The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  In his sessions with Sloan that fall, Sol complained bitterly about David Samson and tried to get the therapist to tell him whatever she knew about Joy’s relationship with her new lover. He also attempted to convince her that being intimate with Samson would be unwise for Joy. “He’s done bad, bad things that will eventually come out,” he told her, and suggested that if she really cared about Joy, she’d check into Samson’s background.

  He himself had already done so. He had asked one of his law clerks to conduct a computer search into Samson’s past and one day, while going through his clerk’s findings, had discovered that Joy’s new lover was the lawyer for a refuse disposal company that was having a contractual dispute with Essex County in New Jersey. The dispute, he read with interest, “could mushroom into intense environmental litigation.”

  He had also obtained a copy of his rival’s biennial New York bar registration form, on which Samson had scrawled his distinctive signature—a loopy scribble that looked more like the letters i,l,e,u than it did like the name “David Samson.”

  Not settled yet on what use he could make of these materials, Sol directed his secretary to start a special “David Samson” file in his Mineola chambers and keep the papers there.

  Did she know Samson was married, Sol asked Joy over lunch soon after he’d started his David Samson file. Did she know that he owned a home in Short Hills, New Jersey, in which his wife was still living, and that the mortgage had recently been paid off?

  He was trying to show her that he had special and intimate knowledge about the man she was going to bed with—knowledge that might lend weight to something else he told her that day, which was that Samson was a bad guy. He was so bad, Sol said, that he was afraid for her. But she wasn’t to worry. If Samson didn’t treat her well, he’d be there for her, he’d stand up and protect her.

  Despite his effusiveness, the lunch did not have a happy outcome. Joy made light of his warnings and refused to entertain doubts about her new lover. Frustrated, he was reduced to trying to elicit from her a promise that if Samson ever broke off their relationship, she would return to him.

  Though dismayed, after the lunch he took comfort in the fact that he could still talk to Joy. After all, he reminded himself, she hadn’t said she never wanted to hear from him again. And one night not long after their lunch, when he was out of town on a speaking engagement, he used the pretext that he needed a restaurant recommendation and phoned her from his lonely hotel room. She talked to him. But she was brief, and afterward he felt strangely dissatisfied and dialed her again.

  But this time when she answered, he just hung up.

  Over the next few weeks, he did this again and again. Perhaps he was lovesick and longing for the sound of her voice. Perhaps he was furious and trying to provoke her, make her pick up the phone and hear it turn dead in her hand. Whatever his motive, time after time when she answered her phone, he put down his receiver with a soft click.

  Joy would one day say that she hadn’t suspected that Wachtler was responsible for the harassment she experienced. But she seems to have at least suspected that the hang-up calls she was suddenly receiving were being made by him. Norman Sheresky, her lawyer, would say later that one day not long after the calls started, she told him about the hang-ups and said, “Sol’s harassing me.”

  Sheresky thought she was being ridiculous. Sol Wachtler harassing someone? Impossible.

  But Joy was insistent. “I want it to stop,” she said. “Tell him to stop.”

  Sheresky was embarrassed at the very notion of going to the chief judge of New York with the accusation Joy was leveling. But he did what Joy asked. He met with Sol and said, “She thinks you’re calling and hanging up.”

  “She’s crazy,” Sol said.

  He had, by then, begun making hang-up calls to other people too, to David Samson at his office—he didn’t know the phone number in Samson’s Manhattan apartment, which was unlisted—and to Samson’s wife, Elaine, at her New Jersey home.

  He had also, by then, conceived of a plan that might bring about the rift between Joy and Samson that he so desired. Suppose a private investigator began to investigate Samson and uncovered his relationship with Joy? Mightn’t that worry the New Jersey lawyer, perhaps even scare him so much that he’d hurry back to the arms of his wife? Mightn’t it frighten Joy too and send her back to his arms? Convinced that he might be able to bring about this outcome—perhaps he had faith that it could work because he himself was such a worrier about scandal—Sol decided to pretend to be a private investigator and, in that guise, to pass along word of the affair between Samson and Joy to some interested parties.

  It would not be difficult for him to take on a role. Frequently in his life, he had played the trickster, and often he had trafficked—for purposes of amusing people—in impersonation. Now he would use his skills at masquerade for a different reason. For a reason close to his heart.

  The first person to whom he pretended to be a private eye was Jeffrey Silverman, the husband from whom Joy was separated. Calling Silverman, he said his name was David Purdy, that he’d been hired to investigate Samson, and that inadvertently he’d stumbled onto Samson’s affair with Joy.

  After that, he sat back and waited. Silverman, he no doubt expected, would inform Joy about the call, and Joy would at once be on the phone about it to Samson. The two of them would be devastated! And soon he’d hear from Joy herself that her lover had left her or that she’d decided to leave him.

  But by week’s end, he had received no such word, and on Election Day, he once again played at being Purdy—but this time he directed his pitch toward Elaine Samson. Calling her up, he spoke as Purdy, said he had information about her husband and another woman, and told her he’d be willing to sell it to her.

  Coolly, Elaine asked him who had hired him to investigate her husband.

  Sol didn’t answer.

  A moment later, Elaine hung up on him.

  Undaunted, he took another shot at calling her the next day. This time, he told her he’d give her his information for free, and he proceeded to tell her that the woman her husband was seeing was a very rich individual named Joy Silverman. They slept together in Silverman’s house in Southampton, he said, and in Samson’s house in Water Mill. Not only that, but they dined together in Manhattan twice a week, eating in expensive restaurants and talking about her, Elaine.

  Then, giving Elaine Joy’s unlisted home telephone number, Sol asked her to provide him with her husband’s Manhattan address and phone number. But Elaine wouldn’t do it.

  Two days later, he tried to get this information from her again. And the next day, and the next, and the next. To no avail. But that didn’t discourage him. It was true he was no closer than ever to knowing how to reach David, but every time he called Elaine, he gained some advantage. Every time he called her, he presumably made her anxious. So presumably she would want to communicate her concern to her recently departed husband. Then presumably, he would become concerned, and sooner or later, either he or Joy would get concerned enough to stop seeing each other. Or at the very least, Joy would call him and say that she was terrified, and that she needed him to come to her rescue the way he’d always done in the past.

  Joan, unaware that her husband was impersonating a private investigator or making hang-up calls, knew only that Sol still seemed depressed. He had many of the classic symptoms of depression, among them weight loss, disturbed sleep, and an inability to concentrate. Each of these telling symptoms could, of course, have been caused by the Tenuate he was taking, for the drug, often used as a diet pill, can produce loss of appetite, insomnia, and jitteriness. But in addition, Sol was uncharacteristically pessimistic and blue. Worried, Joan persisted in her pleas that he see a psychiatrist. And at last, when he had repeatedly turned down her suggestion, she asked Dr. Geraldine Lanman, their family doctor, to stop by the house and have a look at him.

  Dr. Lanman, when she examined Sol, agreed with Joan’s hypothesis. Sol was suffering fr
om depression, she said, and she prescribed Pamelor, a standard antidepressant, to elevate his mood, and Halcion, a controversial but still widely used hypnotic, to help him sleep. In addition, she directed him to stop taking the Tenuate and various other medications he was taking for headaches, among them Percogesic, Tylenol No. 3 with Codeine, and a steroid-based elixir of anti-histamines.

  Sol filled his new prescriptions on November 11 and that day again called Elaine Samson and again asked her for David’s home number. She wouldn’t give it to him, and he called her ten days later with the same request. Then, on the day after Thanksgiving, he called once more. But this time, perhaps because his initial attempts to scare Elaine and thereby frighten David and Joy had not resulted in the reunion he craved, he said something to her far more ominous than anything he’d ever said before. He had dirty pictures of David and Joy together, was what he said. He’d sell them to her, if she liked.

  “Where did Jessica spend her Thanksgiving?” Sol asked Jeffrey Silverman, who knew nothing of the judge’s longtime affair with his wife or his present efforts to woo her back, over lunch at the Harmonie Club early in December. Sol had called Jeffrey and set up their meeting.

  “With Joy and this fellow Samson,” Jeffrey informed him.

  Though Sol had expected as much, it disturbed him to hear his suspicions confirmed. “Jeffrey, this is your daughter,” he lectured the former husband of his former lover. “Doesn’t it bother you that she would have her Thanksgiving dinner with a live-in?”

  “No,” Jeffrey said. “I had Thanksgiving with my girlfriend.”

  Sol was troubled by Jeffrey’s nonchalance. But he couldn’t seem to make Jeffrey see the wrongfulness of exposing the little girl to her mother’s lover. He gave up, and spoke of other things. “How’s he managing, this Samson?” he asked. “How well do you think he’s putting up with Joy’s mouth?”

  Jeffrey shrugged. “I understand that Joy is walking on eggs with Samson right now.”

  Suggesting, as it did, that Joy was on her best behavior with her new lover, the answer gave Sol little comfort. But he didn’t let Jeffrey know his disappointment. “I wonder how long that will last,” he said cynically.

  He missed Joy terribly that pre-Christmas season. He was still yearning for her and still feeling melancholy. He told his trusted chief administrator, Matthew Crosson, who had earlier noticed that he seemed deeply tired and unable to focus on administrative matters, that he’d been depressed and was taking an antidepressant. He told his fellow judges that this had been the worst year he had ever experienced. But to no one did he confide the feelings of loss and longing that still continued to sweep over him.

  Shortly before the holiday, even though Joy had told him that not only didn’t she want to see him but she didn’t want him turning up at her apartment, his need to be in touch with her was so great that he went to her building anyway and left her a gift and a letter.

  “Joy,” the letter began, “five years ago a friend—she became my best friend—sent me a framed proverb. It read:

  Cherish yesterday

  Dream about tomorrow

  Live today

  “I have been looking at it all these years, but never really understood it until this month.

  “I couldn’t resist getting you a holiday gift. A longtime habit—like a longtime love—takes a long time to die.”

  He signed it, “Always, Sol.”

  Afterward, he must have felt in bad need of a pick-me-up, because a little before Christmas, he disobeyed his doctor’s orders. He once again renewed his old prescription for Tenuate.

  Shortly after the court of appeals reconvened after the Christmas recess, Sol dropped his lawsuit against Mario Cuomo in return for the promise of an extra nineteen million dollars for the courts in the next state budget and the passage of cost-saving laws that would provide another fifteen million. His lawsuit against the governor, which had seemed to many to be foolish or ill-conceived, had proved to be politically wise. The pressure had worked.

  Sol opened that 1992 session with a tribute to a former chief judge, Charles Breitel, who had recently died. Leaning engagingly forward in his high-backed chair, he praised his predecessor in fluid, silver-tongued sentences. If he was depressed that day—or on his way to that remarkable other pole of depression, mania—it was impossible to tell. And throughout 1992, whenever he took the bench—although his inner mood, he would eventually claim, swung from a disconsolate low to an extravagant high—his behavior would seem as reasonable, as thoughtful, as gentle, as it did on that first day of the new session.

  When he was off the bench, it was another story. Fed by Tenuate, which reduces inhibitions and produces arousal, as well as by Pamelor, which can also promote arousal and agitation, and Halcion, which can cause irritability and extreme excitation, his brain swirled feverishly with thoughts of Joy, and increasingly he continued to focus on one thing and one thing only: getting her to come back to him. And soon, the trickster in him seems to have concluded that this could be accomplished by making Elaine Samson think that her husband wanted to reunite with her. So on Valentine’s Day, he sent Elaine a mash note, signed with a forgery of David Samson’s distinctive signature. It showed a big lovable bear pointing to his heart and saying, “Even though we’re far apart, I know exactly where you are every second of every day—right here.” In March, he sent her another such card. It showed a little teddy bear saying, “I can go through life without a lot of things, but I can’t last a day without you!” It too was signed with a forgery of David Samson’s signature.

  Perhaps Sol expected that Elaine, receiving such sentimental greetings from her husband, would become energized to woo him back from Joy. Or perhaps he expected that she would communicate the sentiments of the cards to Joy, thereby raising doubts in Joy’s mind as to the loyalty of her lover. Whatever his hopes, he went on plying Elaine with love cards supposedly from her husband. One, with a picture of a spring flower, said, “Like the wonder of the first fragile blossom and the promise of Easter morning, thoughts of you bring me joy.” Another, with a cartoon of a man sitting alone with his puppy, said, “Hi! I was just sittin’ around doin’ nothin’, like I so often do when I don’t have anything to do, and I got to thinkin’ about YOU and Me and Us, and I got sorta all misty-like.” Still another showed two little pigs, and said, “Thinking of you. Let’s get reconnected.”

  But by the time he mailed the last love note to Elaine, something had happened that sparked a new and more noxious plan in his mind. Late in March, he had read in The New York Times that the residents of Linden, New Jersey, were fighting the building of a hazardous-waste incinerator. The lawyer for G.A.F., the company that wanted to build the incinerator, was David Samson. Samson was quoted in the article, as was a woman named Beatrice Bernzott, the leader of a citizens’ group opposing the incinerator. Two days after the article appeared, Sol attempted to make it appear that Samson was up to no good, that he wanted to bribe or even threaten Bernzott. Claiming to be an associate of Samson’s, he called the civic leader and told her ominously that Samson wanted to discuss the incinerator project with her. The following day, he thickened his plot. He called Samson, claimed to be Bernzott’s husband, and left a message saying that his wife had been receiving threatening phone calls. His plan seems to have been to make Bernzott tell the police or the press that Samson was harassing her, and to make Samson deny the allegation—he knew enough from his years in politics to realize that many people, hearing a denial, would conclude that where there was smoke, there had probably been fire.

  By this time it was early April and Joy’s birthday was coming up. She’d be forty-five on April 8. Sol had been asked to make a speech in Florida, and he’d accepted the engagement, doubtless hoping that if he were away from his familiar haunts, he could banish his obsessive thoughts of how to win Joy back. But his weekend in Florida proved disastrous. He couldn’t stop thinking of her, couldn’t stop remembering how important her birthdays always were to her. He
felt so blue that he didn’t want to be with anyone, and he drove alone to Disney World, where he tried to amuse himself by going on rides, just the way he used to do when his kids were little and he’d take them to Kiddie City.

  But as he drifted through underground grottoes and hurtled dizzily up and down tracks in the sky, he kept seeing all around him hordes of smiling parents, laughing children, lovers with arms entwined. Their happiness highlighted his own lack of it, producing in him acute feelings of loneliness and misery.

  Desperate, when he returned to New York, he stepped up his efforts to frighten Joy back into his arms. He called Beatrice Bernzott collect, saying he was David Samson, and tried to get her to accept his call. She refused. He called her again. And again. But when his calls to Bernzott didn’t result in any apparent police or press attention to Samson, he abandoned that line of tactics and turned at last to yet a new plan.

  He would frighten Joy, he decided, Joy herself. He would make her think that Samson—or someone pretending to be Samson—was haunting her, sending her and her beloved Jessica dirty and scary messages through the mail.

  In mid-April, he began seeking out cards that would do the trick.

  Joy was at home when, one morning in late April, she opened her mail to find a belated birthday greeting. It was a card whose front panel bore a picture of a bear and the words “On your birthday, CUCUMBERS are better than men.”

  When she turned to the inside of the card, she saw a long commercially printed message, all in capital letters:

  THE AVERAGE CUCUMBER IS AT LEAST

  SIX INCHES LONG.—CUCUMBERS STAY

  HARD FOR A WEEK.—A CUCUMBER WON’T

  TELL YOU SIZE DOESN’T COUNT.

  —CUCUMBERS DON’T GET TOO EXCITED.

  —A CUCUMBER NEVER SUFFERS

  PERFORMANCE ANXIETY.—CUCUMBERS

  ARE EASY TO PICK UP.—YOU CAN EAT

  A CUCUMBER WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE.