Free The Professor and the Prostitute by Linda Wolfe Page A

he’d been a timorous, inhibited high school student. Now he stood beside the alluring Robin and boldly examined lingerie with her. They fingered the fabrics, considered the colors, and at last he bought her a frivolous little outfit with brief pink panties.
    It was the last happy moment he was ever to spend with her. Back in the car again, she asked him to drive her to Charlestown, Massachusetts, before taking her into Boston. In Charlestown, she went alone to visit a friend, emerging a half hour later with a plastic sandwich bag half full of cocaine. The two of them sampled some of it and then headed for Boston. But the cocaine affected Robin badly. She became anxious and then, suddenly, paranoid. Someone in a yellow Volkswagen was following them, she insisted. A few minutes later, she said someone in a big van was also following them. She couldn’t go home, she cried. She’d be followed there. Something dreadful would happen to her. She begged Bill to check her into a motel.
    He found one in Natick, the Red Roof Inn, but as soon as he carried in the bags, she said she was sure she’d just seen the yellow Volkswagen go by. They left the motel hurriedly and looked for another, settling at last on one that was set well back from the road. He brought in the bags. She started to unpack. Then, her paranoia suddenly fulminating, she said her pursuers were in the room next door. They checked out of the second motel, too, and looked for still another. While they were driving, taking back roads and deserted streets, she suddenly demanded that he stop the car and hide the cocaine so that she couldn’t be caught with it.
    Where? How? He pulled over on a quiet residential street and punched the plastic bag into a snowbank in front of one of the houses.
    Later that night, ensconced in a third motel, Robin’s terrors finally evaporated. But as soon as she felt better, she begged Bill to retrieve the cocaine. It was the middle of the night and freezing cold, but he wanted to assuage her, so he went outside and started the car.
    He found the street on which he’d hidden the bag, but he couldn’t remember precisely where on the street he’d buried it. Was it ten houses from the corner? Twelve? In the cold dawn he began searching, clambering onto icy lawns and thrusting his hands into snowbanks. His feet grew soaking wet. His fingers numbed. But although he dug and dug, he couldn’t find the plastic sandwich bag, and finally, after an hour and a half, he gave up and returned to the motel.
    Robin was distraught. The coke had cost her about $700, she said.
    In the morning, according to Bill, she told him that she wanted, not just the thousand dollars he had promised her for the night in Plattsburgh, but another $2,000. She said it was because by now she’d been with him not just one day but three.
    He said he couldn’t afford all that. He said it wasn’t his fault that they’d spent all of Friday night trying to get away from whoever she thought was chasing her. But she stuck to her guns. He owed her $3,000, not just $1,000 or even $2,000.
    What had started off for him as a romantic reunion had turned into a nightmare from which he couldn’t seem to awaken.
    In the next few days, again according to Bill, the two of them were often on the phone with one another, apparently arguing over whether he owed her $2,000 or $3,000. He thought her unreasonable but told himself she’d come around, and on February 22 he made a date with her to discuss the exact amount of his debt.
    They met at a roadside restaurant near Lynn, went to a motel, and later were driving around in his car, arguing vociferously, when suddenly Robin sprang on him that he owed her not just $3,000 but $5,000. Her reason: since he hadn’t yet paid her a red cent on the initial debt, he owed her $2,000 in interest.
    Can Robin have been this usurious? We have only Bill’s word that she majestically escalated his