The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  —A CUCUMBER DOESN’T CARE IF YOU’RE A

  VIRGIN.—A CUCUMBER WON’T ASK, AM

  I THE BEST? HOW WAS IT?—NO MATTER

  HOW OLD YOU ARE, YOU CAN ALWAYS GET

  A FRESH CUCUMBER.—A CUCUMBER

  WON’T POUT IF YOU HAVE A HEADACHE.

  —WITH A CUCUMBER YOU NEVER HAVE TO

  SAY YOU’RE SORRY.—A CUCUMBER

  WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU FOR ANOTHER

  WOMAN.—YOU ALWAYS KNOW WHERE

  YOUR CUCUMBER’S BEEN.—CUCUMBERS

  DON’T LEAVE YOU WONDERING FOR A MONTH.

  —IT’S EASY TO DROP A CUCUMBER.

  —NO MATTER HOW YOU SLICE IT, YOU CAN

  HAVE YOUR CUKE AND EAT IT TOO!!!

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

  The card was signed with a forgery of David Samson’s loopy signature and three big Xs, for kisses.

  Joy was annoyed by the cucumber card. But her irritation must have been nothing compared to that which came over her when she opened another envelope that had come in the mail that same morning. This one was addressed to “Ms. Jesse Silverman”—her daughter Jessica?—and showed a buxom woman reaching into her refrigerator for a soda can. Inside were the words:

  1. A DIET COLA IS SATISFYING ALL THE TIME.

  2. YOU CAN DUMP A DIET COLA WHEN YOU’VE HAD ENOUGH.

  3. IT GENERALLY LASTS LONGER.

  4. IT’S AVAILABLE IN A VARIETY OF SIZES.

  5. YOU ONLY NEED ONE.

  6. DIET COLA COMES IN A CAN, NOT IN YOUR MOUTH.

  7. WHEN YOU SWALLOW A DIET COLA, YOU ONLY GET 1 CALORIE.

  8. A DIET COLA DOESN’T DIRTY YOUR SHEETS OR DISHES.

  9. A DIET COLA WILL SILENTLY AND PATIENTLY WAIT FOR YOU.

  10. YOU CAN IGNORE A DIET COLA FOR DAYS AND IT WILL STILL BE THERE WHEN YOU WANT IT.

  11. A DIET COLA RESPECTS YOU AS MUCH AT NIGHT AS IT DOES IN THE MORNING.

  12. WHEN YOU SWALLOW A DIET COLA, IT DOESN’T LEAVE AN AFTERTASTE IN YOUR MOUTH.

  13. PEOPLE DON’T TALK IF YOU’VE HAD 3 OR 4 OF THEM.

  14. NO PRIVACY IS NEEDED TO ENJOY ONE.

  15. EVEN IF YOU SPILL ONE IN BED, IT WON’T MAKE YOU SLEEP IN A WET SPOT.

  16. YOU CAN HAVE A HEADACHE AND ENJOY IT.

  This card, too, was signed with a replica of David Samson’s signature. But Joy was sure the cards weren’t from him. They were clearly from someone who had reason to want to annoy her, harass her.

  Soon after he mailed the dirty cards, Sol went through Joy’s financial records and made a startling discovery. He learned that despite his always having viewed Joy as a spendthrift, she’d managed to save $150,000 out of the $300,000 a year she was receiving from Jeffrey and her trust. Maybe he ought to cut off her trust payments, he began thinking. Maybe he’d suggest as much to Norman Sheresky.

  Early in May, he called the lawyer. Joy, he told him, would probably receive a greater maintenance award from the judge presiding over her divorce if she didn’t get any income from her trust.

  The lawyer said he’d speak to Joy about the idea.

  Joy turned it down. It smacked of harassment to her. Meanwhile, the harassment by mail was getting worse. Only last week, she’d received two even more disgusting cards. One showed a woman who appeared to have drunk something that had caused her eyes to roll and her head to expand hideously. “Under the circumstances, you seem to be handling things fairly well!!!” said the card’s printed message, and beneath it was a handwritten message, “But soon I’m going to fuck you over!!!”

  Another card showed a bear falling down a mountain and said on its front panel, “Life is peaks and valleys,” and on its inside panel, “And the peaks are greased!”

  Beneath that, the sender had penned in another of his own messages. “Especially for you, Bitch!” he had written.

  Still, the most worrisome card had been addressed not to Joy but, once again, to her daughter, or at least to “Ms. Jesse Silverman.”

  On the outside was the picture of a fluffy kitten sniffing a flower. On the inside was a wrapped condom.

  The card also contained a typewritten message. “I look forward to visiting you this summer,” the message said. “School should be great fun for you.

  “BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL. The enclosed should be used by your boy friend before you do ‘IT.’”

  It was signed with another replica of David Samson’s signature, and beneath the signature was an additional line. “P.S.,” the line read, “I have a picture of your mother doing ‘IT’ which I will send you soon.”

  Though Joy had intercepted this perversion that seemed intended for her daughter, and didn’t let the girl see it, she was frightened by the new threatening cards. She made up her mind that the next time she spoke to Sol on the telephone, she would tape their conversation. And she also told Sheresky that under no circumstances would she follow Sol’s suggestions concerning her money. They couldn’t be trusted.

  Sol didn’t let up on his plan to cut off Joy’s income from the trust. In mid-May, he again discussed it with Sheresky, and after their conversation, which had apparently left him dissatisfied, he wrote a preening letter to the lawyer that warned that under the terms of Bibbs’s will, he himself was the deciding voice in how the trust money was distributed. “You will note that I,” he said, “have the discretion to withhold income which, year after year, would become part of the principal. I also have the power to distribute principal whenever I wish.”

  A week later, he wrote Sheresky another letter, this time telling him that he had presented Joy’s case as a hypothetical one to six other judges and that all the judges had agreed that his notion was a sound one:

  The six judges said that they would award maintenance, based on the established standard of living enjoyed by the wife at the time the action was commenced, less the amount of income which she received from her trust.

  The same six judges said that if the income from the trust was suspended, prior to the commencement of the action, and for whatever reason, the trust income would not be a factor in computing the amount of maintenance to be awarded.

  Six to nothing, Norman. Think about it.

  Joy, when she heard about the letter, was pretty sure Sol was using his role as trustee of her trust fund to intimidate her. It was a goal not so different from that of the dirty letter writer.

  When he wasn’t involved in activities that concerned Joy, Sol behaved in his usual pleasant, considerate, and entertaining fashion. One evening early in June, he captivated an audience of seasoned politicians and hard-nosed reporters at a dinner of the Legislative Correspondents Association in Albany by poking merciless fun at Governor Cuomo. Cuomo was so indecisive, he joked, that at his wedding ceremony he’d said to his bride, not “I do,” but “I might.” Cuomo was so obsessive that he was only now getting ready to toss his hat in the ring for the 1988 presidential nomination.

  At each of his one-liners, his audience roared, but they laughed the hardest when he said that if he ran against Cuomo in 1994, his campaign slogan would be “Anyone who would appoint me as chief judge is not fit to be governor.”

  He also told jokes about Vice President Quayle, and two days after the dinner, when Joy called him, her tape recorder on, he repeated one of them to her. “I said that when Dan Quayle was a little boy, he worked very very hard because someday he wanted to go to the electoral college.”

  Joy got angry. “Why would you do that to him? You’re on the same ticket as he is, or you will be.”

  Sol said he’d never have to run at the same time as Quayle, and then he launched into an attack on Bush. “Let’s be honest here,” he said. “The President has done some bad things. He’s alienated a lot of people, he’s alienated a lot of Jews, he’s alienated anyone that thinks about or is concerned about women’s rights, he’s devastated the legal profession by his last two appointments to the Supreme Court, and he seems to be determined to give away the presidency to the conservatives. One of his bad choices—and I apologize fo
r saying this, because I know you’re close to him—is Dan Quayle. A bad mistake.”

  Joy leaped to Quayle’s defense. “Dan Quayle’s gotten a terrible rap from the media. I think he’s much better than people give him credit for. I’ll tell you something. I was at his home for dinner, and he really impressed me.”

  “But what right does he have to pass judgment on the way people lead their lives?” Sol objected.

  “You mean the Murphy Brown incident?” she said, alluding to Quayle’s attack on the TV character for having a child out of wedlock. “It’s absurd.”

  “Excuse me!” Sol expostulated. “You think he’d approve of your lifestyle? Of my lifestyle?”

  Joy defended Quayle. “He knows my lifestyle. He doesn’t show any disappointment in me. I’m invited to his home. He considers me his friend. They just called to tell me when he’s going to be in town.”

  Sol continued to criticize Quayle, and soon Joy was telling him that she was sick of politics. “I think politics has got to be the all-time sleaze, with the all-time sleaze buckets. I am so turned off with government and politics. I am not turned off with the President, because of his loyalty and decency to me—”

  Sol interrupted to tell her that he, too, had been loyal and decent to her.

  Joy brushed past his remark and asked why he wanted to run for governor.

  “You know, honest to God,” Sol said, “I feel I can make a difference. I think there are things—”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah,” Joy mocked him. “Make a difference.”

  Despite her taunting, Sol continued to talk about his goals. “Well, you know, maybe, maybe I just think this state is so hungry for some change, it’s so anxious not to keep descending the way it has been—I think there are programs and initiatives that I would love to take. Sometimes I get so enthused about this thing and then I pull myself back because I don’t want to get too enthused.”

  Joy ran out of patience. “It’s something you always wanted to do anyway,” she snapped. “You’re basically a politician at heart. You are. And you had the opportunity to become a politician with Cuomo, and you took it and enjoyed it.”

  “I didn’t enjoy it,” Sol protested.

  “You enjoyed it.”

  Everything they talked about that afternoon turned into a quarrel. And the quarreling got more and more intense, especially after Sol mentioned that he was going to attend a fund-raising party for Long Island University that Jeffrey had organized. “You screwed his wife, for crying out loud,” Joy said harshly, “and you’re going to go to a party that he’s giving?”

  He reminded her that Jeffrey had once come to a similar party that had been given for him—it was while he and Joy were still lovers, and she’d come too—and he said that he felt obligated to return the favor.

  But Joy got ticked off. “I find it ironic,” she said, “that you, who never let anybody tell him what to do, and you who oftentimes don’t give a shit what people say or think, because you find a way of getting yourself in and out of situations, would feel obligated to go to this because he did that for you.”

  “Wait,” Sol tried to stop her.

  “But you weren’t obligated to be having an affair with his wife,” Joy went on.

  “Oh, stop that business, will you please?” Sol begged.

  But she wouldn’t stop, she laughed derisively at him, and her tone got strident, and at last he promised docilely that he wouldn’t go to Jeffrey’s party.

  He’d given in, but soon after he did so, his docility turned to aggression, and he not only once again brought up his idea of withholding her trust income, but said of his idea, “If you don’t like it, sue me. I’m going to withhold from you. That I can do anyhow. I can do that arbitrarily.”

  Yet once those challenging words had surged to the surface, he repressed his anger and once again became gentle and placating, and tried to persuade her that his idea was a sound one. Then he became boastful, as if to impress her with how powerful he was, and suggested that he could manipulate her divorce proceedings for her because no one would ever dare question him, the chief judge. “Let them ask me,” he said, “let the judge”—and at the very thought, he laughed sardonically—“let the presiding judge over the trial say to me, ‘Are you doing this collusively in order to prevent her from getting money, so she gets more by this, is it collusively?’” He’d tell them, he assured Joy, “‘Absolutely not, Your Honor.’” And that would be that. “You think they’re going to believe me? You’re damn well right they are going to believe me.”

  He had said something unwise, something he may have long believed but which most likely he would not have said had he known he was being taped. He had said he was above the law.

  Joy filed the tape away for future use.

  Who was David Purdy? Like a novelist, to whom the name of a character often occurs before the character’s lineaments and personal history become clear, Sol had invented a private eye named David Purdy, but he had not yet fully imagined him. What did he look like? Where did he come from? What sort of man was he? One day, it struck him that the private eye ought to come from Texas. Maybe from Houston. Yes, he’d be a Houston guy, down on his luck, just like the characters in the novels of Raymond Chandler. He’d be in need of money, would be so broke he’d have to live in a YMCA. But how much would that cost him? Again like a novelist—writers of fiction generally feel they need to know everything about their characters, even when they don’t plan to utilize all that they know—Sol called a Y in Houston and inquired about the cost of a room. He also asked how large the rooms were. And after that, he could picture David Purdy. Could see his body—fat and slovenly. His face—toothless and ugly. He could hear his voice too. His southern accent—a drawl just like the one he used when he told Bubba jokes. His language—vulgar and smutty. And he could imagine him pacing up and down in his tiny cage of a room, longing to break out and make people—Joy—take notice of him.

  One night, when he was in Sedona, Arizona, to which he’d traveled in order to give a speech at a meeting of the Nevada Bar Association, he gave life to David Purdy. It was the night before he was due to deliver his speech. He’d taken some Halcion, but it hadn’t made him sleepy—if anything, it had charged him up—and so he told the sponsors of the conference that he had an important opinion to write and asked them for a typewriter. They brought one to his room, and he began typing. But what he typed was not a judicial opinion. It was a letter to Joy. And although the fingers that pressed the keys were his, the voice that emerged from the page was Purdy’s.

  He had dirty pictures of Joy taken in David’s house in Water Mill, “Purdy” wrote. “I also have some terrific audio tapes of you talking to some friends at your Southampton house. Some interesting chit chat about your personal life and some big shots. I can send them some pictures too.

  “But everything I have is for sale. I’ll give you a chance before I send my material to your husband Jeffery [sic] (At PLY-GEM) and to Jessica at school and to others. Samson’s wife was not interested in buying what I have to sell. But she’s an innocent bystander—you are the home breaker—yours and her’s [sic].”

  As Sol wrote, he became more and more exhilarated. Joy would be scared out of her wits by this letter, he thought. And she’d never know it was from him. Because Purdy wasn’t anything like Sol Wachtler. Purdy was a lowlife. Purdy was a creep. Clattering away at the keys, he typed another paragraph, letting Purdy’s voice emerge at its most vile.

  “Just think,” he wrote, “if that fucker had not decided to dump his toxic waste in Linden, I would not have discovered your cheating. He’s screwing you like he has screwed us—the only difference is that you’re enjoying it. I promise I’ll not charge you as much as he paid off those commissioners. You will be hearing from me soon.”

  When he was done, he signed the letter with the peculiar signature he had been using for Purdy all along—an imitation of David Samson’s signature. And he added, in words that the upright, clean-speaking ju
dge, Sol Wachtler, had never been known to use: “P.S. You know what GAF stands for? Godamned Ass Fuckers.”

  He had been at the typewriter for hours, he thought when he stood up. The letter had taken forever to compose. But much later, long after he mailed it, he realized that he had written just a few short paragraphs.

  Joy was horrified by the letter from “Purdy.” She talked to Sheresky and consulted private investigators about tracking down the person who had written it. But although she informed the investigators that she was pretty certain she knew who it was, they told her it would be difficult to prove. She had nothing but instinct to go on.

  The discrepancy between who Sol knew himself to be and the image he liked to project to the world began to show—but ever so glancingly—that late spring of 1992. A colleague mentioned to him that his mother was seriously ill with cancer. The usually compassionate chief judge gave no response. A female law clerk handed him a one-page memo on an issue pivotal to a case he was about to hear. The usually polite chief judge railed that the memo was too long, that he’d wanted just one line. And one day in his chambers, he scoffed aloud at a videotape showing a cerebral palsy victim against whom he had ruled in her suit with a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

  But for the most part, Sol conducted himself as he customarily did—affably hearing cases, responsibly attending administrative meetings, energetically making speeches. Then, one day late in June, he took a trip to Virginia, where he spoke at his alma mater, Washington and Lee, and at the Brookings Institution, and while there he once again took to a typewriter and compounded his trickery. This time, however, he didn’t write as Purdy, but in the voice of a new character, a woman, someone who could add to Purdy’s credibility by saying she knew him. Someone who could add to Purdy’s fearsomeness by suggesting he had links to an infamous pair of kidnappers, Arthur and Irene Seale, who had recently been arrested and charged in the tragic abduction and killing of Sidney Reso, an executive with the Exxon Corporation.

  Pretending to be this new character, he wrote first to the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, whose office was handling the Seale case. “Arthur and Irene Seale were in the process of a blackmail scheme effecting [sic] Mr. David Samson of 7 Robbins La., Short Hills, N.J.,” he wrote, “and Mrs. Joy Silverman of 983 Park Avenue, New York City.”