Publication date: October 8th, 2023
Synopsis:
Has Jack the Ripper returned?
Summer 1901, and the great Pan-American Exposition welcomes the world to Buffalo, New York--Queen of the Lakes... the Electric City. Eight million visitors throng the bustling boomtown--all of them looking for a good time.
While the Pan-American blazes bright, in its shadow lies a zone of darker pleasures: the Tenderloin District, a rabbit's warren of saloons, brothels, and ask-no-questions hotels. In this sprawling vice quarter, fully as large as the Exposition itself, fairgoers can indulge their less innocent appetites.
As heat and swarming crowds choke the city, the bodies of prostitutes begin turning up, slashed and mutilated by a pitiless hand--their flesh carved with strange symbols. Their gruesome murders are a final indignity worked on once-hopeful young women.
Some say the killings are the work of the Devil himself. Others hint that the Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, has crossed the Atlantic to resume his bloody career. Yet the city's power brokers--afraid of any publicity that would harm the Exposition--turn a blind eye to the victims.
As the blood summer wears on, only one thing is clear: it'll be up to the working girls themselves to stop the carnage. And in The Buffalo Butcher, five of them will stand together to confront the killer... and to reclaim their humanity.
An important new novel by Robert Brighton, acclaimed author of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries.
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Excerpt
PROLOGUE :: VINE ALLEY
Buffalo, New York
The Tenderloin
Late June 1901
The first body was found next to a rotting shed along Vine Alley, near the corner of Elm Street, and behind one of the worst dives in that part of the Tenderloin--Buffalo's sprawling red-light district. The corpse was discovered early Sunday morning by fifteen-year-old Louise Harris, who had been emptying chamber pots into an abandoned well in back of the place.
The wells had long ago been poisoned by a rising water table of blood, shit, and urine from the area's concentration of tanneries and slaughterhouses. By day, Vine Alley was alive with the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of cattle, sounds abruptly cut short by the stroke of a blade. By night, the low, desperate moos were replaced with the din of rattling pianos, drunken singing, and the angry scuffling of men--and sometimes women--who had come to Vine Alley for the cheapest fun that the vice district had to offer.
Emptying slops were every new girl's early-morning chore, usually performed while the prostitutes were still sleeping off the previous night's debauch. No one liked doing it, but it developed a strong stomach--a requirement on Vine Alley. After the pots were cleaned and replaced under each bed came collecting soiled laundry and, every once in a blue moon, scrubbing the floors.
That morning, Louise had dumped the dregs of Saturday night's bacchanal into the old well and was about to return to her other chores when she decided to tarry a bit and sneak a cigarette behind the shed. On Sunday morning things moved slowly on Vine Alley, and she wouldn't be risking the madam's wrath. And, with any luck, she might find one of the working girls there, too.
Louise liked talking with the older girls and looked up to them. They had the kind of scarred, sardonic humor that sprouts when all illusion has been plowed under, and they liked to shoot the shit, swear, and smoke. And talking was the best way for Louise to acquire the hard-won secrets of the hired girl: how to appear eager to fuck a client, no matter how foul his breath or his body; how to bring him off quickly; what douches and tonics could prevent pregnancy; and, if it came to it, where one could go to have things put right again. All this lore would make the first night of her real work--less than a year away, now--go much more smoothly.
The night before, Louise had bummed a couple of smokes while flirting with clients waiting their turn upstairs. As she rounded the corner of the shed, she removed one of the precious cigarettes from her skirt pocket and planted it between her lips. She could almost taste the smoke when she realized that she had left behind the parlor match she had pinched the night before. It wasn't well to carry them about: parlor matches, or snapping devils as the girls called them, needed only friction to cause them to ignite. This was convenient, but in a handbag or--God forbid--a skirt pocket, loose parlor matches could, and did, cause serious injury.
Louise held out her pocket and peered into it, hoping that she was mistaken, but there was no match. She removed the cigarette from her mouth, replaced it next to the other one, and with a sigh picked up her pail again to return to the dive. When she looked up, she spied what seemed like a roll of old carpet lying next to the far corner of the shed. That didn't make much sense, since the rag-pickers of the Tenderloin--who scoured the area for the tiniest scrap of old fabric--would never have overlooked such a treasure.
She walked over and saw that the object was part of an old horse blanket, draped over some other item. She kicked it gently with the toe of her shoe. It was soft and yielding. Louise bent down and pulled back the blanket, and immediately ran back into her brothel screaming.
***
The deceased's surname was unknown. In the dive, she went only by Lizzie, and to her regulars--affectionately it was thought--she was Dirty Legs Lizzie. Why "dirty legs," no one knew. She was as clean as any of the others in her third-rate cathouse, and certainly more sanitary than a common streetwalker, but Lizzie wasn't a fancy girl, either. She was a workingman's throw, the kind a tired butcher from the slaughterhouses might avail himself of after a few drinks to wash the smell out of his nostrils. And while at thirty she was getting long in the tooth, madam and clients alike agreed that Lizzie still have a few good years left in her.
Her body was lying face up against the tottering back wall of the old shed. Her skirt and chemise had been pulled up over her hips and bunched up just above her pubis. Equal money was on two possibilities: either that she had been taking a squat behind the shed or had snuck away to service a "random" for a little unreported pocket money. A good prostitute was trained to bring a man to climax in two minutes or less, and even in a busy dive any girl could sneak off for five--plenty of time to make a few extra bucks. Madams didn't like it, but it was tolerated, provided the girls still made their nightly quota inside the house.
As the eye scanned upward from Lizzie's exposed genitals, it would detect nothing out of the ordinary until it reached her collarbone. That's where things got very interesting Lizzie's collar was saturated with dried blood, which had gushed out from a somewhat ragged cut that meandered from just under her left ear, across her windpipe, and then stopped at the right clavicle. The cut was so deep that the inner structures of the neck had been exposed. Lizzie had died staring at her killer, and her eyes still retained a kind of eerie intensity very unlike the glazed look of death.
The madam, Louise, and two horrified prostitutes were gathered around Lizzie's corpse when Patrolman Michael Scanlan sauntered up. He had heard Louise's screaming and thought he'd see what fresh horror was afoot at the corner of Vine and Elm.
"What's going?" he said as he came up behind the group.
"Someone murdered one of my gals," the madam said.
"You don't say." Scanlan bent over to take a look at the dead woman, hands on his knees. "What's her name?"
"Lizzie," all four ladies said in unison.
"Lizzie what?"
The woman all shrugged or murmured something inaudible.
"I'll call Detective Cusack," Scanlan said. "But it's going to take a while. Someone vandalized the call box on Elm, so I'll have to hoof it to Eagle and call from there. Don't let anyone back here until I get back. I don't want to tangle with a bunch of rubberneckers on a Sunday morning."
He ambled off down Elm in the direction of Eagle, whistling and swinging his stick. A half an hour later, he returned with a second cop and the detective.
Detective Cusack was a somewhat rumpled, balding man, wearing a suit that seemed a size or two too large for the body inside. Perhaps, like the flowing robes of the Bedouin, the baggy outfit helped him keep cool in the humid Buffalo summer. Or, more likely, he'd got it at a remainder sale at Meldrum's, which was famous for selling cheap but functional goods, usually in off-sizes.
The cops, Cusack, Louise, the madam, and the two whores all stood and stared silently at Lizzie, who stared silently back.
"I called the coroner," Cusack said to no one. He knelt in the dirt, and with his thumb and forefinger, spread open the flaps of skin bordering the fatal neck wound. The four ladies leaned over Cusack for a better view.
"Don't you all have something else to do?" the detective said over his shoulder.
"Yeah," Scanlan said, prodding Louise with his stick. "You've done your bit. Now scram."
The ladies scurried away, whispering.
Cusack crouched over Lizzie's corpse, closely examining the cut. It resembled the kind of cut one might make in filleting a fish--neat and clean, very deep, but not quite straight. Still, straighter than one might think if a murderer was trying to cut the throat of a struggling woman. The wound had to have been inflicted quickly, Cusack thought, in a single stroke--and with the confidence of experience. This was not the work of someone unaccustomed to the blade. He could think of at least six butchers within a block, and any one of them could have managed the job. But then again, he knew them all pretty well, and for the most part they were broken-down, quiet types, and--if anything--weary of gore after spending twelve hours a day in it up to their boot-tops.
The killer had done his work, and then had slipped away unnoticed. Yet given the quantity of blood--even though quite a bit of it had soaked into the dirt--it would have been impossible to commit this sort of crime without coming away drenched. But Cusack knew even that wouldn't earn so much as a raised eyebrow on Vine and Elm. Half the men wandering home from work, or stumbling along drunk, were coated in the stuff. It was only part of the passing parade in this desperate part of the city, where death was the stock in trade and blood a badge of brotherhood.
"All right, I'm done," Cusack said, standing and dusting off the knees of his baggy trousers. "Cover her privates up, will you? When the coroner's wagon gets here, tell them I'll meet them at the morgue to make a report."
Scanlan nodded, and the second cop, Patrick Mohoney, knelt down to restore Lizzie's modesty. He pulled on the hem of her skirt, but the rear of the garment had stiffened in the clotted pool of blood under her body. Mahoney reached under the corpse and was trying to free the back of her skirt, when Scanlan stopped him.
"Detective," he said, looking Cusack, "did you see that?"
"See what?" Cusack asked.
"That," Scanlan said, touching his stick to the smooth skin just above Lizzie's pubic mound.
Cusack bent over again. "Hmm, this is interesting."
Faintly incised into the dead woman's skin was a pentacle.
***
A knife-wielding murderer who had killed a prostitute needed a good name. "Jack the Ripper" had already long been taken, and for good, by the mysterious whore-killer of Whitechapel some thirteen years before. So the Buffalo newspapers--not unmindful of the enormous circulation increase enjoyed by London's penny dreadfuls after Saucy Jack had made his debut--had to think fast to find a name that would sell.
Their first attempt, "The Tenderloin Ripper," seemed almost like plagiarism, and was roundly rejected. Then they went after the "Vine Alley Marauder," which was a mouthful. Finally, a young newspaperman hit upon one that combined the city's name with the predominant trade around Vine and Elm: The Buffalo Butcher. That one was clear and memorable, even if it did cast a bit of shade over the city's reputation. It stuck immediately, earning the young reporter a ten-dollar bonus while putting tens of thousands into the coffers of his employer.
The pimps and the madams of the Tenderloin did their best to reassure their girls that the Butcher's choice of victim was nothing more than happenstance, but the streetwise working girls were having none of it. All they could talk about was where or when another murder might occur, and which of their unofficial sorority would get the cut. And every man who came to any of the brothels was viewed with such suspicion that many of the girls froze every time the door closed behind a client. Some refused to go outside at all, even to run errands. A few even considered moving to Cleveland.
Every girl had her own suspicions about who or what had swung the deadly blade. Few believed it could be the work of a woman; too much strength would be required to pin a struggling whore to the ground and open her throat with a single stroke. A man, then. But what kind of man?
The criminal's catch name provided a clue. A butcher, slaughterman, or knacker were the most likely suspects. Vine Alley may have earned local renown for its concentration of slaughterhouses, but in a city where horses outnumbered people five to one, every neighborhood had at least one knacker. The knacker was a fellow of strong constitution who disposed of old, diseased, or otherwise unwanted horses. He killed and bled them, and then stripped off the hides to make leather, rendered the bones and hooves into glue, and minced, cooked, and sold the flesh as pet food. The knacker, it was said, left behind nothing but the whinny.
There was only one other possibility--a medical man. A doctor or a mortician would be handy with a knife and unfazed by blood. But doctors had taken an oath to do no harm, and morticians--well, whatever they got up to in the basements of their undertaking parlors was likely more than enough to satisfy the most ghoulish appetite.
One curious element gave the girls of the Tenderloin pause. London's famous Whitechapel murderer had gotten his jollies from the extravagant mutilation of his victims, without ever having left a trace of traditional sexual activity--the frenzied violence itself having served, presumably, as a surrogate for orgasm. that was not the case with the Buffalo Butcher's victim. Inside Lizzie's vagina, the medical examiner found evidence of a very recent seminal emission.
Apparently, Buffalo's killer liked to take his fun with a side dish of murder. It certainly would be easier to cut a woman's throat while in the process of humping her, and outdoor fun and games were almost always carried on in strict silence, too, for fear of discovery. That would jibe with the lack of reports of any unusual screams or cries for help. Of course, there remained the hideous possibility that the killer had taken his pleasure after Lizzie had given up the ghost.
***
The coroner's conclusion was brief. Willful murder by person or persons unknown. Cause of death, exsanguination due to severed left carotid artery. On autopsy, it was determined that Dirty Legs Lizzie hadn't been too far from the grave, the Butcher notwithstanding. Years of heavy smoking had damaged her lungs, ten or twelve whiskeys a night had rotted her liver, and her heart was almost twice the normal size. She likely would have been a dead woman in a few years, or a few weeks, depending. But that, of course, didn't change the fact that she had been hurried along to the next world by a very sharp instrument, which the medical examiner assessed to have been a straight razor.
This came as something of a surprise. Most everyone had expected the murder weapon to be, of course, a butcher's knife, but even the keenest of those would have left a bigger kerf--the width of the cut. The blow that killed Dirty Legs was a slice more than it was a cut, and the fine, stiff steel of a man's razor would have been both sharp and strong enough to make the fatal incision.
The incision itself had started deep on the left side of Lizzie's throat, deep enough to find the carotid artery buried an inch under the skin below the ear. That would have been enough to finish her in a matter of a few minutes--the blood loss from a severed carotid is catastrophic--but the killer had an apparent penchant for symmetry, and had drawn the blade in an ascending and ever shallower arc across the front of the throat and then to rest against the opposite clavicle.
Without the carotid's supply of blood to the hungry brain, unconsciousness--or at least shock--would have been almost instantaneous. Yet the swooning brain would still command the heart to keep working, harder and harder, compounding Lizzie's problem as her blood pressure dropped. In only a few minutes her heart would have so little fluid left to pump that it would have to accept defeat and stop entirely.
This was precisely how flocks of sheep and trainloads of cattle went to their deaths every day, not two blocks from Lizzie's murder, but no one--not really--had thought much about how it actually worked.
But now it was most of what occupied the minds of the prostitutes of the Tenderloin, as if they hadn't already more than enough to contend with. Their better sort clucked their tongues, the ministers railed about the wages of sin, and the newspapers secretly wished for another murder.
That wish would be granted, and soon.
Meanwhile, only a few trolley stops north of Vine Alley, the Pan-American Exposition--the Electric City--was finally getting going in earnest. May, and most of June, had been cool, but the weather had at last begun to cooperate. As July approached, the fair, the heat, and the killing were all about to reach a climax.
Award-winning author ROBERT BRIGHTON is an authority on the Gilded Age, and a great believer that the Victorian era was anything but stuffy. In his Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries, Brighton exposes the turbulence of the era - its passion, dreams, and disasters - against a backdrop of careful research on the places, sights, sounds, and smells of the time.
When he is not walking the streets in the footsteps of the Avenging Angels, sniffing out unsolved mysteries, Brighton is an adventurer. He has traveled in more than 50 countries around the world, personally throwing himself into every situation his characters will face - from underground ruins to opium dens - and (so far) living to tell about it.
A graduate of the Sorbonne, Paris, Brighton is an avid student of early 20th Century history and literature, an ardent and relentless investigator, and an admirer of Emily Dickinson and Jim Morrison. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their two cats.
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