The Professor and the Prostitute Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then one day in the late spring it occurred to him that he might be able to get the money with which to swing the high cost of Robin Benedict. His grants entitled him to hire personnel. Why not employ Robin, put her on the payroll of some of his research projects at Tufts?
    It was, he thought, a brainstorm of an idea. Robin had told him—as clearly so many of the girls at Good Time Charlie’s tell their customers—that she was only going to be a hooker for a short time, just long enough to get some capital together. Then she was going to look for more respectable work. His willingness to believe her was part of his whole fantasy about her, his notion, not that she was a hooker with a heart of gold (even he knew that wasn’t the case), but that she was a hooker with a golden brain. (He was so persuaded of her intellect that he eventually enrolled her in one of his scientific groups, the Tissue Culture Association, although there may have been vanity as well as admiration in this. He published scientific papers in the association’s journal, In Vitro , and no doubt hoped she would read them, or at least notice them, and be impressed.) Therefore, putting Robin on the Tufts payroll seemed a solution to his dilemma that had advantages all around. Not only would it enable him to go on affording her, but it would bring her closer to him, give her an awareness of his importance in the scientific world, and start her out on her path toward respectability.
    Soon thereafter, he sat down at his desk in the lab and wrote Robin a lengthy memo setting forth his plan. He would tell Tufts that she was working for him. Tufts would pay her for that work $200 a week, by university check, which would cover his first two-hour visits with her each week. He knew she might find it a nuisance to be paid by check, but in the end she might discover that it was in fact beneficial to earn money this way because it would legitimize her. “When you retire from ‘business,’” he pontificated, “your résumé will not have a five-year gap.”
    Robin liked the scheme, and from that time forward, he claimed she was a graduate student from MIT whom he had hired to illustrate cell cultures.
    The woman who had caught the fancy of the odd but respected professor was only twenty years old and had been out of high school for only two and a half years. But she was already well entrenched in prostitution. Robin Benedict had turned up in the Combat Zone in the beginning of 1982. Almost immediately she came to the attention of the Boston Vice Squad. Detective Billy Dwyer spotted her on the street, told her to get moving (Boston permits solicitation only indoors, not out), and received a sharp, sarcastic response. “She was irritating, aggressive, too full of backtalk for her own good,” he told me one night.
    He and I were taking a tour of the Zone in Dwyer’s unmarked car, his partner at the wheel. Dwyer, so intense that he conveys the sense of having banked but still-smoldering fires within, was talking to me over one shoulder, over the other keeping an eye out for any problems. From time to time he’d bark something at a hooker or a pimp—he knew them all—and they would startle and look uneasy. He shouted at a girl who seemed to be ogling a man across the street that she’d better get moving; at another, who’d just been released from jail on a robbery charge, that he wanted to see her release papers, so she’d better double-time it over to the car. Dwyer is known in the Zone as Billy the Driver, and everyone he shouted at complied with lightning speed. But apparently Robin hadn’t. “She was one tough little number,” Dwyer said. “The kind of girl you just knew would get into deep trouble. In fact, one day my boss said to her, ‘Do you have any tattoos?’ She snapped, ‘Why?’ And he told her, ‘Just so that when we fish you out of the