The Professor and the Prostitute (8 page)

Bill met her at the airport, and they spent the night together. The following morning she accompanied him to the last sessions of the seminar. He was overjoyed, his troubles forgotten, at least for the moment. He was back in the city in which he had gone to college, been a nobody, a shy youth with no prospects. Now he had just finished directing a highly esoteric conference on the subject of tissue culture. He was surrounded by the leading lights in his field, scholars who were exploring the very farthest edges of the mysteries of biology, creating life in glass dishes, playing God. And he was there with Robin, his Galatea. That morning, during a break in the formal part of the seminar, he introduced her to his colleagues. Completely immersed in fantasy, he pretended to his peers and perhaps even to himself that she was not the tawdry, drug-dependent hooker from the Combat Zone who went down on strangers in the back of their cars, but a classy, brilliant young scientist, the kind of girlfriend he had always longed for. He told his colleagues she was his graduate student, one of his brightest. That's why he'd brought her.

Several of his colleagues tried to make conversation with her that day. One probed her about her goals. What were her major interests? What kind of research was she pursuing? Robin mumbled a few words, then retreated.

Eventually, Bill and Robin got into his car and started the drive back to Boston. He had promised to give her the thousand dollars once they arrived there.

The drive home started off pleasantly enough. Robin wanted a new nightgown, and Douglas suggested they look for one at a large shopping center in Plattsburgh. He knew the place well. He'd worked right there, in the Grand Union, when he'd been a timorous, inhibited high school student. Now he stood beside the alluring Robin and boldly examined lingerie with her. They fingered the fabrics, considered the colors, and at last he bought her a frivolous little outfit with brief pink panties.

It was the last happy moment he was ever to spend with her. Back in the car again, she asked him to drive her to Charlestown, Massachusetts, before taking her into Boston. In Charlestown, she went alone to visit a friend, emerging a half hour later with a plastic sandwich bag half full of cocaine. The two of them sampled some of it and then headed for Boston. But the cocaine affected Robin badly. She became anxious and then, suddenly, paranoid. Someone in a yellow Volkswagen was following them, she insisted. A few minutes later, she said someone in a big van was also following them. She couldn't go home, she cried. She'd be followed there. Something dreadful would happen to her. She begged Bill to check her into a motel.

He found one in Natick, the Red Roof Inn, but as soon as he carried in the bags, she said she was sure she'd just seen the yellow Volkswagen go by. They left the motel hurriedly and looked for another, settling at last on one that was set well back from the road. He brought in the bags. She started to unpack. Then, her paranoia suddenly fulminating, she said her pursuers were in the room next door. They checked out of the second motel, too, and looked for still another. While they were driving, taking back roads and deserted streets, she suddenly demanded that he stop the car and hide the cocaine so that she couldn't be caught with it.

Where? How? He pulled over on a quiet residential street and punched the plastic bag into a snowbank in front of one of the houses.

Later that night, ensconced in a third motel, Robin's terrors finally evaporated. But as soon as she felt better, she begged Bill to retrieve the cocaine. It was the middle of the night and freezing cold, but he wanted to assuage her, so he went outside and started the car.

He found the street on which he'd hidden the bag, but he couldn't remember precisely where on the street he'd buried it. Was it ten houses from the corner? Twelve? In the cold dawn he began searching, clambering onto icy lawns and thrusting his hands into snowbanks. His feet grew soaking wet. His fingers numbed. But although he dug and dug, he couldn't find the plastic sandwich bag, and finally, after an hour and a half, he gave up and returned to the motel.

Robin was distraught. The coke had cost her about $700, she said.

In the morning, according to Bill, she told him that she wanted, not just the thousand dollars he had promised her for the night in Plattsburgh, but another $2,000. She said it was because by now she'd been with him not just one day but three.

He said he couldn't afford all that. He said it wasn't his fault that they'd spent all of Friday night trying to get away from whoever she thought was chasing her. But she stuck to her guns. He owed her $3,000, not just $1,000 or even $2,000.

What had started off for him as a romantic reunion had turned into a nightmare from which he couldn't seem to awaken.

In the next few days, again according to Bill, the two of them were often on the phone with one another, apparently arguing over whether he owed her $2,000 or $3,000. He thought her unreasonable but told himself she'd come around, and on February 22 he made a date with her to discuss the exact amount of his debt.

They met at a roadside restaurant near Lynn, went to a motel, and later were driving around in his car, arguing vociferously, when suddenly Robin sprang on him that he owed her not just $3,000 but $5,000. Her reason: since he hadn't yet paid her a red cent on the initial debt, he owed her $2,000 in interest.

Can Robin have been this usurious? We have only Bill's word that she majestically escalated his financial debt, although several prostitutes who knew her told me they thought it was likely. “Lots of girls do it,” one of them said. “You go for what the market will bear.” “Robin was that type,” said another. “Out and out greedy. Like no matter how many men she'd had in a night, she'd steal your john right from under your nose.” A third made the point that Robin might have asked for outrageous interest simply as a way of making Douglas stop pestering her.

Whether or not Robin actually asked Douglas for $2,000 in interest—and, if she did, what her reasons were—is unknowable, but certainly that night something happened to send him into an acute state of alarm. It occurred while he and Robin were driving. She was talking, he insisted, about the money he owed her. He was disagreeing, bargaining. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his chest. All this talk of high interest was more than he could stand. He was having a heart attack, he was sure. Giving up the wheel, he begged her to drive him at once to a hospital.

At the hospital, Lynn Union, he was examined and given an EKG. It showed no heart muscle damage. Nevertheless, the staff thought he didn't seem quite right and, deciding he was having some sort of panic attack, gave him a muscle relaxant. They also advised him not to do any driving while on the medication, and when Robin indicated she wouldn't be taking him home, a nurse telephoned his wife and asked her to come for him.

Bill lay down on a hospital cot. Robin stayed with him. A nurse came in, then left, and as soon as she was gone, Robin started in about the money again. Bill heard her as if through water. He was drowsy, submerging into sleep. Then, suddenly, he felt, or thought he felt, a hideous pain in his ear. He felt, or thought he felt, her driving one of her long-nailed fingers into his ear and he heard, or imagined he heard, her demanding that he pay her what he owed. Dazed, he rolled over onto his other side. She hovered over him and drove her finger into this ear, too. He kept tossing and turning, and no matter which side he rolled onto, she pushed her finger into his ear. At last she let him be, and he slept.

Robin wandered about the hospital room. She looked into the pockets of his brown wool jacket to see if there was any money in it. There wasn't. She opened his briefcase. No money there, either. But it did contain some trays of scientific slides, some grant proposals Bill had been reviewing, and the keys to his car, his house, and the safety deposit box he'd opened at her request. She stuffed the contents of the briefcase into her large handbag. Inside, she saw that she still had the little pink panties from the nightgown set he'd bought her in Plattsburgh. She pulled them out and, as if in exchange for what she had taken, tucked them into the pocket of his jacket.

She almost left after that, but in the end she decided to linger for a while. Nancy was coming. Perhaps she relished the thought of how shocked the suburban housewife would be to see her there by her sick husband. Patiently, she sat at Bill's bedside and waited.

Nancy, concerned and confused, arrived at the hospital accompanied by a neighbor she'd asked to drive her to Lynn. The two women entered Bill's room. They saw him lying pale and prostrate. And they saw at his side a pretty postadolescent girl.

“I'm Chris,” the girl said boldly. Then she hurried out of the hospital and disappeared.

“That's the girl, isn't it?” Nancy whispered, but the neighbor overheard.

Bill acknowledged that it was.

Nancy, humiliated, was silent on the way home.

The keys to the safety deposit box were of immediate interest to Robin. In the days when Bill had been flush with Tufts research funds, he'd often stashed away money in the box, so bright and early the next morning she went to the First National Bank in Boston and, keys in hand, requested box number 920. An attendant checked the records, determined that the box was registered in the names of both Robin Benedict and William Douglas, and allowed her to unlock it.

The box was empty. She left the vault precipitously and, apparently suspecting now that if Bill had any money he must be keeping it at home, asked the attendant if she might use the telephone. She called Bill and told him she was coming out to his house.

He went into a panic. Robin in Sharon! Robin at his
home
. He was no longer as eager to see her as he had been only a week earlier. The sensation of having long-nailed fingers driven into his ears the night before was still sharp within him. She might try to hurt him again. Worse, how could he be sure she was coming alone? Maybe she was bringing her pimp. Or some other of her associates. Once, long before, she'd told him how she'd gotten friends of hers to beat up a cab driver who'd insulted her. Who knew what she might do to him? Frightened, he telephoned the Sharon Police Department.

A sergeant answered, and Douglas told him that the night before he'd been with a woman and she'd stolen his briefcase. Now she'd telephoned and said she was coming to his home to extort money from him in exchange for the briefcase.

The sergeant assigned a police officer to go over to Douglas's house.

Douglas was inside the conventional clapboard ranch house, explaining the situation to police officer James Testa, when Robin's silver Toyota pulled up in the driveway. She was alone, he saw at once, and all of a sudden he felt ridiculous for having called the police. What if she discovered he'd done that? What would she think of him? He raced outdoors and, cornering her as she began crossing his lawn, begged her to talk with him in the driveway.

It was useless. She wanted to go inside to look for the money. The two of them began shouting at each other, and soon they were making such a commotion that Officer Testa hurried out of the house to keep them from disturbing the Sharon peace. The sight of the cop enraged Robin even further, just as Douglas had anticipated. She began screaming that he had stolen something from
her
. “Give me back what belongs to me,” she yelled, “and I will give you back what belongs to you.”

Officer Testa made them both come down to the station house and, thinking they were having a mere lovers' quarrel, gave them a lecture. They should try to work out their problem in a more mature fashion, he told them.

During the next few days, Robin's life was filled with activities that had nothing to do with Douglas. One afternoon, she sought out a friend from her high school days who had become a carpenter and took him to see the renovations in her new house. She wanted his opinion on whether the work was being done right. Another day, she went home to Methuen to attend the funeral of an aunt. Afterward, she paid a call on another high school friend, and over coffee told him, too, about the ambitious renovations, even about the handsome curtains she had just bought. Like Zola's Nana, who before her untimely demise was preoccupied with redesigning her bedroom, Robin struck her friends as having nothing on her mind but interior decoration. But in fact she was still locked into her financial dispute with Douglas, and she continued to do battle with him on the telephone. One time she told him that if he didn't pay up, she'd go to the Boston newspapers with the story of their relationship. Then she threatened to come to his house again. And one day, about a week after her first visit, she made good on the threat. She drove to Sharon and, telephoning from the firehouse in town, shouted so loudly that a fireman overheard her say, “I have your slides and the other items. I am going to come over now.”

Bill dissuaded her. He promised her that if only she would leave Sharon, he would meet her somewhere else and, in exchange for his possessions, pay her. So, on March 2, they met on a busy Boston streetcorner.

He went to the assignation with $1,000 in cash in his pocket. Flat broke, he'd gotten the money from Nancy, who—allegedly without asking any questions about why he needed it—had borrowed $2,000 from her father. He'd put half the loan into his microscope case in a bedroom closet and pocketed the other half, thinking that possibly he could get Robin to settle—despite her increasing demands—for just one grand.

He failed. She asserted more adamantly than ever that he still owed her $5,000—$3,000 for the trip to Plattsburgh and $2,000 in interest. He wrote out a check for $200—her fee for meeting with him—and, keeping the wad of cash in his pocket, didn't even try to placate her with the thousand he'd brought along.

Perhaps he had decided it would be useless. Or perhaps he had by now gotten the faintest glimmer of a solution to his predicament. Perhaps the notion of killing her had at last begun begging and beating at his brain. After all, some tide in their relationship had turned. Now it was no longer he who was hounding her for visits, but she who was hounding him. And he was no longer writing her letters. The days when he had opened up shyly to her and extolled her for being “You You You You You” were long behind him, banished finally and forever by her outrageous demands ever since the trip to Plattsburgh and by the vicious cruelty she had displayed the night of his panic attack. Indeed, he no longer felt that he loved her. The passion he had always secretly longed to have stopped had, at last, come to an end.