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

lacked the sophistication, the imagination, or the desire, to see Douglas’s ambivalence toward her, she nevertheless was aware that he was not altogether easy to control. There was an irritating, infantile side to him that she couldn’t quite cope with. For one thing, he couldn’t take no for an answer; when she’d tell him she was too busy to see him, he’d telephone her a dozen times to beg and plead with her to change her mind. For another, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, at least around her friends; she’d warned him not to say a word about their drug habit, but he began talking about it to the girls at Good Time Charlie’s.
    She’d lash out at him for these transgressions, read him the riot act. But he’d go all babyish on her and apologize and beg for forgiveness, swearing he would never give her any trouble again and saying he loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone in his whole long life. Adulated—if annoyed—she would accept his apologies.
    In the fall of 1982, Douglas’s colleagues in the Tufts Anatomy and Cellular Biology Department began whispering about him. It doesn’t take much to get the members of an academic department gossiping. Personalities and peccadillos preoccupy academicians because, for all the intellectual territory over which their minds roam, the world they actually occupy is so sealed off, so hermetic, that they might as well live in tiny towns. Moreover, in the case of William Douglas, it was hard for his colleagues not to gossip. For one thing, he had lost so much weight that his clothes hung from him. For another, he was behaving uncharacteristically. He almost never came into the lab in the daytime hours anymore. He kept missing appointments with students. He didn’t turn up at departmental meetings and laboratory supervisory sessions. And on the rare occasions that a department member spotted him, he seemed more jumpy and ill at ease than usual.
    At first his colleagues thought simply that the repressed professor had at last broken out and was having an affair, and they joked about the matter. Douglas had mentioned to one of them a while back, and she had told the others, that if a Robin Benedict telephoned, he was to be called to the phone no matter what he was doing, whether he was in the midst of a crucial experiment or in an important meeting. Benedict, he had explained, was a graduate student who was working with him on a research project at MIT. Perhaps, his colleagues laughed, Douglas was having an affair with this uniquely favored student.
    But Professor Sanders and Jane Aghajanian, the chief technician in the lab, soon began to suspect something more sinister. One day, during a routine check of the financial records of the projects on which they worked with Douglas, they discovered that their lab head had been submitting expense vouchers for surprisingly large amounts of money against university grants shared by all of them. More important, the expenses he claimed to have incurred made little sense. He had submitted vouchers for trips abroad when, as far as they knew, he hadn’t been away, vouchers for the entertainment and lodging of visiting scientists they had never seen, and vouchers for work performed by the Benedict “graduate student,” who had never even put in an appearance in the lab.
    Sanders and Aghajanian brought the puzzling expenses to the attention of the Tufts auditing department. The auditors noticed some discrepancies and launched a discreet investigation.
    Douglas may have suspected he was under investigation, but he didn’t stop stealing from his grants. Some of the scams and swindles he undertook were ludicrous. He hired Robin as a consultant on a project to develop a computer program for analyzing prostate tissue. He requisitioned from a medical supply house used by Tufts Medical School what he described on a voucher as “fluid collection units,” which turned out to