The Professor and the Prostitute (9 page)

Robin had dinner with her parents that day. She acted carefree, joking with her father, trying on clothes with her sister. She told the family that she and J.R. would be getting their wallpaper on Sunday, and that as soon as everything was finished, she'd have them over to
her
house for a meal. She knew her father was uneasy about her living with a black man, she said, but if he got to know J.R., he might feel differently about the matter.

She also mentioned Professor Douglas. Her parents had met him in court on one of the occasions when she'd been arrested, and they'd chosen to believe him when he said he was her employer. They hadn't liked him, but they'd been impressed. Well, lately, said Robin, the man had become a pest. He'd been following her, bothering her. That very day she'd gotten so mad that she'd telephoned his wife at her job and told her to tell her husband to lay off.

The call to Nancy must have seemed to Douglas like a kind of final straw, for two days afterward, on March 4, he notified his bank to stop payment on the $200 check. It was Friday afternoon. Given what he knew of Robin, he would have been certain that when the banks opened on Monday and she discovered his perfidy, she would be violently angry. So it seems likely that he meant for her never to find out, that he had decided, that Friday afternoon, to do away with her over the weekend. Of course, it will never be possible to say with absolute certainty that he ever actually
decided
to do away with her. When he confessed to having killed her, he said he'd done so accidentally, and he denied having set a trap for her and luring her into it. Yet his first move, as soon as he'd stopped the check, was to telephone Robin and tell her that he'd pay her, and pay her in cash, if she would meet him one last time and hand over to him his possessions. His second was to suggest that their meeting take place in Sharon.

This was surprising, given his earlier resistance to having Robin visit him there. Suddenly, he did an about-face, and instead of being dismayed and frightened at her coming to his home, he began urging her to do so. Indeed, if she would come to the house, he told her, he would pay her
all
she said he owed. He informed her of this over the telephone on the evening he stopped payment on the check, and he repeated it to her again the next morning.

The second time he proposed it, Robin agreed to the suggestion. She'd be at his home later that night, she said. She wasn't sure just when, but she'd call and let him know.

Apparently, it didn't cross her mind that this might be a dangerous visit. Apparently, she didn't sense that she had been goading Bill beyond his endurance. Yet, why not? Her parents didn't trust him. The day they met him, he'd given Shirley Benedict the creeps by boasting that he knew everything there was to know about chemistry, even how to concoct poisons that could kill a person and yet go undetected in the body. Nor did J.R. trust him. And on the day she made her final date with the professor, her street-smart boyfriend questioned the wisdom of her going to his house alone.

Robin ignored her lover's concern. Her attitude seemed to be that she knew perfectly well how to take care of herself, and just as she had defied her parents in regard to living with Costic and J.R., she defied J.R.'s anxieties about Douglas. She and the professor had reached an understanding, she declared; he'd definitely be paying up tonight, and she'd go there alone, thank you.

Perhaps she was, as Detective Dwyer had said, a girl bent on rebellion. Or perhaps, with the lack of self-regard that Dwyer's boss had noticed in her the day he'd predicted she'd end up in the river, she was courting, had all along been courting, her own destruction.

Whatever her reasons, Robin made her date with Douglas and then went nonchalantly about her business that Saturday afternoon. In the early hours, she shopped for a birthday present for Taj, Savi and J.R.'s son, who was going to be celebrating his fourth birthday the next day. Later, she dressed carefully for work, laying out her jewelry and clothes on the brass bed at the house in Malden before putting them on—gold earrings and a gold knot ring, brown pants, a beige shirt, and an expensive beige corduroy jacket she'd bought at Lord & Taylor's.

In the late afternoon she left the house and went out to her car, and it is possible that for a brief moment, just before she got behind the wheel, she experienced a sudden change of mind about visiting Douglas, or at least an urge to discuss the matter further with J.R. A neighbor saw her acting uncharacteristically indecisive. She approached her car, then walked away from it, then returned and stood beside it for a long time, all the whole staring wistfully back at the house. But, after this, Robin unlocked the door with her usual devil-may-care swiftness, and hurriedly drove off.

She drove into Boston and started hooking. She'd rented a new trick pad, this one on elegant Beacon Street again, and she went over there for a while and used some cocaine, scraping up the powdery white lines with a new hobby knife. Then she went to Good Time Charlie's and hung out at the bar for a bit. From time to time she called Douglas and said she'd be leaving for Sharon soon, but she was busy just now and would call him again when she knew what time she'd be starting out. At about 9
P.M.
she went on a date to meet an aristocratic new john. He came from one of the oldest families in Boston and lived in one of the city's newest, most fashionable buildings. He'd heard about Robin from the building's doorman, who'd met her a few weeks before at the bar of the Park Plaza Hotel and arranged the date for him.

Robin's new john, whose business was real estate, let her into his apartment, got her a drink, and chatted with her for about twenty-five minutes. She told him about how she'd attended the Rhode Island School of Design and how she was working as a prostitute just temporarily, just until she got together enough money to invest in something and retire. She thought it might take her three or four years.

He was very much taken with her. He is the kind of man, he likes to boast, who never misses a detail because if he does, he “loses a million.” Robin's details impressed him mightily. She spoke well and was well dressed. He felt he could have taken her anywhere on a date, “even to the Harvard Club.”

After a while he asked her to spend the night. But she said that tonight she was available only for “something quick.” She couldn't stay because there was something else she had to do. He didn't want a quickie, so he gave her $30 for the time she'd spent talking to him, and they agreed they'd get together some other night. Then she asked to use his phone, and she dialed a number. He overheard her saying, “I'll be leaving shortly. I'll be there in about a half hour.”

When she hung up, she said to the new john, by way of explanation, “I have to run in and out between the wife and children.”

Douglas's evening was far more tense. He'd made arrangements to have Nancy and the children out of the house by telling his wife that Robin was coming and that he intended to settle up and be done with her. Nancy had agreed that under the circumstances, it would be best if the family were gone, so she'd taken the boys out and sent Pammy baby-sitting. But Robin was taking forever about getting to Sharon, and he began to worry that she might not arrive before Nancy and the kids returned. Because he was so edgy—or so he said—he began telephoning Robin's answering service and, impersonating J.R., picking up her messages. Then, at last, she called at about 9:30
P.M.
and said she was on her way. He waited a little while and then once again dialed her answering service, this time leaving a message
for
Robin. The message purported to be from a man named Joe who lived in Charlestown, and it was that there was going to be an all-night party at his place, commencing at 10:30
P.M.
that night and lasting until 6
P.M.
on Sunday, and that Robin was invited.

Why did he leave that message? the Norfolk County D.A.'s office was to demand of Douglas when he finally confessed. Why, because Robin had been teasing him all night about coming to Sharon and hadn't shown up, he said. And so, “when she didn't come at ten o'clock, I decided that since she was stringing me along, I would tease her … and send her on a wild goose chase to Charlestown. She would waste time and waste money, and time was money to her.”

Maybe that was why he made the call. But maybe not. Certainly it was a call that—at least for a time—got him right off the hook, threw suspicion for the events that subsequently transpired away from him and onto the unsuspecting Joe in Charlestown.

Those events, grizzly and gruesome, would soon begin racing to their conclusion. I learned about them from Douglas's confession, a lengthy, rambling account that took him two days to make. But they can be rapidly reported, swiftly recounted. They were hideous.

Robin pulled up at the house in Sharon at about 10:45
P.M
. Bill let her in, saying, “Come in quickly and shut the door,” and she immediately demanded, “Do you have the money?”

He told her he did, but that he didn't want to give it to her downstairs. There were too many windows; the neighbors might see him with a woman not his wife. He asked her to come upstairs. That's where the money was, anyway, he told her. He'd put it in a drawer in the microscope case he kept in his bedroom closet.

She led the way, and they went upstairs and into the bedroom. He opened the closet, bending down toward the microscope case and pulling open a little drawer. He extricated the money—hundred-dollar bills, all folded small and rolled together. He started to stand up. Then, as he straightened up, he told her that $2,000 was all she would be getting because it was all he had. He reached out to hand it to her. And then—or so he said—she hit him over the head with a hammer.

She had brought it with her, he claimed, and concealed it under her jacket. He hadn't noticed it, he insisted, although it was a two-and-a-half-pound sledgehammer. She hit him with it several times, striking him on his head, legs, arms, and trunk. He fell backward onto his bed, a king-size bed on which he and Nancy and the kids used to curl up to watch TV, and she loomed over him. Suddenly he lunged upward, twisted her wrist with one hand, grabbed the hammer with the other, and began pushing
her
down onto the bed.

She started screaming. She shrieked that he was a bum and that he owed her $5,000, not just $2,000. She hit him and kicked him and sunk her teeth into the inside of his thigh. He lifted the hammer and brought it crashing down on her skull.

The hammer touched flesh, and it seemed to him to keep right on going. It cracked her skull, and he could see not just skin but brain tissue. He hit her again. And then maybe a third time. He couldn't be sure how many blows he struck, but by the end of the second or third time he hit her, the hammer had penetrated her skull an inch and a half.

He was dazed, crazed, beside himself. But a few seconds later he came to his senses. He leaned over her and tried to take her pulse. But he felt nothing, neither on the inside of her wrist nor at the carotid artery on her neck, and he knew that he had killed her. “My God!” was the first thought that flashed through his mind. “My God! What if Billy and Pammy and John walked in through that door?”

It was a horrible thought, more horrible to him than what he had done, and it mobilized him, made him leap into activity so that his brutality might never be known to them.

He attended, first, to himself. His head wound was bleeding copiously, so he went into the bathroom and, scooping up some towels, pressed them firmly against his forehead, attempting to staunch the blood. It worked, and as soon as the bleeding subsided, he lowered his trousers and checked the inside of his thigh, where Robin had bitten him. He could see her teethmarks on his flesh, but fortunately the bite hadn't pierced the surface of his skin.

He was ready, then, for housekeeping. Pulling up his trousers and clutching the bloodstained towels, he ran to the hall closet, where Nancy kept a stack of old paper shopping bags. He grabbed one and returned to the bedroom. Robin's jacket was covered with blood, and so was the old blue shirt he himself was wearing, so he removed his shirt and shoved it and the jacket into the shopping bag. Then he tried to hide the weapon. But where? Momentarily disoriented, he grabbed a blue windbreaker from the back of the closet and tried to conceal the hammer in one of its capacious pockets. But the pocket was far too small. Hanging the jacket back in the closet, he threw the hammer into the brown bag. Then he noticed that blood was starting to seep through the bag. If he wasn't careful, the weight of the hammer would rip it right open. He ran into the kitchen, got a plastic garbage bag this time, and dumped the contents of the brown bag into that.

There was blood all over. Blood on the comforter on which Robin lay dead. Blood on the floor. Blood on the radiator behind the bed. It wasn't a lot of blood, but it was splattered here and there throughout the room. Most of it was his own, from the wounds Robin had inflicted on him. She seemed hardly to be bleeding at all. Still, it was important that there be no blood in the house at all, none, not even his own. He ran back to the bathroom, grabbed the hand towels he had used to clean himself, and began wiping up the gore with them and stuffing them into the brown paper bag. Then he got dressed, putting on a warm ski jacket with huge, deep pockets and somehow managing to cram the brown bag full of towels into one of the pockets. Finally, he went over to the bed and, with Robin still lying in the middle of the comforter, began to pull the comforter and the blankets beneath it off the bed. He made a kind of cradle that way and, holding the four ends, rocked Robin's body down the stairs and into the kitchen.

Now he was ready to leave. He would take her car, he decided. That way there would be no trace of her having been to his house. He went out to her car, but when he got inside, he couldn't start it. The keys weren't in the ignition, where she usually left them.