Dr. Altman and the Concubines

By Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney

Move over Sue Grafton, Michael Connolly, and Adrien McGinty, Shortell-McSweeney is in town.

In the early Eighties, everyone from the Guerilla Girls to Lou Reed can be spotted walking the cobblestone streets of Soho. Sigourney Madigan has worked many “rainbow colored” jobs since leaving her Pennsylvania farm. Her last job with the Due Diligence Detective Agency ended when the owner’s wife caught him en flagrante at the Chelsea Hotel.

Sig inherits audio and video equipment from Due Diligence and so decides to open her own detective agency. Her first client is Jennifer Palmer, an uptight administrator at The Center for Rational Therapy—a far cry from the flamboyance of Soho. Someone claims to have a pornographic video of Jennifer and is now blackmailing her; Jennifer enlists Sig’s help to stop the blackmail.

However, when the police begin investigating a murder, Sig realizes her professional ethics are on trial. The intrigue only increases when Jennifer disappears. From Soho to the Devil’s Hole of Martinique, crime knows no borders, but Sig is determined to find Jennifer. She will rescue her client’s—and her own—reputation in this hard-boiled noir thriller featuring a complex heroine who will stop at nothing to break the case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665705950

Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney

Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney worked as a producer for Women Make Movies and as a video artist at Henry Street Settlement. She was the first female NABET grip on the East Coast. As an attorney for Women’s Venture Fund, Shortell-McSweeney worked with female entrepreneurs. Now retired, she spends her time writing, helping worthy candidates get elected, and enjoying the Great South Bay with her beloved editor-in-chief, William, and their four daughters.

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Copyright © 2021 Jacqueline Shortell-McSweeney.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Author Credits: Bard’s Anthology, 2017 and 2018, Curating Alexandria, 2019

Wingless Dreamer, 2020, La Piccioletta 2021, Beat Generation 2021

Author photo credit: Kelly O’Quinn

Cover concept: Katherine A. Ryder

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0596-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0594-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0595-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908139

Archway Publishing rev. date:  10/20/2021

CONTENTS

Chapter 1     Woe Is She

Chapter 2     The Elevator

Chapter 3     The New Boss

Chapter 4     Brownstone of Sighs

Chapter 5     The Coven

Chapter 6     The Descent

Chapter 7     Jennifer’s Office Meet

Chapter 8     Session One

Chapter 9     Ali

Chapter 9     Louise—Louey Louise

Chapter 10   Mauro Is the Name. Pornography Is the Game

Chapter 11   Belly of the Beast

Chapter 12   Set ’Em Up, Doody

Chapter 13   Saint Anthony’s Fire Cures the Soul

Chapter 14   Staff Meeting

Chapter 15   Politics and Work

Chapter 16   The Friendship

Chapter 17   Judge and Johnny

Chapter 18   Poetry and Guido

Chapter 19   Madame Bitterfly

Chapter 20   The Whine

Chapter 21   The Daze of the Daily

Chapter 22   In the Lion’s Den

Chapter 23   Presumption of Guilt

Chapter 24   The First Kill

Chapter 25   The Belly Has Ears

Chapter 26   Welcome to the Club

Chapter 27   Second Kill

Chapter 28   The New Order of Command

Chapter 29   A Vacation from Death

Chapter 30   Soho And Beyond

Chapter 31   The Tin Badge

Chapter 32   Isle de Fleurs

Chapter 33   The Ascent

Chapter 34   The Last Liaison

Chapter 35   From the Devil

Chapter 36   The Last Martini

Chapter 37   The Telephonic Grail

Chapter 38   A Small Reckoning

Chapter 39   Mountain of Fears

Chapter 40   Case Unsolved

Chapter 41   Cold Cases

Chapter 42   What Goes Around Doesn’t Come Around

Chapter 43   Roses Are Red

Chapter 44   Long and Unhappy Life

Chapter 45   Vengeance Is Mine Sayeth the Lord

About The Author

Dedicated to William, Noreen,

and my precious family.

"The Earth belongs to

the living, not to the dead."

THOMAS JEFFERSON

CHAPTER ONE

Woe Is She

P eople deserve one another. There are exceptions—a few innocent people out there who don’t deserve the misery they get. But you must admit, despite new age crystalling and a thousand points of light and compassionate conservatism, the majority of us have a mean streak that gets lots of exercise.

Usually, we find people perfectly suited to one another’s perfidy. Whites deserve a Louis Farrakhan. Blacks deserve a Christopher Jencks. Men deserve Andrea Dworkin. Women deserve Bob Guccione and Hugh Hefner (perhaps I’m too severe.) Gays deserve straights, the Serbs deserve the Croats, and the Albanians—well, have you ever met a mad Albanian? Don’t. The last Albanian I met cut off the head of a beautiful blonde translator before his trial was over. So you get my gist, don’t you?

My name is Sigourney Madigan, and I did not become this cynical overnight. I had worked for this sleazy detective agency, D. D. Devlin by name, Due Diligence Is the Game. You know, a business that places cheap, insinuating ads in neighborhood papers for twenty-eight dollars a month, where the office address is rented space from a matrimonial lawyer who was sleeping with him. It was a no-windowed, large, broom-closet space with one huge desk surrounded by mountains of cardboard cartons cascading, old files in no sequence, onto the green-tiled floor.

One wall, however, had audio and video equipment nicely organized on a pegboard. Donald had been a techie. He loved surveillance equipment. When he wasn’t taking videos of himself with an unsuspecting wife of a client or boffing his landlady, he had been an avid reader of tech magazines including Byte and Creative Computing. We had gotten along because I was a techie myself. Techs have a bond not reasonably explained.

I had taken the job on a whim. I’d floundered around for years. I’d been a teacher—I couldn’t take the noise of a classroom. I’d been a short-order cook—I couldn’t stand the grease or the waiters, in either order. I’d been in the film industry as a video technician—I couldn’t take film all so seriously or be groped sixteen hours a day though it was $525 a day. In the last job, I had been told by the sole female lighting technician in the union that to be unharrassed, one had to be married, pretend to be married, or pretend to be crazy. The last suited me perfectly. In short, a woman had to be ready to pull a knife; then the men would somewhat control their libidinous urge to grope.

At five-nine and a muscled 180 pounds with red hair, a butch haircut, and a practiced glare, I looked the dangerously unpredictable type. Still, I had to spend some time resolving the issue of my sexuality for some dullards. Eventually, for what was termed my attitude, I lost all my film work and resigned from National Association of Broadcast and Television Employees Union when our pension funds were stolen and everyone had to join the Teamsters. My departure was all right with me since I never saw more than five minutes of dialogue worth my labors, or the good money.

So on one of those days when you realign your entire life, I had applied to the D. D. Devlin Detective Agency, and to my great surprise had been hired. Not too many women knew computers or production and applied to Due Diligence for work. DD envisioned me in a good Reuneu’s platinum-blonde wig and Chanel blacks as well a female construction worker who didn’t get the coffee. And I knew cameras—still, 16 mm, Polaroid, reel-to-reel VHS, and the series of Sony PXW-X70 surveillance video cameras. I knew audio from the Panasonic RM 415 to the Sony DRT-28 wireless receivers to name a few of my many skills. DD had paid me twenty-five dollars an hour, and my time off had been abundant—and my own. He hadn’t wasted me on surveillance a college kid could do for ten dollars an hour. I covered the doctor and lawyer cases.

It had all come to an end when DD’s wife hired a competitor to follow him and his girlfriend, Luz, to the Chelsea Hotel. Donald the Dumb had thought the cameraman was an NYU art student doing a documentary on the old hotel where Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and the inimitable Leonard Cohen had spent time together in creative splendor, induced by whatever drugs were available. DD’s second mistake was, like many a husband, trying to burn Miriam in court. That had prompted her to provide his unreported income for last ten years to the IRS. Rather than see Miriam with a steady income, DD had paid the IRS and then went bankrupt. Once again, I’d found myself free to explore the many-colored parachutes unemployment makes possible. However, at least I had been left with a closet full of DD’s old equipment, which I’d received in lieu of my last two paychecks. I knew it was a sign that I should strike out on my own, but I was not quite sure how to present myself as a detective, or a businessperson. In the early eighties, this was a challenge for many feminists who wanted to be self-sufficient and out of the typing pool.

I was depressed. I hadn’t settled down after high school twelve years prior with ole Marshall in Pawscatawny, Pennsylvania. Marsh would have talked me to death. I had chosen to be an independent woman. And independent I was. So, there I sat in my studio apartment at the independent age of thirty-two surrounded by the accumulated wealth of twelve years of independence and poor pay—my futon couch bed and pink Formica table with four chairs, with a view of the inspiring Twin Towers, in case I ever entertained in my sixth-floor aerie. Pride of place was the pegboard full of my recently acquired video and sound equipment. I wondered where in the recession of the moment my next job would come from. The phone rang.

It was my friend Willa. We were lifelong buddies who had left our coal-mining town in Pennsylvania and had gone to college together. No one in either of our families had gotten past high school. We’d feared that we would not escape the fate of most high school girls at that time—that is, the ubiquitous Marshalls who leaned on picket fences clutching at us and hoping to hold us back in our hometowns to make them feel better about themselves. Neither Willa nor I forgot the mental struggle required to get on the Greyhound for New York City and scholarships to its remarkable Hunter College.

Strategic to the last brain cell, we had minored in sociology courses at Hunter; that afforded us time to explore the clubs, galleries, museums, and let us not forget Ray’s Pizza—all with the promise of college degrees. Willa was a psych major, and I was a biology major if that tells you anything about my need for precision. We had graduated together in the NYC uniform of black suits and berets and with more acquaintance with the world than Pawscatawny could ever have offered.

We were New Yorkers. And like all New Yorkers, we had faced the hunt for an apartment. We finally joined a group of Dutch radical feminist artists sharing a loft off Bowery (Yes, some were Guerilla Girls.) The only thing we had in common with them, beside fried foods, had been meeting the monthly rent and hating a landlord who tried to flood, freeze, and scare us out of our loft.

When he unscrewed our bicycle seats and Willa fell off on Bowery, almost meeting her end under a cab, we decided to find other digs. I found a studio on the sixth floor of a building on Sullivan Street. Willa moved in with her boyfriend, a doctor in residence at Beth Israel, to East Fifth Street off Second Avenue, on Curry Row, which was and is lined with cheap and wonderful Indian restaurants. My favorite was Taj.

At the time of her call, Willa was a therapist down at Henry Street Settlement and an adjunct professor at Hunter, and I was still searching. Her early-morning call meant she had a problem, and tradition mandated that when Willa had a problem, she would bring it to me, her own down-home therapist. This time, it was a case for me to solve.

Sig, your machine really needs repair. It’s unprofessional to hear a Porky Pig voice on a squeaking tape in this day and age. And you, a technician! Pick up if you’re there. You can’t discourage me. I’ll keep calling.

I gave in because I knew she would keep calling. Hey! What’s up?

Spare me, cool. You’re over thirty.

But young at heart. What’s up?

You’re still not working, right?

Right.

Good. I have a job for you. A friend. You don’t know her. She’s in some trouble. And I thought what with your investigative experience you could help her. She’s got money and can pay.

I let out a pleasantly insignificant Oh. Then some instinct told me to ask, You want to tell me what this is about first?

She’s a psychologist. A genuine PhD. Berkley, no less. And like a lot of New York women, she got involved with a married man. Agreed—Silly, sad people do that. A psychologist too. Anyway, Sig, I think you should talk with Jennifer and let her tell you the rest, OK?

Does she know I get sixty an hour plus expenses?

I told her it was in that neighborhood.

When’s a good time?

Lunch today?

That soon?

It’s complicated and best done quickly.

Let’s see. Lunch is good. OG’s is quiet.

We’ll meet you there at noon. And Sig? Don’t laugh at her. She’s pretty shaken up.

Though I always resented Willa’s implication that she, the psychotherapist, was more sensitive than I was, I decided not to confront her on her statement. Instead, I confirmed the noon meeting.

OG’s was one of my favorite places; dark-varnished, wainscoted wood walls, slightly scroungy with aged pine tables and sawdust on the floor, and no surprise—lousy lighting—all maintained its reliably funky atmosphere. You could always find the Post, the Daily News, the Times, and sometimes even the International Herald Tribune on a table at the front for customers to peruse with their first cuppas. OG’s had a great breakfast special for three dollars and a sprouty Soho salad with chicken for lunch for six dollars tops. It was one of the last neighborhood places left below Houston, that is, unboutiqued and offering delicious, affordable food for the locals. Another reliable, the white Rastafarian, sat intensely cogitating what conflicting thoughts only his God knew. We never heard him utter a word in all the years we’d seen him there. Like the sawdust on the floor, he was a fixture. Unlike the tables, he was never washed.

Willa was sitting opposite her friend at a table at the rear of the restaurant. No one was going to overhear this conversation. Willa waved to me, and I walked over to them. I kissed the top of her prematurely gray afro and sat next to her. The woman sat across from us, upright, stiff and perfect in an impeccably cut lightweight gray wool suit. She had on a twenty-inch real pearl necklace that she was clutching in her left hand and working the way a nun might work a rosary. Apparently though, she was no nun. Her dusty-blonde hair was pulled back into a chignon. Even the curls escaping the knot seemed to go with the pearl earrings. She sat delicate and pretty—large blue eyes, perfect nose, nice mouth, orthodontically correct teeth, and just a perfect light touch of makeup. Of course, she looked miserable. Perfectly.

In contrast, Willa, an adjunct Hunter prof as well as a hippie version of a therapist at Henry Street at that time, wore a soft and swirling orange beaded cotton skirt, a sacky purple Indian shirt, and huge orange beaded earrings to complete the effect. I definitely ranked lowest on the couture scale in my blue jeans, T-shirt and navy peacoat. Willa kissed me on the cheek and then turned to the woman to make formal introductions. Sig, this is Jennifer Palmer. Jennifer, this is Sigourney Madigan. Jennifer didn’t look me in the eyes.

My favorite waitress, Diana of the Hunt, came over to tell of her latest conquest, a Filipino cowboy in town for the rodeo at the Garden. She eventually took our orders; that meant Willa and I would share our usual fresh ground hamburger raw, with blue cheese, lettuce, tomato, and red onion, a Soho salad with sesame dressing and Chinese noodles, and most important, two Sam Adams’s. Jennifer had a cup of Earl Grey tea and a muffin, blueberry.

I wasted no time on the usual pleasantries of female discourse. Willa tells me you need my services.

Jennifer tried to smile but seemed too depressed to get the masticatory muscles to work. Let’s talk first. You’re a private investigator. What does that mean? Are you subject to the laws of confidentiality?

I understood her need for caution; it was just her moral tone I couldn’t abide. Since tact was not my strong point, I countered with, "Miss Palmer, like a lawyer once said, laws are meant to be broken; that’s why there are lawyers. Basically, you have to take my word that what