fifth Avenue to saloon denizens wanted to do “something.” The next day, I went down to the refuge. The Benchleys did not question my request, apparently feeling it was their contribution to the relief effort. But the refuge was empty. All the women had gone to help. I went, too, although I was among the many who had nothing to offer but a pair of hands. Some of the women from the refuge could translate for the mostly Jewish and Italian families searching for daughters, wives, and sisters—or those who needed assistance in burying them. As I neared the crowds by the pier, I heard street vendors shouting, “Get ’em while they last! Souvenirs of the big fire! Get a ring from the finger of a dead girl!”

  I found Anna quite by accident. She was talking to a man in Italian, her voice gentle and firm. From his age and his expression, I guessed his daughter had been found. I waited until she was finished, then said, “Anna?”

  That evening, we sat on a bench by the East River and ate sandwiches and ginger ale someone had donated to volunteers. Anna had spent the day talking in two languages, and I thought maybe she would prefer silence. But she said, “You know who sent the sandwiches? Andrew Carnegie.”

  “You’re joking.”

  She shook her head, biting into one. “They’re all making donations now. All scared.”

  “People are calling for the factory owners to be charged with murder.”

  Anna shrugged. “They won’t be found guilty. Not by a trial jury.”

  “It’s too big this time, Anna. People will want to see someone punished.”

  “Someone,” she conceded. “Not necessarily the right someone. In the end, they’ll make excuses, find perfectly good reasons one hundred and forty-six people died.” She looked at me. “Whatever happened to that other someone? Your scrap of cloth?”

  I looked down at my sandwich in its paper. “We haven’t talked about the car bombing that killed the Newsomes.”

  “No.” She smiled, puzzled. “Do you want to ask me about that?”

  “No.”

  “Because you don’t want to know.”

  “Because I do know. I know you had nothing to do with it.”

  Anna gave me a look of mocking admiration. “But you know who did.”

  “Yes, I do. And I think for the murderer of Norrie Newsome, there was some justice.”

  Anna looked at me quizzically. I stared out at the river, saw a small boat steaming toward the Bronx. So close to the Atlantic Ocean, the river had the smell of sea, and for a moment, I thought of the father who had brought me to this island, then left me as if, having done his duty and gotten me here, America would now take care of me.

  “Did you write the notes?” I heard myself ask.

  It was a long time before Anna answered. “Not myself.”

  So I was right and Rose Coogan wrong. The notes would have been too great an act of imagination for Norrie; he would have had to put himself in another person’s shoes, something that completely self-centered young man was incapable of doing.

  I asked, “Was there a plan?”

  “There was.”

  A plan. A plan to kill. To end a life—to what end? I glanced at Anna, wondering what she imagined the death of Robert Newsome Sr. would have achieved. Had McKinley’s murder achieved anything? The L.A. Times bombing? I thought of the cheers that had greeted the news of Josef Pawlicec’s death. That will show them. They can’t get away with it. But no one ever seemed to see it, even if they were shown with great brutality, and they often tried again. I remembered Rose Coogan’s words: They just liked throwing rocks.

  I heard Anna say, “We would have been careful. Made sure—”

  You were not hurt. I waved my hand, not wanting to hear more. I did not want to ask if the plan had a date, if that date was before or after Norrie’s marriage to Charlotte. I did not want to ask what the method was to have been, if the casualties could have been limited or if they would have been difficult to calculate. I did not need to ask her if my life had any value to her. Because hers had value to me; she was my friend, however ridiculous she might find that word. I refused to give that up.

  Instead I raised my bottle and said, “To Josef.”

  Anna smiled, raised hers. “To Josef. And to Janusz.”

  “Janusz.”

  I thought of Ruth Solomon, laughing that she was to be a seamstress after all. “To Ruth Solomon.”

  Anna echoed the name.

  Almost to myself, I said, “To Rose Coogan.”

  Then I looked back at the pier where so many people were still searching for the people who belonged to them.

  25

  This week, the newspapers announced with great sorrow the death of Lucinda Newsome. Town Topics has long since ceased publication, but the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Daily News, as well as radio and television broadcasts, paid tribute to New York’s leading philanthropist. Her image—still homely yet compelling at the age of ninety-two—was everywhere. Flags were lowered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lights were dimmed at the opera and on Broadway. The carriage horses of Central Park wore black plumes. Mourning wreaths were placed around the necks of the stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, at the New York Public Library.

  The mayor offered the predictable obsequies. Society writers fell over themselves to capture the quintessential moments of Lucinda Newsome’s life and career. She had married, but once widowed had gone back to her maiden name in honor of her slain family. The newspapers had never called her anything else. The funeral service was held at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. There was fevered speculation as to who would be invited, who would not, and why. The public was invited to view during certain limited hours.

  I did not attend. Although a representative of the Gorman Refuge for Women was sent in recognition of Lucinda Newsome’s extraordinary generosity to the organization.

  Many years ago, many, many years, I met with Lucinda Newsome. Strangely, we met in the very same house where her brother had been murdered, but we spoke in her office, not the library. I told her what I knew and what I suspected. I told her one other person knew it as well, but neither he nor I had any interest in making it public; that would be for her to decide. Although a public figure, Lucinda Newsome remained a very private person, and I was not surprised that she did not choose to do so. Nor was I surprised when she began contributing some of her vast wealth to the Women’s Trade Union League, Hull House, and the Gorman Refuge for Women.

  But now that she has died, I can tell the full truth of what happened that Christmas Eve of 1910. Of course, not many people remember the Newsome murder now. It has been followed by so much slaughter, both intimate and global. (The Newsome murder was my first encounter with violent death, but far from the last. However, those are stories for another time.) By telling what I know, I hope to redeem the reputation of Ida Pawlicec, who insisted on her brother’s innocence to the day she died in 1956. And, of course, the reputation of Josef Pawlicec.

  Will it matter to people today? If she were still alive, Anna would point out that society makes its own judgments as to which deaths matter and which do not. The death of what she called “one stupid, worthless, rich boy” mobilized the city’s full resources in the capture and punishment
of his killer. In contrast, the owners of the Triangle Factory, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were found not guilty of manslaughter. A civil suit later earned the victims’ families $75 per victim. However, the insurance company paid Blanck and Harris $60,000—or $400 per victim. So they came out of it not too badly.

  And yet, whether out of guilt or a sense that the center could not hold without some shift in the balance, change did come in the wake of the Triangle Fire. New laws mandated the presence of fire extinguishers, alarms, and sprinkler systems. The working hours for women and children were shortened. What Josef Pawlicec’s lonely death—or Norrie Newsome’s, if you prefer to see it that way—failed to achieve, one hundred and forty-six sacrifices did.

  Shortly after Lucinda Newsome’s funeral, I received a letter. It was in an oddly shaped envelope, and the stamp was foreign, although I could not tell from which country. There was no return address, and at first, I hesitated to open it. But something about the beauty of the handwriting, the richness of the blue ink, the use of my maiden name, intrigued me and I read.

  Dear Jane,

  It’s strange to be old, isn’t it? Especially when you’ve been dead for seventy years. I was sorry not to see you at Lucinda’s funeral. I had hoped we could talk. You see, I never properly thanked you. You’ve protected my privacy all these years. You could have sold my story—perhaps to that handsome reporter. You didn’t. You kept your promise and that’s a rare thing.

  (I also thank you for the kind suggestion that I take the jewels and disappear.

  Don’t worry too much about Greider. I hired him personally and he was deserving of the honor.)

  But I release you from your promise. I don’t have a lot of time left.

  You may now speak ill of the dead.

  With affection and respect,

  Rose

  If Anna were here, or Michael Behan, or Louise Benchley, or Norrie Newsome himself, I’m sure they would say, “No, Jane, it wasn’t like that.” They would remind me of things I’ve forgotten, insist that so-and-so said this and not that. They would tell me that I have portrayed one person too kindly, another too harshly. They would be aware of things I am not, because I never witnessed them.

  But this is the truth as I know it. As I lived it and saw it lived.

  Make of it what you will.

  Author Q&A

  What inspired you to write this series?

  A love of three things: voice, history, and true crime.

  The voice is the first and most important element of a story to me; until I have the voice, I don’t have a narrative. I heard Jane clearly from the beginning and hers seemed like a rich point of view. It felt very easy to be in her head. Which doesn’t always happen, so when you come across a character like that, you should go for it.

  I love history. I majored in it in college and historical fiction has always been a favorite genre. Jane was obviously not the contemporary teenager I had been writing about previously, so this was a chance to delve into the past. And one of the most interesting windows to the past is crime. I’m obsessed with true crime. Leopold and Loeb, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Mary Bell case in England. I envisioned Jane as a societally insignificant person—a servant—and a servant revealing the truth about a fictional “crime of the century” struck me as a book I would really want to read.

  What was the research process like for A Death of No Importance? Do you expect your process to evolve for future books in the series?

  I don’t think of myself as a particularly visual writer. But when you’re writing historical, there’s a certain amount of world-building involved. So I worked very hard to get the physical details right. How many people had phones in 1910? Go to the New York Public Library and look up old telephone directories and surveys of phone usage in the United States. If Mrs. Newsome is a fashion trendsetter, what might her ball gown have looked like? Thank you Pinterest obsessives for your images. What was the contemporary response to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? Read Leon Stein’s excellent book, The Triangle Fire.

  I think the process for each book will be similar. I’m in the early stages now of reading for the next book: What was happening in that year? What themes come through? What historical events can be included? But beyond that, I’ll have to figure out how you get to the opera house in a blizzard, what was playing that night, who had box seats and who didn’t. I’m looking forward to finding out.

  Setting Jane’s stories in and around New York was clearly an important choice. What made you decide on New York City?

  I’m a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised. Even as a kid, I was a fanatical New Yorker. Yankees, not Mets. Giants, not Jets. There’s no other city I know as well. But New York has changed so much in my lifetime. Both my parents are dead. So writing these books is a lovely way to revisit a past New York. They’re a great excuse to wallow in a city I love.

  Also, part of what I want to do with this series is look at issues affecting the country at that time (and maybe this time) and New York was at the epicenter. Capitalism, immigration, culture—there’s so much going on in the city. If you want your heroine in significant places during the American Revolution, you think Boston or Virginia. If you want her in key places at the dawn of the twentieth century, she has to be a New Yorker.

  In the past, you’ve written young adult novels, and A Death of No Importance marks your adult fiction debut. What are the differences between writing for adults and writing for young adults? Was it a difficult transition?

  It was a welcome transition. You certainly can write about death and even murder in YA books, but history is a very hard sell! Writing young adult was very good training for writing a mystery. In both cases, you’re writing for a very passionate, involved reader. You can’t get lost in your own verbiage, you have to keep the story moving. I’ve gotten used to considering what the reader will make of this piece of information, what I’m leading them to expect, am I staying a step ahead? Young adults can have very strong opinions about characters—team Peeta or team Gale—and I love series where you follow a set of characters through time. I wanted to write a narrative where people would be invested in the characters and want to see what they did and how they turned out.

  What is your personal murder weapon of choice?

  So far I’ve beaten someone to death and cut one throat. As we’re in the twentieth century, guns will be used at some point. I’m just writing a scene with a gun now and I realize my characters can have very different views on firearms than I do.

  I love the idea of slow poison, killing someone slowly over time with intent. That was done so well in We, the Accused. I’m phobic about snakes so it could be fun to write a scene where someone dies of a cobra bite. Then the murder weapon slithers away, leaving everyone baffled until someone points out the puncture wounds. Did Conan Doyle do that already?

  Can you give any hints as to what’s next in Jane’s future?

  Jane remains very loyal to the Benchleys, although she’s fonder of some family members than others. Her interests and theirs don’t always coincide. Her friendship with Anna will remain strong, if prickly. I can say the same for her relationship with Michael Behan. She’s off to Long Island for a wedding in the second book. Those who have asked to see her off duty will be happy to hear that she gets to go on vacation in book three, which leads to all sort of entanglements. Some pleasant, some not!

  Like everyone else in the books, she’s navigating a time of enormous change. What does it mean to be a woman at this time? What does it mean to be an American—is there such a thing? Does she feel more at home in the mansions of the wealthy or at her uncle’s refuge on the Lower East Side? Or somewhere in between? Through it all, while she’s investigating bludgeoned bodies and cut throats, she’s learning who are the real villains—and how do you bring them to justice?

  Discussion Questions

  1. Jane begins her story by stating, “I will tell it. I will tell it badly, forgetting things that are important and re
membering things that never happened.” How do these first two sentences set up Jane’s reliability as a narrator? Does Jane acknowledging her potentially faulty memory affect your trust in her positively or negatively?

  2. How does Jane’s status as a servant impact her investigation?

  3. Who did you initially suspect was the murderer? Looking back, which clues pointed toward the killer, and which were red herrings?

  4. How does the relationship between Jane and Anna change throughout the book? Do you think Jane’s friendship with Anna affects how she views the case?

  5. Jane begins her partnership with Michael Behan quite reluctantly, mostly because of his profession as a journalist. How does the press contribute to their investigations? Clippings from various newspapers also appear periodically throughout the story. What impact do these clipping have on the story, and on the lives of the characters?

  6. Which “upper-class” characters did you find the most sympathetic? How was their likeability reflected in their relationships with Jane? In their relationships with each other?

  7. In the final pages, Jane draws a comparison between Tip the elephant and Josef Pawlicec. In what ways are their situations similar? In what ways are they different?

  8. In the end, do you feel justice was served?

  Read on for a sneak peek at Mariah Fredericks’s next novel

  Available April 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Mariah Fredericks

  A wedding took place on Long Island yesterday. This morning’s newspaper informs me that the bride, sixty-seven, is the star of a popular television drama. The groom, twenty-five, was recently employed as a waiter. The two became acquainted at a clinic known for its success in treating alcoholics. It is the groom’s first marriage, the bride’s seventh.