The Professor and the Prostitute by Linda Wolfe Read Free Book Online

not even Douglas himself, recognized its symptoms or understood the frightening future the words foreboded. That night he’d arranged, as was his habit, to be Robin’s last date, the lover she saw when she was finished with all her other johns, the man she came home to after work, so to speak. He occupied himself in his lab at Tufts, waiting for her to telephone and say that she was free, and when she did, he hurried to her. They made love. He gave her $100. And afterward they left her trick pad, a new one she had just rented, and, in the cool, crisp dawn, went for a stroll.
    They were just past Robin’s building when suddenly the young woman, her arm tucked familiarly into Douglas’s, noticed Detective Dwyer’s car parked just down the street. “Maybe they won’t notice us,” she said. “Let’s keep walking.” But she warned Douglas that if they were noticed, and if the police detained them, he should not under any circumstances reveal that he had given her money. If he didn’t admit to having paid her, she might be harassed but she couldn’t be arrested. “No matter how hard they press you,” Robin coached him, “just don’t say anything about money.”
    They continued walking, trying to stay calm, but seconds later Dwyer and his partner, Mark Malloy, leaped out of the car. Dwyer took Robin aside and Malloy began interrogating Douglas. “Are you married?” he asked.
    Douglas said he was, and Malloy said, “Well, this is going to make a nice stink in the papers, isn’t it?”
    Douglas began to shake.
    â€œHow much money did you give her?” Malloy demanded.
    He forced himself to say “None,” and he even maintained that Robin worked for him over at the medical school and couldn’t possibly be a prostitute.
    He was proud of himself, then, and prouder still when Dwyer, too, began to press him. He didn’t cave in, not even when Dwyer said, “Come on, we know you were in that apartment with her,” and insisted on taking him and Robin back to it.
    There, Dwyer looked the apartment over and, certain of the purpose for which Robin was using it, told her she would have to move out of this place, too. Then he told Douglas to wise up. Robin was not only a hooker, he informed him, but she had a pimp. “Every cent you give her is going to her pimp,” he said.
    Douglas refused to believe him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
    â€œOh, I don’t, huh?” Dwyer got out a photograph and tried to show it to him. He wouldn’t look at it. Then Dwyer uttered a name, Clarence J. Rogers. That was Robin’s pimp, he said. But Douglas just kept repeating that it was impossible and that Robin wasn’t even a prostitute. Maybe they had her mixed up with someone else.
    Much later Dwyer would say, “He was adamant. He wouldn’t budge. I think he didn’t want to know she had a pimp. I mean, she just ran roughshod over him and he just followed her around, like she had him by the nose.… He was totally, totally infatuated.”
    It certainly looked that way. But infatuation was only one of the emotions that Douglas harbored toward Robin. It would turn out that he himself was responsible for Malloy and Dwyer’s having parked on Marlborough Street at that time on that night. It would turn out that just before leaving Tufts to be with Robin, he had telephoned the police and made a complaint about the trafficking in prostitution that was going on in her building. Disguising his voice, he had said to the officer who answered the phone that prostitutes working out of the building were ruining the neighborhood. “Bringing in undesirable elements” were the words he used. And before he hung up, he insisted, “I want it stopped.”
    By then, Douglas had ample reason to resent Robin, who was costing him so much money. But in fact, although no one