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

knew it at the time, he had been surreptitiously calling her activities to the attention of the police from the very first days of his involvement with her. And as a result Robin, from those very first days, kept getting arrested.
    Douglas brought about her first arrest just weeks after they started seeing one another. He notified the police that she was with a john in her car. They came careening after her in a vice squad vehicle and, establishing that she’d solicited the fellow, a young music student, hauled them both down to court. Soon afterward she was arrested a second time. And a third. And a fourth. Other working girls didn’t get arrested so frequently, she’d complain to Douglas, who would listen, sympathetic and consoling, never acknowledging his role in the proceedings.
    Why would a man seek to get the woman with whom he was infatuated in trouble with the police? Detective Dwyer, discussing the matter with me months after it had been discovered, said, “Most likely, Douglas wanted to see Robin busted because he was jealous of the other men she saw and figured that if she kept getting arrested, she’d have to give up prostitution. Then she’d be his alone.” But Dwyer, a straightforward, reasonable man, was seeking a rational explanation for something that was far from rational. He failed to fathom Douglas’s tortured, complex personality. Not that it is easy to do. It would take someone as attuned to the darkness within the human soul as Dostoyevsky, who wrote in Notes from the Underground , the story of an intellectual who falls in love with a prostitute, that he tormented himself with the question, “Should I not begin to hate her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?”
    William Douglas, by the fall of 1982, had come to hate himself, to view himself, in his own words, as an “undesirable element.” But he had also, virtually from the day he fell in love with Robin—from the first day he had, so to speak, kissed her feet—begun to hate her.
    To be on the receiving end of obsessive love can be flattering, at least at first. Thus, it is often only after a long while that, when courted by an obsessive lover, even a mature and sophisticated woman recognizes the threat implicit in such love. Robin was only twenty and, while sexually wise beyond her years, still relatively inexperienced romantically. All through the early months of her relationship with Douglas, she not only didn’t know he was causing her arrests, but had no comprehension of the complexity of his feelings toward himself or toward her. Emotionally naive, she had no inkling that he loved her in any but a unidimensional, storybook way. Moreover, she was vain and believed herself entitled to love. Small wonder, then, that although she was cynical in her own behavior, she imagined others as sincere, as feeling exactly what they said they felt. She saw proof of Douglas’s fond feelings in his generosity. One day she wanted a MasterCard, and he willingly lied to bank officials, saying she was his employee, so she could get one. Another time she wanted a safe place to stash her cocaine, so he rented a safety deposit box in both their names. And when she needed a new car, he bought her the very one she coveted—a silver Toyota Starlet. Star was the name many pimps gave their most lucrative girls, but she didn’t tell Douglas this.
    She found proof of his devotion in other ways, too. He was always willing to help her out, to carry her belongings whenever she had to move, to pick up her mail at the post office box she maintained, to go to court and lend her moral support whenever she got arrested. One time when he came he vouched for her, telling the judge, just as he had told Dwyer and Malloy, that it was preposterous for anyone to call her a prostitute since she made her living by doing scientific illustrations for him at the medical school.
    But if Robin