Ritzi is equally as complex and dynamic as Stella. She first appears in the novel when Maria, while working as a maid, finds Ritzi in Crater’s bed. Originally from Iowa, she left her home state and husband, seeking fame on Broadway. Three years later, she is 22 and feels used and abused in many ways. Owney Madden compels her to conduct an illicit affair with the married Justice Crater, and she works for the morally corrupt William Klein; she is not at liberty to direct many aspects of her life at all. 

Owney sets her up to live with Vivian Gordon, a madam/sex worker, and he procures auditions for her that she has no choice but to attend. When he gives her an order, she is meant to accept it without question or hesitation. Though this exhausts her, she does it until she learns that she’s pregnant with Crater’s baby. She tries to terminate the pregnancy safely, but when she is prevented—because pregnancy termination was illegal in the United States until 1973—she feels she has no choice but to hide her condition as long as possible, even wearing a restrictive and painful corset.

Ritzi has long been aware of the impossible demands on women. She believes that the only way to get ahead is to join the corrupt, as opposing them only results in death, as she sees happen with Vivian and Elaine. Alongside Stella and Maria, she conspires to bring about Justice Crater’s disappearance and death. She comes to regret leaving her husband and home in Iowa, longing for the simple honesty of life on the farm and the sincerity of a man who truly loved her. Ultimately, Ritzi is the only female character to escape with her life and sense of self intact, as she flees NYC after Vivian’s murder and returns to Iowa where she raises her daughter, named after Vivian.

Maria is Detective Jude Simon’s wife and the accomplice of Stella and Ritzi in their plot against Justice Crater. She works two jobs, one as a seamstress and one as a maid. It is her work as a maid that brings her into contact with the Craters. 

Maria was initially unaware of the favors and bribes that make New York City society run. When she asks the Craters to help her husband get a promotion with the NYPD, Maria unknowingly obligates both herself and Jude to mobsters and shady characters in Tammany Hall. She hopes that he will be safer as a detective than he would as a vice cop, working the beat, but she soon realizes that the danger is of a completely different, more insidious, kind. Commissioner Mulrooney makes it clear that Jude will have to do things that run counter to his ethical code. Maria sees him plant evidence in Stella’s dresser, some of which could only have come through Owney Madden’s hands, making it clear just how interconnected New York City politics and organized crime are. Maria is eager for Jude’s success, but she inadvertently links him to corruption, obligating him to do unethical things to keep himself and her safe.

Maria, like Stella and Ritzi, quickly learns that she is essentially powerless in a patriarchal system, leading her to embrace female solidarity as a means of exercising agency. While her morals nearly prevent her from participating in the plot to kill Joe Crater, she understands that it’s the best way to protect Jude. Even when the plot is a success, she hides her involvement in it from Jude, who only learns about what she did for him long after her death, when he meets with Stella and sees Ritzi’s letter. Due to ovarian cancer, Maria cannot conceive children and dies not long after the text’s main events. However, her death does help to reveal the way in which even Jude has underestimated and infantilized her, as he is completely taken aback at the revelations of what she managed to achieve behind his back many years before.

Justice Joe Crater embodies the corrupt patriarchal power structure of New York City in 1930. As a character, he is both flat and static, not especially complex and seemingly incapable of self-reflection or change. Early on in his marriage to Stella, he revealed the way he prioritizes appearances over truth, preferring to maintain the look of a happy marriage over having a marriage that is actually happy. He isn’t concerned about Stella’s wishes or fulfillment when he instructs her to stay out of politics, especially regarding women’s suffrage, and he isn’t concerned about her happiness years later when he tells her that she’s welcome to leave him if she doesn’t like the way he secured his seat on the New York State Supreme Court.

Joe is selfish and unscrupulous, caring for no one’s happiness and welfare but his own. For him, Stella is a means to an end: She helps him look good and keep up appearances as a devoted husband and public servant. Ritzi, on the other hand, serves as entertainment, and as soon as her pregnancy could link them together in a more permanent way, he immediately breaks off the relationship, declaring that he is not the father. He enjoys lording his power over Maria, threatening her when Jude questions authority after Joe recommends him for promotion, and ogling her lecherously while she cleans his home. His behavior causes such ill-feeling that the three most significant women in his life all want him dead, and they want it badly enough to risk their own safety and morality to do it.

Owney’s character is based on the real-life notorious mobster. He, like Crater, is flat and static. Owney protects his own interests, mostly financial, and puts the bottom line ahead of everything else. When Elaine, Ritzi’s fellow chorus girl, talks to a reporter, for example, Owney has her killed so that she can’t expose too much about his operations. He owns several lucrative nightclubs that peddle illegal spirits, and he procures positions for local politicians with deep pockets, plants showgirl mistresses and spies in the lives of those powerful men, and manages them all by eliminating threats to his enterprise.

In the novel, Owney is quite busy and impatient with anyone who does not immediately and consistently toe his line. When he learns from Ritzi (and anonymously from Maria) that Crater has been called to testify before the Seabury Commission, he masterminds Crater’s demise. In addition, it becomes clear that he orchestrated Crater’s elevation to the state Supreme Court. Owney then conveys evidence from Crater’s own hand and safety deposit box to the police so that it can be planted in Stella Crater’s dresser. He manipulates everyone from Maria to Joe, showgirls to police commissioners, the relatively powerless to the objectively powerful. 

Like Joe Crater, he is unscrupulous and selfish, arrogant and well-connected, but he is also intimidating and dangerous in a way that Joe never could be because he does not seem to answer to anyone else. Owney combines his corruption with an apparent lack of concern for appearances. He is so powerful that he needn’t be concerned with how he looks to others, and this makes him the most dangerous.