Double Life by Linda Wolfe

Author:Linda Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497648869
Publisher: Open Road Media

PART 3

“This Judge Is Either Crazy or Criminal”

CHAPTER 9

“SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG [WITH SOL],” JOAN WROTE IN her diary not long after Sol and Joy broke up. “He’s acting strangely. Very depressed, irritable, emotional.… [He went to] Florida [to visit his mother]—came back, told me it was the worst three days of his life—death, old people—he feels he’s dying.… Doesn’t understand what’s happening to him. Feels disassociated with himself. Feels a beautiful day is ugly. Hasn’t slept in weeks even with pills—lost fifteen pounds. Doesn’t eat at all—drug-related?”

He had told her by then that he thought maybe they ought to separate. He loved her, he said, but he couldn’t live with her any longer—not until he got his head together. He’d even begun moving some of his clothes out of the house. But then he moved them back in. Joan hardly knew what to think.

But it seemed to her that whatever else might be going on with him, he was depressed. After all, she’d been head of a mental-health clinic for years. She begged him to see a psychiatrist.

Sol refused. He was afraid, he told her, that if he went to a psychiatrist, news that he had a mental problem might leak out. If it did, his career would be ruined. He’d have no more credibility as a judge, and he’d never be able to run for governor. He’d be stigmatized, like poor Tom Eagleton.

He didn’t tell Joan that he was already seeing someone in the mental-health field—Eleanor Sloan.

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

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