by Linda Wolfe
Douglas was desperate to find out if it was true. Shortly after getting her message, he drove to a motel in the vicinity of the Danish Health Club. Behind the motel was a forested, snowy hill from which the club was visible. Taking a pair of binoculars, he climbed up among the trees and, hidden, waited to see if Robin’s car would turn up at the club. When it did, he knew she was lying to him and his spirits plunged even lower.
But the worst was still to come. On January 11, he was once again called to a meeting at Tufts on the matter of his expenses. This time he was informed that the auditors now knew for certain that he had been stealing from his grants. He was asked for his resignation. He had no choice but to give it.
The following day he turned up at his laboratory to collect his research and personal possessions. But he was denied entry. And the chairman of Anatomy and Cellular Biology, a woman who had sought him out six years earlier because she had the highest respect for his research and believed he would round out the department, came and escorted him off the premises. He stood at the elevator saying goodbye to her, and even as he did so locksmiths arrived and changed the locks on his office and laboratory.
In his desk drawer, never to be retrieved by him, were two eight-by-ten photographs of drawings Robin had done. One was a picture of three flowers, and on its back was the inscription: “To my favorite Prof. Talk to you later. Robin. 8/11/82.” The other depicted a pretty girl surrounded by four natty men in tuxedos. On the back of this one was the message: “To my favorite professor. I signed [this] while we were sitting in my home in Natick on November 18, 1982. A moment I do believe you will treasure for quite some time. (Me too.) You can never tell what we are going to do next. It’s been wonderful and will be more wonderful in times to come. Let’s enjoy them. Always, Robin.”
He thought about her constantly in the next few days, and on January 14 he wrote to her, pouring out his loneliness and his disgrace. “I need your help!” he wrote. “I am so depressed and sad. Everything in my life is going wrong lately. I truly need a friend that I can talk with and share things with.”
The letter went unanswered. And on January 21 he went back to Saugus and, concealed among the trees high up on the hill behind the motel, spied on her once again. There was her Toyota, which he’d paid for, in the health club parking lot. He made up his mind to get even with her for turning her back on him after all he’d done for her, lost for her. But how?
The idea came to a him a moment later. As he was leaving the hill, he noticed a billboard with the name and telephone number of a man selling garage doors, a Mr. Schloss. He went to a telephone booth and, dialing the Saugus Board of Health, asked for the health commissioner. When Joseph Tabbi, health agent for the town of Saugus, got on the wire, he said in a high falsetto, “My name is Mr. Schloss. I’m on the road a lot. I’m a salesman.” And he then proceeded to inform Tabbi that over at the Danish Health Club, there was a woman who claimed to be a masseuse but who was really a prostitute. “The woman is there in the club, now,” he complained. “You’ve got to do something about it.”
The health agent said he’d send someone right over.
Douglas drove to a restaurant that had a good view of the Danish Health Club. He asked the waitress to give him a window table. He ordered food and toyed with it nervously, looking out the window until he saw a car pull up at the club and a man with a harried expression and businesslike gait go inside. A few minutes later the man reappeared, this time with the manager of the club. The two walked around to the back of the building, deep in serious conversation. He saw them look at Robin’s car. Then the men went back inside, and a few minutes later Robin came out, carrying her bag. Moments later she left the Danish Health Club parking lot, never to return. She too had been fired. And he had engineered—and even gotten to witness—the whole humiliating scene.
If Douglas was pleased with himself at the time, afterward he found that his revenge gave him little satisfaction. Despite his fury at Robin, he still wanted to see her. But whenever he managed to reach her, she said they were finished.
He refused to believe her and held long dialogues with himself in which he consoled himself with the thought that surely one of these days she’d make up with him. Hadn’t she said once that she’d learned forgiveness in the bosom of her family? Hadn’t she told him all about how she’d had an uncle who’d stolen money from her parents and landed in jail but been forgiven by the family, who’d even gone to visit him? Anyway, Robin would no doubt make up with him someday because even when she’d been angriest, she’d never said, “I will never see you again.” It was one of the things he treasured most about her. And besides, there was something else that gave him hope. It was the way she liked money. He figured her passion for money was particularly related to her passion for cocaine. And if only he could get another job, if only he could offer her the money with which to indulge her habit, surely he’d be able to persuade her to see him again.
His musings proved right. Several weeks later, the State University of New York in Plattsburgh, his old stamping ground, came through with a job offer. He’d sent out feelers to SUNY shortly after the Tufts investigation had begun and now, unaware of the scandal, they promised him a professorship, starting in September, and invited him to come to Plattsburgh immediately to codirect a week-long seminar in tissue culture. Taking heart, he called Robin and asked her to accompany him. And, his good fortune making him euphoric and expansive, he promised her that if she would come, he’d pay her $1,000 a day.
Robin said yes. How could she, why would she, when by now she knew that Douglas was shadowing her, even if she didn’t know he was behind her arrests and the health club firing? The answer was in part Robin’s greed. Just as Douglas had suspected, when offered enough money, she could readily put anger aside. But apparently she also, like many beautiful women, believed that because an admirer said he loved her, he truly did, and that this meant he would never hurt her, that she would always be the person in control of the relationship. On February 17, the next to the last day of the seminar, she flew to Plattsburgh.
Bill met her at the airport, and they spent the night together. The following morning she accompanied him to the last sessions of the seminar. He was overjoyed, his troubles forgotten, at least for the moment. He was back in the city in which he had gone to college, been a nobody, a shy youth with no prospects. Now he had just finished directing a highly esoteric conference on the subject of tissue culture. He was surrounded by the leading lights in his field, scholars who were exploring the very farthest edges of the mysteries of biology, creating life in glass dishes, playing God. And he was there with Robin, his Galatea. That morning, during a break in the formal part of the seminar, he introduced her to his colleagues. Completely immersed in fantasy, he pretended to his peers and perhaps even to himself that she was not the tawdry, drug-dependent hooker from the Combat Zone who went down on strangers in the back of their cars, but a classy, brilliant young scientist, the kind of girlfriend he had always longed for. He told his colleagues she was his graduate student, one of his brightest. That’s why he’d brought her.
Several of his colleagues tried to make conversation with her that day. One probed her about her goals. What were her major interests? What kind of research was she pursuing? Robin mumbled a few words, then retreated.
Eventually, Bill and Robin got into his car and started the drive back to Boston. He had promised to give her the thousand dollars once they arrived there.
The drive home started off pleasantly enough. Robin wanted a new nightgown, and Douglas suggested they look for one at a large shopping center in Plattsburgh. He knew the place well. He’d worked right there, in the Grand Union, when 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 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.
“I’m Chris,” the girl said boldly. Then she hurried out of the hospital and disappeared.
“That’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, keys in hand, requested box number 920. An attendant checked the records, determined that the box was registered in the names of both Robin Benedict and William Douglas, and allowed her to unlock it.
The box was empty. She left the vault precipitously and, apparently suspecting now that if Bill had any money he must be keeping it at home, asked the attendant if she might use the telephone. She called Bill and told him she was coming out to his house.
He went into a panic. Robin in Sharon! Robin at his home. He was no longer as eager to see her as he had been only a week earlier. The sensation of having long-nailed fingers driven into his ears the night before was still sharp within him. She might try to hurt him again. Worse, how could he be sure she was coming alone? Maybe she was bringing her pimp. Or some other of her associates. Once, long before, she’d told him how she’d gotten friends of hers to beat up a cab driver who’d insulted her. Who knew what she might do to him? Frightened, he telephoned
the Sharon Police Department.
A sergeant answered, and Douglas told him that the night before he’d been with a woman and she’d stolen his briefcase. Now she’d telephoned and said she was coming to his home to extort money from him in exchange for the briefcase.
The sergeant assigned a police officer to go over to Douglas’s house.
Douglas was inside the conventional clapboard ranch house, explaining the situation to police officer James Testa, when Robin’s silver Toyota pulled up in the driveway. She was alone, he saw at once, and all of a sudden he felt ridiculous for having called the police. What if she discovered he’d done that? What would she think of him? He raced outdoors and, cornering her as she began crossing his lawn, begged her to talk with him in the driveway.
It was useless. She wanted to go inside to look for the money. The two of them began shouting at each other, and soon they were making such a commotion that Officer Testa hurried out of the house to keep them from disturbing the Sharon peace. The sight of the cop enraged Robin even further, just as Douglas had anticipated. She began screaming that he had stolen something from her. “Give me back what belongs to me,” she yelled, “and I will give you back what belongs to you.”
Officer Testa made them both come down to the station house and, thinking they were having a mere lovers’ quarrel, gave them a lecture. They should try to work out their problem in a more mature fashion, he told them.
During the next few days, Robin’s life was filled with activities that had nothing to do with Douglas. One afternoon, she sought out a friend from her high school days who had become a carpenter and took him to see the renovations in her new house. She wanted his opinion on whether the work was being done right. Another day, she went home to Methuen to attend the funeral of an aunt. Afterward, she paid a call on another high school friend, and over coffee told him, too, about the ambitious renovations, even about the handsome curtains she had just bought. Like Zola’s Nana, who before her untimely demise was preoccupied with redesigning her bedroom, Robin struck her friends as having nothing on her mind but interior decoration. But in fact she was still locked into her financial dispute with Douglas, and she continued to do battle with him on the telephone. One time she told him that if he didn’t pay up, she’d go to the Boston newspapers with the story of their relationship. Then she threatened to come to his house again. And one day, about a week after her first visit, she made good on the threat. She drove to Sharon and, telephoning from the firehouse in town, shouted so loudly that a fireman overheard her say, “I have your slides and the other items. I am going to come over now.”