The Professor and the Prostitute (6 page)

But if Robin 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 be condoms that Robin, on the nights business was bad, sold to other Combat Zone hookers at a handsome profit. He added Savi Bisram's name to the list of people he was employing for research, and Tufts issued her a check for $9,000. (Savi cashed the check and turned the money over to Robin.) He gave Robin herself some $20,000 directly. And he submitted numerous other false vouchers for money supposedly spent by himself. Ultimately, he swindled some $67,000 from Tufts within the space of a year. And virtually all this money he gave to Robin.

She spent it freely, lavishing her income on designer clothes, furs, soft leather boots, necklaces worth thousands of dollars apiece. She also spent it on cocaine. She had become, at twenty, a girl without a future, a child-woman who reveled in flattery, fripperies, and the fun of the moment. Sometimes she'd go home to Methuen, where her parents had hung many of her sketches and paintings throughout the house. She'd study them, talk about continuing her art education. But according to a prostitute who knew her, when they'd first met, Robin had frequently mentioned that she hoped one day to make her living by drawing, but by the fall of 1982 she no longer took seriously the possibility of becoming an artist. “There were lots of reasons,” the prostitute said. “The cut in pay, for one.”

Sometime in October Douglas was officially informed that he was suspected of having padded his expense accounts. He was called to a meeting by Richard Thorngren, the comptroller of Tufts, and Steven Manos, a vice president of the university, shown his questionable vouchers, and asked to justify them. Had he attended the out-of-town meetings he said he had? What kind of work had Benedict and Bisram performed?

He stayed calm at first. He began leafing methodically through his appointment calendar. But, of course, there were no entries for the trips, and after a while he admitted that some of his vouchers were “problems and false.” Still, he insisted that some of the others being questioned were valid. And he particularly maintained that the vouchers for money paid to Benedict and Bisram were on the up and up.

Thorngren contemplated Douglas and then, informing him that he was going to launch a full-scale investigation, demanded to speak with Robin Benedict and Savi Bisram. Douglas grew agitated and confused. The vouchers for the women's work were valid, he repeated. But if they weren't, he added brightly, and if it turned out he owed the university money, why, he'd pay it right back. It was as if he believed that all he needed to do was make restitution, and apologize, and the matter would be forgiven and forgotten.

That same month, Nancy Douglas, too, demanded an accounting from Bill. This was unusual for her. For years he had been absenting himself from the household in the middle of the night, but always she had chosen to accept his explanation that he kept his extraordinary hours because his experiments were so delicate, so important, that they required round-the-clock attention.

I thought when I first heard how trusting she'd always been that Nancy must be an extremely naive woman. But on reflection I recalled that I had known many women, and even some men as well, who ignored even the most telling evidence of sexual disloyalty, who appeared almost to prefer to look the other way so as to deny their spouse's infidelities. To accomplish this, they generally convinced themselves that the spouse was unusually worthwhile—a talent, a prodigy, a fantastic father, a magnificent mother, a superb provider. I was to learn that Nancy took the tack that Bill was a genius—an eccentric one, perhaps, but nevertheless a genius. There are many marriages in which there is a star and a supporting cast. The Douglases' marriage seems to have been one of them.

In such marriages, the star is not just coddled but excused. In this case, no matter what Nancy found out about her husband—that he was having an affair with another woman, that he was in love with that woman—she would lay the blame for his actions, not on him, but on someone or something else. At fault were the pressures of academic life, Bill's demanding supervisors at Tufts, or even, poor woman, herself. She was Bill's fan, and never—at least in the public eye—did she waver from that role.

But although she may not have blamed Bill for it, by October 1982 Nancy Douglas had at last become unable to hide from herself the probability that he was seeing another woman. Characteristically, she believed that if she hadn't taken a night job, he might not have been unfaithful. But no matter whose fault it was, she felt she needed to know what was going on, and she confronted Bill with her fears.

What happened next was typical of their marriage—and, I suppose, of many marriages. Bill, apologizing profusely, told her about his girlfriend and asked Nancy if she wanted a divorce. She said no, not if they could patch things up. Bill said they could and promised her that from now on he'd stop seeing Robin and try to spend more time at home. And although he assured her that none of it was her fault, Nancy promised Bill that from now on she would no longer work nights.

She kept her end of the bargain, but Bill didn't keep his, He went on seeing Robin. And one night, in a burst of misery, Nancy penned a kind of diary entry to herself, pouring out her problems on paper. “Why is this happening? Why won't he just come home?” she wrote. “I think he's on drugs, too. Oh, God. Please help me. Please, please help me. I can't take any more.”

While Nancy was bemoaning her fate, the Tufts investigation was deepening. But Douglas kept stalling the examiners about bringing in Robin and Savi. And, curiously, though he now knew for certain that his expenses were being scrutinized, in November he submitted a bill for $3,597 for graphic work performed by Robin.

What possessed him to go on with the deceit once he had been warned he was being watched? Perhaps cocaine had scrambled his brain. The drug produces euphoria, a sense of invulnerability, and the conviction that the mores of the rest of the world need not govern one's own behavior. No doubt, too, the fact that his career was now in jeopardy because of Robin may have strengthened his resolve to hold on to her; if he couldn't have her, then what had it all been for? However, there was no way to see Robin without paying for the privilege. And so he paid, and continued to pay.

But he had always felt subjugated by his passion for her, and a change began to come over him. He became resentful. He didn't let on to Robin that it angered him to keep having to fork over money to her. He gave her whatever she asked. But increasingly he would spitefully, passive-aggressively, get even with her by going behind her back.

One night in November, she'd been irritable throughout the latest costly hour they'd spent together, and nothing he'd done or said had helped to alleviate her mood. They had argued the whole time. Yet, at the end of the hour, she had demanded her usual fee. It made him furious and later, after he'd left her, he decided to get even with her by breaking into her apartment and stealing from her. “What upset me,” he would eventually explain, was that “I ended up paying for the hour, but it really bothered me because I didn't feel that that was right.”

Her place at this time was on Commonwealth Avenue, the apartment to which she moved after Dwyer forced her to vacate her Marlborough Street pad. At the time of the move, Robin had asked Douglas to assist her, and he'd rented the U-Haul and done the driving and unloading. Another bit of help she'd asked of him was that he go to a locksmith's and get several sets of keys made for her. He'd done that, too. But without her permission or knowledge, he'd had an extra set made for himself.

On the night in question, he returned to the building after his quarrelsome hour with Robin and, parking his car outside, lurked there, studying her comings and goings. He saw her go in with a john, come out a while later, get into her car, drive off, and return with a new man. Every half hour or hour she'd leave, drive away, and return in some twelve to twenty minutes. Her routine would, he realized, give him just enough time to stage a robbery.

He'd done it before. He'd staged a break-in at her old apartment. There, he'd crept around to the back of the building, broken a pane in the rear door to gain entry, and then stolen Robin's telephones and an answering machine he'd bought her as a present, careful to scatter her other possessions around so that it would look like a regular robbery.

This time, on Commonwealth Avenue, it was going to be a lot easier. He wouldn't have to risk arousing the neighbors by breaking any glass. He had the keys, so he'd just let himself in. And this time he'd steal cash, not just electronic equipment. She loved money, and its loss would really annoy her, he thought. And besides, if he took money, the robbery would truly seem authentic.

He waited until she left on one of her forays back to Good Time Charlie's. Then, stealthily, he let himself into her apartment and stole $300 as well as the new answering machine he'd given her to replace the old one. But while he took cash and the phone machine, he also made off with something no bona fide robber would have. He pocketed her little red address book, with the names and phone numbers of most of her clients.

Robin, returning from Good Time Charlie's, a client nuzzling her neck, arrived home to chaos. Always edgy and prone to hysteria, she flew into a tantrum, began to sob and rage, told Douglas for weeks afterward how violated she'd felt by the weirdo who'd ripped her off. He agreed that the robber was a “freak.” He agreed so heartily that although J.R. suspected the robber might have been the professor himself, Robin said she didn't think so.

Perhaps she didn't want to know. By now, she had a veritable passion for money, and Douglas was her most reliable source. He had given her so much money, so many gifts, and now he was promising to help her buy the one thing she desired above all others—a house of her own. She'd wanted one ever since she'd been a little girl in Methuen, sharing a bedroom with her sister, squeezing into the tiny dining alcove with her parents, her sister, and her three brothers. J.R., who was still her constant companion, thought she should cut the professor loose, but she ignored his advice and went on seeing him.

In the next few weeks, Bill learned things about Robin he hadn't known, or at least fully accepted, before. Armed with her address book, he learned about all her numerous clients, and listening to the messages on her phone machine, in particular an affectionate one she'd left for J.R., he at last realized that she had a pimp.