Broadway Butterfly

by Sara DiVello

Like most of the city, she’d been following the Pettit-Wells trial, in which a ruffian innkeeper had been shot—by his mistress, the DA alleged; by himself, the defense insisted—and Ella found herself thinking the distinctly un-Christian thought, That man probably deserved it. While nobody wanted to find themselves at the business end of a shotgun, maybe the hard-drinking wastrel who’d found himself in exactly that undesirable spot had earned his way there.

Since then, she’d become the lead crime reporter at the paper, and one of the best in the whole city. And yet the pressure was always on to prove she deserved to be there and had the chutzpah to stay. That pressure would not end with this story or the next. The necessity to arrive earlier, stay later, and work twice as hard (and get paid half as much), simply for the privilege to be allowed to be there, trailed her like a constant shadow. But it also meant she found herself with the power to shape the narrative of the news, not only by which stories she covered but also by how she covered them.

Facts were facts. But the storyteller steered the narrative and the narrative steered public perception. It was an invisible power.

Male jurors—and of course, all jurors were male—didn’t want to believe women were capable of murder. It threatened their sense of safety and world order, where only they were capable of passion, violence, and retribution. A wife and a mistress teaming up against their man struck inordinate fear in men who were as comfortably settled with their ideas about women’s roles as wives and mothers as they were with their pipes and newspapers after a day of toil.

Every living creature seeks survival first and foremost. A cornered animal will attack. Women, Julia had learned from ten years on the beat, were no different. Women mostly committed homicide out of sheer desperation to protect themselves and their children. Men, on the other hand, were more apt to murder for lust, rage, revenge, greed . . . or simply because they could.

Coughlin raised a brow. If Miss Hilda the showgirl had stayed, Dot King might still be alive . . . or maybe he’d have a double homicide on his hands. The chance and fickleness of life, and death, could set a soul crazy if you let it.

she’d yet to meet a no-good man who thought of himself as the villain. Everyone, Julia had learned, found a way to paint themselves as the heroes in their own stories.

while Harding was out shooting a round of golf and having lunch with the bigwigs, Daugherty called the gentlemen of the press. Guess they don’t have any girl reporters down there—sorry, Harpman!” Julia shrugged. “There’s a reason New York journalism is more respected than the rags down south. Why y’all think I came north? For the pleasure of freezing my tail off six months a year?”

Her mother had taught her the power to do something about it lay on the page. As women and as Jews, they were excluded from many rooms and opportunities. But the tools of the fourth estate—the power of the written word, disseminating information to the public, and the freedom of the press—were accessible to them.

“But how can I ever forgive him?” Eva’s face softened. “Oh, my darling girl. Women are the moral compass of society. We exert our good influences on our marriages, our children, the circles in which we move, and the communities in which we exist. Without us, the moral structure of society would disintegrate, and with that, society itself. So we forgive, even when our hearts are broken. We hold our heads up and march on when we feel as though we might die—because we’re women and we’re wives. It’s the bravest and best thing we can do—and our worlds, and the world at large, are far better for it.”

“Well, you got your work cut out for you. What happened wasn’t right. But in this city, right and wrong don’t matter as much as rich and powerful.”

The truth was, two wrongs had been done to Dot King: first a man had taken her life, and second several powerful men had pulled every lever within their reach to curtail the investigation into her murder, thus denying her justice.