The Professor and the Prostitute by Linda Wolfe Page B

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.
    The discovery enraged him. He had acquiesced to all her demands, albeit while going behind her back to get even. He had been willing to satisfy his passion under any terms. Terms were par for her profession. But that there was another man in her life, a man to whom she gave herself freely, changed the whole picture. Previously, he’d refused even to consider that there might be such a man. But now he could no longer deny this truth to himself, and anger began to boil up in him.
    Robin’s behavior didn’t help the situation. Early in December, she took $25,000, which she had obtained from Douglas, and placed a down payment on a two-story wooden house on a shabby but respectable lower-middle-class street in Malden, Massachusetts. A local