The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (31 page)

T
HE PROPERTY ON
Greenwood Avenue, less than a mile from Chapman Street, looked the same as those around it, if moderately worse for wear. The cracked paint was olive green with pale blue details. The three floors were sectored into separate apartments, with a front porch and backyard. A few of the windows were boarded up, and water stains veined the ceilings of the first and second floors. The neighborhood was not good by any stretch, but he could walk in and out of his door without worrying too much about who might be watching.

Ten thousand dollars down on a $90,000 house, with a fifteen-year fixed 5 percent interest rate, came out to roughly $700 per month in mortgage payments, plus insurance, plus taxes. He did the math, weighed the costs against his desire to own property, and bought a house.

Jackie did not understand this decision. Her son was twenty-four and unmarried, making as much as she'd ever made and in a more respectable profession but still not very much at all. If you had money, you spent it on your family. And the family needed it. Frances was too sick with emphysema to rise more than once a day from her bed in the first-floor living room (Rob gave $300 per month toward her medical costs, about 15 percent of his salary). And Horace sat hunched over in an easy chair beside his wife as each day passed and turned into the following, resigned to his worn body and dulled mind. Meanwhile, Jackie—now fifty-five years old—looked at him and saw what would happen to her, and not even too long from now.

She cherished so very much having Rob home—a strong male figure who could take care of the minutiae that, while he'd been away, had accelerated this aging process in her. And Rob doted over his grandparents, running out to fetch whatever they needed or wanted: tea, eggs, whiskey. They were people who had fought, and fought strongly, to raise a family and keep the house secure. He respected what they'd done above all things. The house on Chapman Street had taken on an elevated meaning when he'd come home from Rio. The house simply was; it had been here, lived in by the Peace family, for twenty years before he was born, and it had been here for twenty-four years since, and it would be here twenty years from now. No matter what he learned or where he went, these walls would always stand erect on this plot of land as a port of call for all those bearing his surname as well as some, such as Carl, who did not. The house was run-down and sparsely furnished, as it always had been, but it was also the most permanent and dependable entity he had ever known.

So why, Jackie wondered, was he so compelled to leave it?

“I just don't understand,” she told him, shaking her head, smoking her menthol. “It's just money you don't need to spend.”

“It's not spending money,” Rob replied. “It's an investment.”

“You can't think of any better investment than a busted-up house?”

“I'll rent out the upper and lower units. That'll cover the mortgage and taxes.”

“Good luck collecting rent on time from anyone who wants to live on Greenwood.”

“Oswaldo's going to help me make it nice. Then, down the road, I'll sell it. Make a profit.”

“Don't you know how
expensive
it is to fix up a house? Those contractors are cheats, all of them.”

“Ma, please.” He'd explained this before a few times, and listened to her reservations just as many. She'd been quiet about his Rio vacation, though she hadn't understood it. Now that he was teaching, she didn't mind so much that he seemed to have no plans to go back to school anytime soon. Her son had always possessed a natural capacity to influence people, and a place like St. Benedict's seemed to her an ideal place for him to use that gift. But as for the house on Greenwood, she had trouble standing idly by and watching her son make a mistake.

She'd known something like this would happen. Subconsciously, she'd known from the moment she'd taken him to Yale the first time: that her son would come home from this place and she would have no power to mother him anymore, because he would presume to know everything, just as the toddler incarnation of him, “the Professor,” had. Jackie wasn't as smart as her son. What she did have that he lacked were years—she had experience. While he certainly had more than most other American men his age, he didn't have as much as Jackie, not by a wide margin. All she wanted to do—all any parent wanted to do—was use this commodity to help her child in life. Experience had taught her that buying a fixer-upper in a lousy neighborhood for very little money down and a high interest rate was a terrible idea.

But Rob was like his father when he had his mind made up, and she didn't have the stamina to keep battling him.

Tavarus, with his real estate know-how, had first brought the idea of home ownership to Rob. He'd done the title research. He'd explained the math associated with flipping properties—a process he'd become enamored of when he'd seen a young, hippie-looking white man gutting the house next door to his apartment, who had explained how he would
profit $30K in six months' time. He'd helped Rob compile the necessary information to secure the particular loan with so little money down and minimal financial review (a loan that, five years later, would be known nationwide as “subprime”). They thought that if this one worked out and turned a profit, they could repeat the process with two properties, and four after that, and on and on.

Oswaldo Gutierrez, who a year and a half after Yale graduation was still working for his father's home repair business, took a look at the place a few days after Rob officially moved in. He took in the disintegrating plaster in the bathrooms, the shorted-out electric system, the boiler that must have been half a century old, the lopsided foundation and leaky pipes, and then he looked at his friend's face—with its boyish, almost beaming pride—and he could not integrate the two in his mind. Simply bringing this house up to code would cost in the low to mid five figures. Making the place into what Rob seemed to envision would cost in the mid to high five figures. And the owner was a first-year high school teacher with no savings.

“I'm proud of you,” Oswaldo said, thinking a hundred other things. “I've never known a twenty-four-year-old homeowner.”

“Feels good,” Rob replied.

“If you want to start renting soon, you should start with the boiler.”

Together, they went to work. Oswaldo didn't have the heart to say aloud how hopeless the endeavor actually looked to him. In no world could lead be turned into gold, and certainly not in East Orange. In the end, he had fun; meeting up with Rob at the house on Saturdays and Sundays to haul junky furniture up and down stairs the way Rob and I had at the beginning of each school year became one of the few aspects of his life he could look forward to. Dealing with Rob's dream—doomed though he felt it to be—gave Oswaldo a reprieve from the folding inward of his own dream of becoming a doctor. He'd been too busy dealing with his grave emotional problems while at Yale, and then with his equally grave family problems after graduation, to even keep track of application deadlines, scholarships, loans, the economics of a poor fam
ily and an expensive education. That was his own fault, he knew. A more put-together person could have sorted through and accomplished everything. But still, the long-held pursuit had whisked past him so quietly, and he found something wrong with the reality that when he'd been in high school, everyone around him had been geared toward helping him achieve his goal of going to college: teachers, counselors, classmates. But now, five years later and with the next step carrying even greater life implications, there was no one to tell him what to do. Instead, the people around him seemed to do nothing but ask things of him—and suddenly Rob, for practically the first time ever, was doing the same.

“
GIVE ME THE
damn ball!”

Hrvoje Dundovic scanned the long rectangle of water before him, a froth of bobbing heads and waving arms. As had been the case in high school, identifying Rob amid the bodies was easy. During a water polo game, Rob was always either grinning or leering, and his bared white teeth stood out like a beacon. Hrvoje swiveled his palm behind the ball and lasered it to Rob, who thrashed toward the goal, then reared up suddenly and placed a lob—the softness of which belied the sharp jerk of Rob's arm, like a change-up pitch—into the top left corner of the net.

Hrvoje and Rob had kept in touch ever since coming across one another at a water polo tournament, sophomore year of college. Hrvoje had played for the University of Vermont. He'd been warming up for a game when he'd heard that low, amiable voice that had once asked him about prog rock music. “What up, Herve?” The shortening of the name had once been a shared joke, a reference to all the teachers and students who'd never learned how to pronounce it correctly. Rob was squatting at the pool's edge. Hrvoje freestyled over and they caught up briefly. They'd been in touch every few weeks in the years since. Now they played together in an informal pickup water polo league at Rutgers University, just north of Trenton: a long haul for a short game, but also as good a means as any to step away from life for a few hours.

Hrvoje always asked if they could carpool there and back, a forty-five-minute drive each way. Rob never did, because before each game he went to Trenton State to visit his father.

Skeet had gained weight, mostly upper-body muscle from lifting weights. But a new padding had layered over his neck and face that looked unhealthy, an effect exacerbated by his increasingly slumped shoulders. Rob had been swimming with the St. Benedict's team a few days a week and had lost a few pounds of lingering “Rio weight.” The hours each day he spent at the head of his classroom had also straightened his posture, such that when he stood now he reached his full height of five eleven (at Yale, trudging around in his skully, he'd looked more like five nine). The two men suddenly appeared less alike physically, but their primary interest together remained the same: freeing Skeet from prison. Since the overturned appeal in June 1999, they had tried to launch various new offensives. Rob had met with potential attorneys sporadically throughout college and over the last year; he'd encountered the very same problem that Jackie's coworker had first warned her about on the day she'd received word of Skeet's arrest: good lawyers cost too much, and bad lawyers wouldn't be able to do the job.

Arguing Skeet's release no longer centered on whether he'd actually killed the Moore sisters but rather on the legal structure—the chemistry of identifying and isolating inefficiencies in a closed system. During the postconviction relief hearings in 1999, Skeet's representatives had argued that due to a system failure on the part of the courts, Skeet had been deprived of the ability to adequately prove his innocence during trial. The ins and outs of that argument had been obscure at times, but fundamentally they'd still been trying to prove that Skeet had been innocent of the crime for which he'd been convicted.

Now, in 2004, their task was to prove that the eventual reversal of his postconviction relief had been a flawed decision, that the district court had “failed to apply the correct standard of review pursuant to the terms of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA).” To do so, they relied on the small type rather than the broad issues; each
new strategy seemed to take the father and the son farther and farther away from the actual, tragic events of that August morning in 1987 and the sprawling ramifications thereof. Rob still spent time in the Essex County law library downtown, going there straight from school on days the water polo team didn't have practice to slip in an hour of research. He was parsing through past murder cases and appeals, looking for precedents, or, in Latin, stare decisis, “to stand by things decided.” Because the primary relevant cases had already been exhausted during previous efforts, applicable precedents were very hard to find in those brown-spined legal texts with faded gold lettering. But with painstaking effort and extraordinary attention to detail, Rob gathered factoids that might one day help them. He noticed that, at one point when presenting the overturning of Skeet's appeal in June 1999, the judge had misquoted a certain standard of review, and that misstatement was similar to one that had occurred in an earlier case, which had resulted in a mistrial. Rob recorded data such as this in his black-and-white composition books, each new thread of legal jargon its own small conquest.

For almost fifteen years now, Skeet had been a model inmate. His record showed no disciplinary red flags—which was miraculous, as perpetrators of violence against women were often singled out, “marked” by other inmates. His periodic psychological evaluations were stellar; he was sensible and sane and popular in his cell block. He made people laugh but was careful not to derive that laughter at the expense of ­others. He had a job on the custodial crew, the highest level of labor available to murder one criminals. He was active in a church group. Most of the guards regarded him well, because he carried a particular pride that enabled him to stride around the concrete prison yard, talking loudly, making jokes, maintaining a running commentary on the daily goings-on—but without pissing off those perennially looking for a reason to be pissed off. By all accounts, Skeet was cool with everybody.

A crucial aspect of staying that way was to speak very little about his son. Everyone knew that Rob's visits were vital to him; those who had been in prison for as long as Skeet were familiar with the way fam
ily visits tended to taper off over time, as their absences from the lives of their loved ones became entrenched. Parents could be relied on to come. Spouses sometimes could and sometimes couldn't, depending on the spouse. Children, especially those who had been young at the time of incarceration, tended to drift away the fastest. The fact that Skeet's boy still came, and had been coming religiously since age ten, was inspiring to the others. Above all else, Rob's loyal showings proved that Skeet hadn't been lying when he'd told others that he'd been a great father. But Skeet's fellow inmates knew nothing at all of who this son was. When it came to Yale in particular, the dynamic for Skeet on the inside was the same as it was for his son on the outside: if Skeet went around Trenton State Prison talking about his son in the Ivy League, most would call him a liar. Some would call him uppity. And a very few would be impelled to do something about it. But Skeet was proud of his son—and guilty for the time and emotion his own situation drained from him. He spoke of these feelings only during church meetings, and never extensively. In contrast, on the cell block, he would return from time with Rob and sink into his hard cot and lace his fingers behind his head and stare at the gray ceiling, in silence. At the same time, Rob would most likely have been driving back into Newark, to his home on Greenwood Avenue that, months after he'd bought it, weeks after he'd planned for the renovations to be complete, with thousands of dollars invested, remained a shell, a mirage of something better.