Free The Professor and the Prostitute by Linda Wolfe Page B

financial debt, although several prostitutes who knew her told me they thought it was likely. “Lots of girls do it,” one of them said. “You go for what the market will bear.” “Robin was that type,” said another. “Out and out greedy. Like no matter how many men she’d had in a night, she’d steal your john right from under your nose.” A third made the point that Robin might have asked for outrageous interest simply as a way of making Douglas stop pestering her.
    Whether or not Robin actually asked Douglas for $2,000 in interest—and, if she did, what her reasons were—is unknowable, but certainly that night something happened to send him into an acute state of alarm. It occurred while he and Robin were driving. She was talking, he insisted, about the money he owed her. He was disagreeing, bargaining. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his chest. All this talk of high interest was more than he could stand. He was having a heart attack, he was sure. Giving up the wheel, he begged her to drive him at once to a hospital.
    At the hospital, Lynn Union, he was examined and given an EKG. It showed no heart muscle damage. Nevertheless, the staff thought he didn’t seem quite right and, deciding he was having some sort of panic attack, gave him a muscle relaxant. They also advised him not to do any driving while on the medication, and when Robin indicated she wouldn’t be taking him home, a nurse telephoned his wife and asked her to come for him.
    Bill lay down on a hospital cot. Robin stayed with him. A nurse came in, then left, and as soon as she was gone, Robin started in about the money again. Bill heard her as if through water. He was drowsy, submerging into sleep. Then, suddenly, he felt, or thought he felt, a hideous pain in his ear. He felt, or thought he felt, her driving one of her long-nailed fingers into his ear and he heard, or imagined he heard, her demanding that he pay her what he owed. Dazed, he rolled over onto his other side. She hovered over him and drove her finger into this ear, too. He kept tossing and turning, and no matter which side he rolled onto, she pushed her finger into his ear. At last she let him be, and he slept.
    Robin wandered about the hospital room. She looked into the pockets of his brown wool jacket to see if there was any money in it. There wasn’t. She opened his briefcase. No money there, either. But it did contain some trays of scientific slides, some grant proposals Bill had been reviewing, and the keys to his car, his house, and the safety deposit box he’d opened at her request. She stuffed the contents of the briefcase into her large handbag. Inside, she saw that she still had the little pink panties from the nightgown set he’d bought her in Plattsburgh. She pulled them out and, as if in exchange for what she had taken, tucked them into the pocket of his jacket.
    She almost left after that, but in the end she decided to linger for a while. Nancy was coming. Perhaps she relished the thought of how shocked the suburban housewife would be to see her there by her sick husband. Patiently, she sat at Bill’s bedside and waited.
    Nancy, concerned and confused, arrived at the hospital accompanied by a neighbor she’d asked to drive her to Lynn. The two women entered Bill’s room. They saw him lying pale and prostrate. And they saw at his side a pretty postadolescent girl.
    â€œI’m Chris,” the girl said boldly. Then she hurried out of the hospital and disappeared.
    â€œThat’s the girl, isn’t it?” Nancy whispered, but the neighbor overheard.
    Bill acknowledged that it was.
    Nancy, humiliated, was silent on the way home.
    The keys to the safety deposit box were of immediate interest to Robin. In the days when Bill had been flush with Tufts research funds, he’d often stashed away money in the box, so bright and early the next morning she went to the First National Bank in Boston and,