The Professor and the Prostitute (10 page)

Back in the house, he began searching for them. Where had she put them? He looked in her pocketbook, but they weren't there. He thrust his hands deep inside the dead girl's pants pockets, but they weren't there either. At last he forced himself to open the plastic bag and rummage through the pockets of her bloody corduroy jacket. He found the keys.

Going outside, he backed the car up to the deck, which was adjacent to the kitchen, and returning inside, dragged the body, still swaddled in the quilt, out of doors. The Christmas tree he and Nancy had gotten for the children in December had been discarded out on the deck, and the planks were slippery with pine needles. He pulled the comforter through the needles and hefted it into the hatchback.

The town was silent, its crescents and side streets dark. He drove for a while, taking back roads, then realized he didn't really know how to get rid of Robin, how to get rid of her remains. He pulled over and sat motionless, worrying the problem over and over in his head. And just then—or so he was to say—he remembered the call he had made to her answering service, the call about the party at Joe's in Charlestown. If he telephoned the answering service now and left a message
from
Robin for J.R., one that indicated she'd gone to the party, it would give him time. J.R. would believe that Robin was in Charlestown, at the all-night celebration, and wouldn't worry about her. The thought spurred him on and he started the car, drove to a nearby shopping mall, and placed the call. The voice in which he spoke to the answering service was pitched high and sultry, a girl's voice.

After that, still with no clear idea of what he was going to do, he started driving south on I-95. But as he drove, he kept thinking that some of Robin's associates might have known she was going to his house. Suppose they came looking for her? Suppose they were already there? Nervous, he stopped the car at a rest area on the road and telephoned Nancy. “Is there anyone there?” he demanded. “Were there any calls?”

Nancy said she'd just walked in the door and asked where he was. He didn't tell her. He just said, “I have a problem and I'll tell you about it later,” then hung up abruptly. But moments later he realized he'd forgotten to instruct her to lock all the doors. He called her back and directed her to do so. He used his credit card to make both those calls.

Then, standing there after he'd hung up again, he noticed that the rest area was replete with garbage barrels and dumpsters. Maybe he could get rid of the plastic bag with the bloodied clothes and hammer in one of them. It was a great idea, he thought. But there were several cars and tractor-trailers parked at the rest area. Some of them had their lights on. Most likely the drivers weren't sleeping. They might notice him. Frustrated, he got back into the car and, making a U-turn, began driving north.

In a few minutes, a sign for another rest area appeared. He pulled over. This rest stop was deserted. Moving quickly, he opened the Toyota's hatch, removed the plastic bag, and heaved it into a trash barrel.

Back in the car and continuing north, he thought briefly, and for the first time since he had killed Robin, that perhaps he ought to confess. After all, the killing hadn't been entirely unprovoked. After all, she'd been trying to extort money from him. And she'd hit
him
with the hammer. He had deep wounds to prove it. The police might feel some sympathy for him. Detective Dwyer might. He decided that he would drive into Boston and turn Robin's body and himself over to Dwyer. But when he reached the city, he knew he couldn't do it. No one would understand. So he just kept driving. After a while he came to a gas station and filled up the tank of the Toyota. He credited the purchase to his own registration number, not Robin's.

Later, passing the Boston train station, he got out and telephoned Nancy again, once more demanding to know if anyone had been to the house and whether she and the kids were all right. Nancy wanted to know what was going on, but he wouldn't tell her.

He drove some more. He drove right through the Combat Zone, where he had first met Robin, and along Commonwealth Avenue, where he had once broken into her apartment. Eventually he came to Brookline, and there, on a quiet residential street, he saw a garbage dumpster and decided to put her body into it.

His mind made up, he got out of the car, went around to the back, and started to haul her out. Suddenly, he jumped. The body was making a noise. It was not a breath but a sort of eerie sound, the sound of the residual air in her lungs being expelled. It was a sound he would never forget.

Nor would he ever forget, he said, the way, at precisely the same moment, a light came on in a house close to where he was standing. Petrified, he banged down the door of the hatchback and, keeping Robin's body inside, got back in the car and started driving again.

He drove for hours. At one point during the night he found himself in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and stopped for a cup of coffee at a Howard Johnson's. Then he made his way from Pawtucket to Providence. There, he left the highway and came to a large housing complex and shopping center. He saw a big supermarket, a Radio Shack, a Rhode Island blood bank, and lots of dumpsters. The sun was starting to come up. It was now or never. He got out of the car and, removing several bags of garbage from a loaded dumpster, made room for his own discards. Then, seizing the bloody comforter, blankets, and Robin's body, he shoved them into the trash. He was done with her now.

That morning, Nancy met him at the bus station near their home in Sharon. He'd telephoned her from Providence, where he'd parked Robin's car in a lot after throwing her pocketbook and the bloody towels in various dumpsters, and asked her to pick him up. But although she complied, she was in a stormy mood. She kept insisting that he tell her what was going on.

He said he didn't want to talk about it.

She said, “I've got a right to know. You were out all night.”

He started to make up a lie, started to pretend he'd been in Boston all night, and then, without meaning to, broke down and spilled out what had happened. They were on the road, nearly home, early churchgoers passing them on the quiet Sunday morning streets, and he blurted out that he'd killed the girl.

Nancy responded as any wife might. She began screaming. But he was bewildered. He'd always thought of her as a quiet, controlled person, and now here she was, positively hysterical, and one of the things she was yelling and screaming about was that he shouldn't have told her. This, even though she'd pushed him to it. Resentful, but hoping to calm her down, he swore to her that no matter what happened in the future, he would never ever admit to anyone that he'd told her of the killing. Then, together, they entered their home.

Inside, he went into the bedroom, shut the door, and checked his head wound. He'd been wearing a tight knitted cap over it, but as soon as he removed the cap, the wound opened up and started bleeding. He sopped up the blood with tissues, flushed them away, and made himself a proper bandage. Then he went out, drove to a grocery store in a nearby town, and called Robin's answering service. Once again using his girl's falsetto, he pretended to be Robin herself, with a message for J.R. She'd left Joe's in Charlestown, ran the message, and was going over now to visit that rich new john she'd been with the evening before. His voice high, he trilled out the address. He'd jotted it down the night before while monitoring her calls.

Back in his bedroom at home, he made his final plans. So far, everything had gone nearly perfectly. He'd really gotten things under control. But there was still the matter of Robin's car. He'd have to get rid of it. But how? He thought about the scientific meeting he was supposed to attend in Washington the next day. Perhaps he could go back to Providence, get Robin's car, and dispose of it in Washington. Or, better yet, dispose of it on the
way
to Washington. He decided that was the best idea. He'd get Nancy to drive him back to the bus station. He'd tell her, since she'd said she wanted to know nothing further about the killing, that he was taking the bus into Boston in order to catch his train to Washington. But, in fact, he'd take a bus to Providence, get the car, abandon it somewhere safe, and
then
catch a train to Washington.

In the meantime, before he had to leave, he'd best dispose of the contents of Robin's pocketbook. Getting out a scissors, he cut her driver's license into tiny pieces; later he would toss away the pieces. But he couldn't bear to part with her new little address book. It made him so curious. He kept it, hiding it in his bedroom alongside the pink panties she'd tucked in his pocket the night of his false-alarm heart attack.

Savi Bisram called Douglas a couple of times that afternoon. Robin hadn't shown up for Taj's birthday party, and since it was altogether unlike her to disappoint the child, she was afraid something might have happened to her. Had he seen her?

Not since midnight, he said, since Savi seemed to know that they'd had an appointment. Robin hadn't stayed long, he went on. They'd talked, looked at some porno slides, and then around midnight she'd gone off to some party. In Charlestown, he thought. Then he told Savi he was sorry he couldn't be of more help, but he was leaving town shortly to attend a conference in Washington. Later, he must have feared he'd sounded callous, for he called her back and, not reaching her, left a mesage for her with another hooker friend. If Savi needed any more assistance from him, he said, she could reach him at his Washington hotel. He left the number.

Late in the day, he proceeded with his plan to get rid of Robin's car. Nancy drove him to the bus station; he was, had anyone noticed him that chilly Sunday afternoon, just another suburban husband being chauffeured by his wife, hurrying to catch a commuter bus to Boston, waving a fond goodbye. But as soon as Nancy drove off he went not to Boston but to Providence. He took Robin's car out of the Providence lot and drove it to New York. He parked it in a garage close to the railroad station and, removing the inspection sticker and license plates, abandoned it. Feeling more secure than he had in hours, he then walked from the garage to New York's Pennsylvania Station and bought a train ticket to Washington.

He arrived in Washington at around 8
A.M.
on Monday, March 7, and it must have seemed to him, at that moment, that he had committed the perfect crime, engineered the perfect cover-up. He had disposed of both the body and the car, and he had planted clues, all sorts of clues, suggesting that Robin had been with other people after she left him—and therefore she had obviously been alive when she left his house. If his luck continued to hold, the car would never even be discovered. It would sit in the garage for years. If his luck continued to hold, Robin's body would never be found. It would be crushed by a garbage compactor and incinerated or buried. And if he was
really
lucky, people would assume that the always erratic, always unpredictable Robin had just decided to leave town.

Did he never for a moment that weekend think of how he had once loved her? I remember expecting, as I leafed through his confession, that sometime soon he would refer to his long-gone passion, express, if not remorse, at least nostalgia. But in fact whenever he spoke of Robin, he did so with, at best, disdain, at worst, something far stranger, more impersonal.

Ultimately, it was as a result of one of these impersonal references to Robin that I grasped the emotional distance he had at last achieved from her. Describing to the district attorney's staff how he had hoisted her body into the dumpster, he referred to it as “the material.” It was so strikingly peculiar and inappropriate a word that even the detective who was interrogating him—Lieutenant James Sharkey, a man with over thirty years on the Massachusetts State Police force—was brought up short. “‘Material' being the body?” he interrupted Douglas. And Douglas said yes, he'd meant Robin's body, although of course it was wrapped in the comforter at the time, so he'd lumped the two together in his phrase.

Shadows

One day, long after Douglas had been caught and sentenced for the murder of Robin Benedict, Lieutenant Sharkey commented to me, “Our catching the professor was really just a matter of coincidence. He almost went scot-free. But there was one thing he didn't consider. About a month before he did away with Robin, Massachusetts went ecological and passed a bottle law. It was the bottle law that put Douglas behind bars.”

Sharkey was joking with me. He's a garrulous, wisecracking Irish cop, who never answers a “How are you?” without a “Couldn't be better if I was twins” or “Ready to run off with ya, but don't tell your husband.” In fact, he and his staff worked heroically to put Douglas behind bars, and the police work that went into solving the case was meticulous. But there was some truth to his observation, for if it wasn't for the bottle law, the police at the Norfolk County D.A.'s office might never have had the opportunity to do their work because the fact that Robin had been murdered might never have emerged.

The bottle law is the law that enables anyone returning beer or soda cans or bottles to obtain a refund. When it first went into effect in Massachusetts, middle-class, relatively comfortable people hardly gave it a thought. But those who were out of work or otherwise economically strapped immediately saw the law as a bonanza, a way to make a bit of cash by scavenging for cans and bottles.

Thus it was that on Sunday, March 6, two unemployed men, Joseph Plotegher and Robert Jewell, both of them with families to support, decided to go out scavenging on I-95. It was a cold morning, but they pursued their task assiduously, checking for cans on the side of the highway and, in particular, in the trash barrels at rest stops. At a rest stop near Foxboro, Plotegher peered into one trash barrel and saw a large brown plastic bag, knotted at the top. He hefted it out and, curious because it was unusually heavy, ripped it open. Inside were a beige jacket, a blue shirt, and a small sledgehammer, all covered with blood.