by Linda Wolfe
It all started when I tried to stop G.A.F. from building a hazardous waste incinerator in Linden. I hired the Seales to get a line on all the principles [sic] of G.A.F. with the hope of finding if there were any payoffs or anything else to help defeat the proposal.
During their surveillance and after some digging, they found out that the attorney for G.A.F., David Samson from the firm of Wolff and Samson in Roseland, was having an affair with a woman named Joy Silverman. Mrs. Silverman is a very wealthy woman in charge of the Bush campaign in New York. Her husband is a billionaire.
The Seales have pictures of the two of them making love in a house on Long Island and some audio tapes. They have been threatening Mrs. Silverman and her daughter to extort a payoff. I had absolutely nothing to do with the blackmail and am sorry for this whole thing.
When he was finished with that letter, he copied it and sent the same missive to the office of the prosecutor for Morris County, New Jersey. Then he wrote a letter introducing his new character—he hadn’t yet given her a name, but eventually he would dub her Theresa O’Connor—to Joy. “By now you probably know,” he wrote to her,
that you don’t have to worry about the Seales anymore.
For the part I played in their blackmail scheme, I am truly sorry. They were retained only to assist me in getting information on the G.A.F. “Bigs.” I never intended that they should pursue their own scheme.
Now that they have been put away, I’m sure you won’t have to worry anymore. God Bless you and your daughter.
On his way home from Virginia, Sol stopped in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and mailed the letters from there.
Joy was getting frantic. She wanted the letters to stop.
Eleanor Sloan, who was still giving Sol psychotherapy, tried to intercede. On the day after Sol returned from Virginia, she telephoned him at his Albany chambers.
Did he know that Joy had been receiving threatening and obscene communications? she asked him. Was it possible that someone in his office was involved?
Sol flew off the handle. How could anyone think a thing like that, he reproved her. Then he demanded that the letters and cards be turned over to him. He’d get to the bottom of what was going on. He’d take them, he said, to the New York State Police for investigation.
There was no way Joy was going to turn over to Sol Wachtler the letters and cards she’d been receiving. Or to the New York State Police, for that matter. It was hard to imagine them undertaking an investigation of the state’s chief judicial officer. No, she’d go to the FBI, she decided. She’d go to the head of the FBI. William Sessions. She knew him. She’d met him in Washington on a couple of occasions.
Soon after Sloan had been rebuffed by Sol, Joy prevailed on Norman Sheresky to let Sol know what she had in mind. “Tell him,” the lawyer recalled her saying, “I’m going to go to the FBI.”
Sheresky wasn’t happy about the assignment. He knew Sol had been obsessed with Joy. Sheresky had even tried, recently, to cure him of his preoccupation by introducing him to another woman—Mary Anne Stephens, the ex-wife of Jackson Stephens, a billionaire investment banker from Little Rock, Arkansas. Mary Anne, who was active in Republican politics and fund-raising, just like Joy, was a slender beauty with dark hair, dark eyes, and a wide, engaging smile, just like Joy, and she had a delightful, bubbly personality. But Sol hadn’t gone for her. He’d still been hung up on Joy. However, that didn’t mean he’d done the things Joy was accusing him of, Sheresky thought. Sol, he was certain, wasn’t capable of such things.
But Sheresky was a good soldier. He’d do what Joy wanted, he promised. And he made an appointment to meet Sol for drinks at the Algonquin.
In the hotel’s cool and comfortable lounge, they chatted about this and that for a while, and then Sheresky came to the point. “Those letters Joy’s been getting,” he said to Sol, “she knows they’re from you.”
“She’s crazy,” Sol said, just as he’d said months ago when Sheresky had said Joy suspected him of making hang-up calls to her.
Still, Sheresky persisted. “She’s going to go to the FBI,” he warned.
“Good. I think she should,” Sol said solemnly. “In fact, I’ll help her.”
“She doesn’t need your fuckin’ help!” Sheresky exploded. “She knows the fuckin’ President of the United States!”
Sol’s expression didn’t change. He seemed as genial as ever.
After his meeting with Sheresky, Sol was cautious for a while. He didn’t stop sending Joy letters, but the letters he sent were reassuring rather than threatening. He wrote them in the voice of his good character, Theresa O’Connor, not his bad one, Purdy.
To flesh O’Connor out, to know her in the way an author knows his characters, he had gone to extraordinary lengths. He had called the information operator in Linden, New Jersey, the town in which the scenario he was developing for her required her to live, and asked for the names of Catholic churches there. He’d liked the first name he’d been given the most. It was the Church of the Holy Family. Yes, Theresa O’Connor would worship in a church like that, he’d thought. And once he’d known at just what church O’Connor would worship, he’d called the church and gotten the name of its priest—a Father German. Then he’d called Father German and asked him when masses were held.
One day, he drove to Linden and tried to get into the church. He wanted to see it, smell it, hear the sounds O’Connor would have heard.
But despite his research, he’d come at the wrong time. The church was locked. He tried one door, then another, but none would open, not even the back door, where they put out the garbage. At last, he contented himself with just walking around the neighborhood, trying to see it with Theresa O’Connor’s eyes.
That night, according to Sol, he remained in Linden, sitting in his car for hours. With him was a letter he’d written in Theresa O’Connor’s voice. But he didn’t want to mail it until dawn. “There were several post boxes there, and I wanted to find the right one,” he would one day explain. “So I had to wait there until the sun came up. See it reflect off the post box. The first box the sun hit would be the right one to mail the letter in. The one that would give the letter all the right meaning.”
The letter he finally mailed that morning alluded to the compromising photographs and audiotapes that “Purdy” had once offered to Elaine Samson, and continued, “I will not send you the pictures because I’ve been told that sending them would be a crime. I will tear them up and the tapes too. You will not hear from me again.”
Then “O’Connor” begged for Joy’s patience while “she” explained herself.
Please listen to my story. Linden has spent over $300,000 to save our children from the G.A.F. hazardous waste. We’re not going to give up.
My try was stupid. I hired a private eye to get something on a G.A.F. big. He fell on Samson and by tracking him back and forth from Short Hills found you and where you lived. He took some pictures and decided on his own that he was going to get money from them. First he tried Mrs. Samson—that was last year. At first she said she would be interested, but after several conversations she said she didn’t care. I thought he was going to give it up but then he decided to get more on you. He followed you to Long Island on a few of your trips there.
When Reso was found, he took off, but first he left me the pictures and tapes which I just found. I don’t think he had anything to do with the Reso thing, but I have written to the authorities in Morristown and Newark about him.
I am sincerely sorry about this and I wanted you to know the facts. Before you blame me too much, think about your daughter and try to imagine haw [sic] you would feel if a hazardous waste plant was to be put in your backyard. I know—you would probably just move away, but there are some of us who can’t afford to.
I ask for your forgiveness but please please tell Mr. Samson that he should think of another place where many people do not live.
Sol mailed Joy letters from “O’Connor” throughout July. And by the seventee
nth of that month, his imagination had spurred him to give his new character an elaborate history and a more distinct way of expressing herself. “Dear Mrs. Silverman,” he wrote as if he were O’Connor,
I know I promised not to write again, but I had to write this one last letter. Not for you, but for myself and my salvation. At Mass this morning, Father German said that all sins can be forgiven except for despair. It seemed as though his homily was directed right at me.
I have been a parishioner of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church all my life. I have not been able to sleep for three weeks because of my part in the matter concerning you. At confessional Father told me that part of my penance was to tell you all I know and that I should do it before depression becomes despair. As God is my judge, and as his son and the fruit of the Blessed Mother’s womb Jesus is the guardian of immortal soul, this is the truth.
Sol had given O’Connor what might best be called a stereotypical Irish Catholic style. She was a cliché, just as David Purdy was a cliché, the prototype of the down-at-heels private eye. But both characters were far more realized and inventive than any Sol had created during his brief stint as a writer, back at Washington and Lee. “I have lived here in Linden my whole life,” O’Connor’s July 17 letter went on, displaying the love of home and family that a religious woman presumably would feel.
I know you must think of it as an ugly smoke stack town, but it’s my home and where I am bringing up my children. My children are as precious to me as your daughter is to you.
When G.A.F. bought the land and planned a hazardous waste incinerator, all I could think of was how my children would be poisoned. I know of the promises—but there are hundreds of stories of “promises” which have left children with cancer and brain and other damage. I was determined to keep this from happening to my children.
Then, Sol launched O’Connor into her complex confession. “The beginning of this year when things looked unstoppable a man named David Purdy called,” he had her reveal, as if following her priest’s instructions to tell all she knew.
He said he was a private investigator from Houston, Texas (he said he was living at the YMCA there and gave me his telephone number: 713-659-8501.) He told me that he had some information about a David Samson who was the lawyer representing G.A.F. and that knowing of my efforts to stop the incinerator he thought I might be interested. He said he might be able to get Samson to back off by threatening to go public with the intimate story of your relationship. Purdy said we could hire him for $10,000—$5,000 right away, and $5,000 if Samson laid down on the G.A.F. application. Considering what was at stake, the price did not seem too much to pay. I borrowed the money and hired Purdy. He moved to a hotel in Linden.
“O’Connor” then claimed that Purdy had originally been hired by Elaine Samson, who had wanted compromising pictures of her husband and Joy to use in getting a divorce.
Purdy took pictures. He told me they were of the two of you eating together, walking together, and going into your or his apartment house together. Mrs. Samson said that these were not the kind of pictures she meant. She wanted pictures—as Purdy put it—of the two of you “doing it.”
It took Purdy a long time, but he got the pictures. But when he called Mrs. Samson to tell her, she said she changed her mind. She said there wasn’t going to be a divorce and she was no longer interested.
It was after that, O’Connor continued, that Purdy came to her, and offered to sell her his pictures and tapes. But, she protested,
he never told me of his blackmail plan. I would not have been part of that. But he did tell me of the pictures and tapes. God help me, I was foolish enough to think that this could help us in getting Samson to back down. I now realize how stupid I was—but I was also desperate.… then the commission ruled against Linden and it looked as though we were lost. I told Purdy that he was not going to get any more money.
That’s when he told me he could get all the money he wanted from you. I swore to him that if he blackmailed you, I would go to the police.
The next day the Seals [sic] were arrested for kidnapping Resa [sic] from Exxon. The police said they were looking for an accomplice and I thought that Purdy was just the kind of misery who would do such a thing. I told Purdy I was going to turn him over if he didn’t get out of town. He really got scared, gave me the pictures and tapes, and said he was leaving town. I haven’t heard from him since.
That’s when I wrote you the first time—to tell you not to worry. I also wrote the Morristown Police and the U.S. Attorney telling them of my suspicions about Purdy. I also destroyed the pictures, which were shameful, and destroyed the audio tape, which I never listened to.
I know you must hate me for my role in this thing. I am self educated and never thought of myself as a stupid woman. I have always tried to be a good person and except for this one foolish thing, I have succeeded.
I have been told that with this act of contrition, God will forgive me. I hope that you will find room in your heart to do likewise.
Sol was playing with Joy the way a cat plays with a mouse. He was giving her respite before tormenting her again; he was encouraging her to think that her troubles were over now that the good-spirited “O’Connor” had destroyed the blackmail pictures and tapes and sent the evil-spirited “Purdy” out of town.
Joan Wachtler, who knew nothing about her husband’s elaborately orchestrated plot or his clever invented characters, was beginning to dread being in Sol’s company. He was tense, irritable, faultfinding. He fought with her about the tiniest things. Like the garbage. If he came home and there was garbage in the trash can, he would insist it be taken out right away. She’d say it could wait until after they ate—but he’d say no, and he’d grab it and take it out before she even sat down to her meal.
He was even worse when they had guests. One night, shortly after he sent the reassuring Theresa O’Connor missive to Joy, they had friends to dinner, and the whole evening he kept talking and talking, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise. And what he was talking about was himself. Just himself. He was so self-absorbed and he so monopolized the conversation that Joan was embarrassed and the next day felt compelled to call the guests and apologize.
Toward the end of July, Joy received another note from “Theresa O’Connor”—a religious card with the biblical inscription “Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness. And let us put on the armour of light.” But if for a moment this card lulled Joy, made her feel—like the mouse temporarily released from the cat’s paws—that her harassment was coming to an end, she soon had a rude awakening. She learned that Elaine Samson had had a letter saying, “I’m sure your husband’s girlfriend would love to hear [the tape] where you tell me that you weren’t interested in the pictures I had and then told me to get one’s [sic] of them having sex. Blow the whistle on me and I promise you will be sorry.”
Whatever “O’Connor” had said, “Purdy” was clearly back.
In his therapy sessions with Sloan, whom he was continuing to see, Sol never talked about writing threatening letters. Instead, he told the therapist that he was distressed to think that Joy thought him capable of such a thing. And one day, toward the end of July, he said to Sloan, “I’ve got to dispel this notion Joy has that the person who sent her those terrible letters was me. I’ve got to see her, talk to her about this.”
Sloan told him, Wachtler said, that she’d try to get Joy to meet with him, and if she succeeded, she’d call him to set up an appointment. But she didn’t call, and when he tried to call her, he kept getting messages that she’d just stepped out. She’s dodging my calls, he thought. Joy’s probably told her not to speak to me anymore. Because she thinks I’m Purdy.
It upset him. He longed to have Joy believe Purdy was real. He longed to have her fear David Purdy and lose sleep over him. And shortly after his failure to reach Sloan, he decided to make Purdy more real by giving him not just a voice, but a presence. He’d impersonate the detective, he decided, dress up the way h
e always saw Purdy in his mind’s eye—wearing a Stetson hat, a string tie, and cowboy boots. Then he’d turn up somewhere, go someplace where Joy would be sure to hear about him. That ought to convince her that Purdy was real. And that he wasn’t him.
He chose David Samson’s apartment building as his destination. After months of trying, he had finally learned where David lived, and on a Friday afternoon, having first established that his rival was out on Long Island, he went to his address on East 81st Street and engaged the doorman there in conversation. “Tell Mr. Samson,” he drawled, “that David Purdy from Houston, Texas, stopped by to see him.”
Throughout the rest of that hot and humid August, Sol spent more and more time in the character of Purdy. He had refined his vision of him, had decided that the private investigator wouldn’t just dress in Texas style but be toothless and obese, which would make him totally different from dentally perfect and elegantly slim Sol Wachtler. His years of doing impersonations for his children and for friends, his years of stepping into the stance and gait of various characters when he told jokes at parties and political dinners, served him well. He practiced at being Purdy, shuffling when he walked, puffing out his abdomen and pulling his shirt from his waistband to make himself look fat, drawing his lips over his teeth to make himself appear toothless. And in Purdy’s guise and getup, he began walking around the city. One day, he rode a crowded elevator while trying to be Purdy and abruptly stopped playing the role when he noticed that people on the elevator were staring at him.
By the end of August, Sol was ready for an acid test of his ability to impersonate Purdy—a trip as the shabby private eye to Joy’s apartment building, where the doorman knew him personally. Before he ventured forth, he called Joy in Southampton to make sure she was out of the city. When she picked up the phone at her summer place, he said nothing, and he was just hanging it up when he heard her speak. “Poor boy,” she said, and clicked her tongue against her palate, making a tsk-tsk sound, the kind of sound one makes to a baby or a pet. “Poor boy.”