In Sanctuary Ruby is presumably referring to her previous life as a prostitute in various cities when she mentions the black maids to whom she used to give nightdresses "after one night" wearing them (75).
Van is one of the gangsters who works with Popeye to get Lee's whiskey from Yoknapatawpha to Memphis. He is introduced into the narrative by his "harsh, derisive laugh" (53). Unlike the men who live at the Old Frenchman place and wear overalls, Van wears "a khaki shirt and breeches," and his "gross and stupid tales of city life" enthrall Tommy (67). He stirs up the menace at the Old Frenchman's by fighting with both Gowan and Lee over Temple, and ripping open the raincoat she is wearing, but drives away with a shipment of moonshine after that.
Ruby tells Temple that she once gave away a fur coat "to a woman in an alley" (62). Ruby lived in many different places, so there's no way to tell what city the alley might be in - and the text provides no other information about the woman at all.
The first time Ruby tells how the lawyer she hired got Lee out of prison, she says he "got a congressman" (59). The second time, she says he got "a Congressman" (278). Neither time does she go into any more details about him.
The second lawyer Ruby hires to secure Lee's release from Leavenworth may work in Kansas or New York City - the narrative is unclear. She pays this second lawyer with money, "all the money I had saved" working in New York during World War I (278), and he finds a "Congressman to get [Lee] out."
The first Leavenworth lawyer whom Ruby hires to secure Lee's release from prison allows her to pay him with sex, but never tells her that he cannot do "anything for a federal prisoner" (277).
Lee Goodwin has a relationship with this woman while he is stationed in the Philippines. Ruby calls her a a "nigger" when telling Temple about how Lee killed another American soldier in a fight over her (59), but since Ruby would be likely to use that term for any Hispanic, it probably tells us little or nothing about the woman herself. And we only know her from Ruby's story.
This man appears in Sanctuary in the story Ruby tells at two different times, to Temple and and then later to Horace, about how when Lee was stationed in the Philippines he "killed another soldier" in a brawl over a local woman (59).
Ruby's father's last name may be "Lamar." Popeye calls Ruby by that name once (10). What we can say for sure about her father is that he "runs his family" very aggressively, cursing his son for wanting to be the one to kill Ruby's boyfriend Frank and then shooting Frank himself (58). He calls his daughter a "whore" for wanting to elope (58).
Like her father, Ruby's brother is determined to keep her apart from Frank, the man she loves. He tells his sister he's going to kill him, "in his yellow buggy" (58). His ambush is foiled by her.
