The Professor and the Prostitute Read Online Free PDF

river—and I’ll bet we have to someday—we’ll know who you are.’”
    Robin’s parents described her differently. They maintained that, despite her line of work, she was sweet-tempered, a good girl, a devoted daughter.
    Theirs was a cross-cultural marriage. Shirley Benedict, Robin’s blond and buxom mother, grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts. John Benedict, Robin’s father, is a handsome Hispanic Trinidadian with high cheekbones and deeply set eyes that make him look like the sculptures of long-ago Amerindians. Color was an issue in the family. Robin indicated to friends, back in the days when she was in high school, that her father did not approve of her dating black men.
    John was a commercial photographer employed by the Raytheon Corporation in Lawrence. Shirley worked as the manager of a jewelry store in a shopping mall there. They had five children—three boys and two girls. Robin was the fourth child and first daughter. This gave her a certain distinction; when she was born, her father hung a sheet across the front of the house, trained a slide projector on it, and displayed in majestic, magnified letters the message: “It’s a girl!”
    He had longed for a girl, and from the time she was an infant, he and this first daughter developed a special, exclusive attachment to one another. He said of Robin once, “I have five kids. But I just have one little girl.” She said of him, “My daddy is my daddy.” He shot thousands of pictures of her as she was growing up, and she early mastered a self-confident grin and a model’s easy poise.
    The Benedicts raised their children in Methuen, a small city in northern Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border. In the early years of this century, it was a thriving milltown, attracting to its hilly streets a scrambled mix of immigrants. But eventually the mills shut down, and Methuen, like many New England towns, sank into lethargy. Unemployment grew severe, and crime flourished. Later, as a result of new high-tech plants, there was some economic revival, but there is still so much traffic in heroin and cocaine in the area that Lawrence—the town that borders Methuen and where Methuen teenagers go for high school—has an unusually high crime rate.
    There are a handful of nice streets and houses in both Lawrence and Methuen. But for the most part, this is a region of dilapidated housing projects, rambling oversize Victorian houses that have begun to crumble and decay, and small ill-kempt ranch houses on quarter-acre lots. Robin grew up in one such ranch house, a tiny green home with graying white shutters, which must have been cramped indeed when all five of the Benedict children were living there.
    Still, the Benedicts managed. And they had fun as a family. John managed a marching group, the White Eagles Drum and Bugle Corps, and the children, carrying flags and brandishing shiny sabers, participated in holiday parades in the nearby New England towns. Summers, all the children went on vacation trips with their parents, and on holidays Shirley would dress the boys in suits and the girls in prim little coats with matching bonnets, and John would take their pictures.
    In 1975 Robin entered the Greater Lawrence Regional Vocational Technical High School, known as the Voke. By then, she was a popular, fashion-conscious teenager who aspired to being voted her class’s best-dressed member. She also had some artistic proclivities, according to one of her teachers, who said she was “one of the most talented people in the commercial art department.”
    She seemed, in those days, no different from other teenagers. She became a jogger, and whenever she felt she was gaining weight, she would put in extra time, running around a reservoir close to her house. She took up the flute, and whenever she felt dreamy or troubled, she would sit cross-legged on her bed and play, favoring in particular the sweet tunes of