
She grew up hard.
Her family owned a duplex near Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey. So the hard didn't come from extreme poverty.
They got the monthly rent for the upstairs apartment.
Her mother had sometimes under the table income from a political boss.
The father went to work but little from the paycheck made it home, which was common in Jersey City in the 1960s. At the parish church, she and her grandmother prayed that the father would stop drinking.
The head of the parish Father Joe - he was convinced going by his first name broke down barriers with wary immigrants - was impressed by her piety. At her confirmation he told her to take the name Mary. He gave her a framed art rending of the Virgin Mary.
She went by the name Mary for the rest of her life, which wasn't to be a long one.
Father Joe pulled strings. Mary was admitted on full scholarship, with a stipend for uniforms and lunches, to St. Dominic's Academy. He gave the principal one order: Smooth down the rough spots.
Within two months of her first year matriculating at St. Dominic's, Mary learned to listen with complete attention to all speakers and smiled with the calmness of the Virgin Mary. She stopped the profanity. She picked up fast on the accent reduction training which the nuns provided on records.
But at the end Father Joe and the nuns were disappointed. Instead of going to St. Elizabeth's College in New Jersey Mary hopped the PATH to Manhattan. She found a job as an assistant to the managing partner of a law firm. Soon enough she was The Assistant. Members of the firm had to devise a whole new mode of stealth operations to elude her monitoring - and snitching.
Paul the managing partner - like Father Joe he preferred to go by his first name to break down barriers - sized Mary up as lusting for power.
So he concocted ways she would have the illusion of that.
He listened to her rat reports. He shook his head and indicated, "I will look into that. Thank you, Mary."
He asked her input on hiring and promoting. Then he did the opposite of what she recommended. She never commented on that.
He had her travel to client sites to manage all the clerical tasks associated with litigation. He was embarrassed that she would send out postcards from those cities. But he was too smart to clue her in that she was low-rent.
He didn't want to have her leave in a huff. After all, even rats have a sense of self.
Paul had reasons to keep her content. The Assistant was loyal. Worked 16 hours a day six days a week. Took the compensation she was assigned without negotiating. And was sufficiently hated internally not to be doing any real damage, or was Paul's assumption of no-harm-done naive, at least for a successful lawyer?
Paul's midsize firm, like most law firms, was up or out.
On the first warm day of spring he informed a third-year associate that the Yale JD was no longer on the partner track. Oh, sure, he could stay working at the firm until he found something else. His work, in fact, was very good, not just partner quality.
It was that phrase "not just partner quality" which was the tipping point. Or, that's what the defense's psychiatrist put in the report. The plea was temporary insanity.
It was the time before metal detectors in Manhattan office buildings. No trouble bringing in a gun.
For two hours the associate watched his target, that is, the woman he assumed ruined his career with tattle-tales.
Then he directed the gun at her mouth.
Father Joe and the nuns from St. Dominic's orchestrated a grandiose funeral mass.
There was no wake because the casket couldn't be left open.
Mary's father arrived at the mass carrying a cross down the church aisle, like Jesus Christ.
Weeping, he proclaimed in front of the altar that if he hadn't been a drunk, Mary wouldn't have "left home" to work in Manhattan.
She would have stayed in Jersey City and rented the apartment upstairs. That's what good girls do and Mary was a good girl. He declared he hadn't had a drop since her death.
Her mother felt like someone for the first time in her life. She looked forward to receiving the proceeds from her daughter's insurance policy through her employer. She could buy two more houses.
Meanwhile she went to the best shop on Journal Square and purchased a lovely spring dress for the mass and burial. After the coffin was in the ground, Father Joe announced there would be an informal dinner back at the parish. Booze was served and Mary's father got drunk and vomited all over his wife's new dress.
Paul didn't attend any of the rituals. He feared his relief at having her gone would show. Pain in the ass, he would tell his wife. Even before she was murdered he vowed never to hire anyone who wasn't from a refined family. Those postcards, he always visualized her filling them out in her nun-acquired handwriting every morning before work in the pricey hotel room. Growing up hard himself, he cringed at any sign of lower-class behavior.
Annually, there is a mass at St. Dominic's to honor the private school's most famous graduate.
She had died in a trophy building in Manhattan.
Since the murderer was a Yale JD the story went worldwide.
Applications so soared to St. Dominic's that its acceptance rate vied that of Yale Law School.
Father Joe was appointed a bishop. Given his easy manner with people he kept rising in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.