The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (36 page)

Mayor James pulled out of the 2006 election and anointed the deputy mayor, Ronald Rice, as his successor. Booker, backed by the majority of corporate interests in the city, outspent Rice twenty-five to one and won the election with 72 percent of the vote. (Two years later, Sharpe James was convicted on five counts of fraud for conspiring to rig the sale of nine city lots to his mistress, who quickly resold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.) The new mayor's campaign pledge to beef up the police department in order to make Newark the national leader in crime reduction was what inspired the Bloods' assassination attempt, which in turn had denied Skeet Douglas the possibility of external cancer treatment.

Booker came into office with an ambitious “100-day” plan to increase police forces, end background checks for many city jobs so that former offenders could find employment, improve city services, and expand summer youth programs. Though Newark city government did not extend to the Oranges, his rise suggested a shift in the direction of the city. Even those who had voted for the “other guy” were curious, and perhaps even hopeful, about what the future might bring.

“That's your boy,” Rob's friends would say, messing with him. “Went
to Yale and everything.”

Even in this context, Rob was uncomfortable being associated with Yale, let alone the charming, some might say slick politician who hadn't even grown up in Newark himself. “We'll see what he does,” Rob said. “He's been talking a long time. Let's see how he does now that he's in it for real.” And his expression said, resignedly,
I don't have high hopes. Now let's talk about something that matters.

“Y
O, GET UP HERE
!”

Rob was in the basement at Smith Street around midnight, gas mask on, filtering hash oil through the tiny perforations at the end of his sieve. Around him, the hydroponic planters formed three sides of a rectangle. The auto-timed LED lights above the sprouting plants blasted white light, screwing up Rob's internal clock even more than his odd hours already had.

He went upstairs, where Curtis and Tavarus were peering out the front window.

“Boobie's back,” Curtis said with rare concern. Rob looked casually through the crack of the curtain. A sedan was parked directly in front of the house, engine idling. A glowing ember was visible through the windows, being passed among multiple silhouettes.

“Yeah,” Rob said, “that's his ride.”

He'd been hearing noise from his connects that Boobie, a forceful member of the Double II Sets, had a beef with Rob—because by now word had slipped that his Sour Diesel was “off the hook” (meaning something so new and fresh that it could be taken straight off the hanger at a clothing store). Word had also gotten out that Rob had been dealing to some of Boobie's people. He wasn't poaching clients; he'd just become the guy they called if Boobie couldn't be reached. Generally, this was not considered encroachment.

“That stupid motherfucker,” Rob said, seeming more exasperated than afraid.

“Should we call the police?” Curtis asked.

“Are you crazy?” Rob replied as he gestured with his eyes to the basement below.

“Let's just head out the back,” Tavarus said. The house occupied a double lot, with a rear driveway that exited onto Telford Street, one block east of Smith. “Head to Flowy's.”

“They probably have a car on Telford, too.” Rob sighed and put on his old leather jacket. “I'll go take care of it. I mean, these fucking stupid people, I just can't stand stupid people . . .”

Before his friends could stop him, Rob was outside knocking on the driver's-side window of the car. The window lowered halfway. Curtis and Tavarus watched. The street was deserted.

Rob was bent over, his head just outside the opening in the window. His hands made wide gestures on either side of his body. The head inside the car, presumably Boobie's, was shaking from side to side, then nodding up and down. They heard garbled voices. Rob's remained genial. Then Boobie laughed.

The window lowered all the way, and Boobie's arm extended toward Rob. The only reason Curtis and Tavarus knew there was not a loaded gun fixed to the end of that arm was that Rob took it in his own, forearms forming an inverted V with the hands locked at the thumbs. Their other hands gripped one another's shoulders. Rob took a hit from the joint inside the car, and the vehicle pulled out as he turned back to the house.

“
Damn
, it's freezing out,” he muttered when he came inside.

“What was that?” Curtis asked.

“It's all good,” Rob said. He strolled back through the kitchen and made himself a screwdriver from the 1.5-liter bottle of Smirnoff on top of the refrigerator. Then he grabbed the gas mask, put it on, and went back downstairs.

T
HE FOLLOWING SPRING
was his last at St. Benedict's, and the feeling was similar to that which had marked our final semester in college: a
mixture of nostalgia for the past and excitement about the future as he performed the tasks he'd performed each day for four years, tasks he would never perform again. He went on his last water polo tournament weekend and stayed up in the motel room he shared with Coach Ridley, watching action movies and putting off the moment when one of them had to check on the players' rooms. He taught his last classes on Darwinian evolution, recessive genes, and cellular structures of plants. He sat through his last faculty meetings and pulled his last students aside in the hallways to drill the importance of discipline. He attended his last senior banquet, listened to the last Presidential Award winner give a speech to parents, teachers, and guests. As in most years, Charles Cawley was one of those guests.

Rob had seen Mr. Cawley a few times during his teaching career, usually at homecoming and the senior banquet. They had always made a point of speaking with one another, but these had been increasingly distant, at points awkward, conversations as Rob had become more and more aloof. After the speech at the 2007 banquet, Mr. Cawley approached Rob's table, as he had done Rob's senior year nine years earlier. Rob stood up, shook his hand, and said, “Hey, Mr. Cawley, how's it going?”

“How's it going with you?” Mr. Cawley replied.

“Getting by.”

“Friar Ed told me that your father passed. I'm sorry.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And I understand you're leaving the school?”

“Yes.”

“And what are your plans?”

“Grad school.”

“Oh, which one? I'm curious.”

“Not sure yet. Still working on it.”

Mr. Cawley looked into Rob's eyes and understood that the young man was saying this only because he was supposed to. He saw something more in those eyes: anger. The emotion wasn't nakedly apparent,
but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain human frailties could actually help fuel success. Insecurity drove billionaire entrepreneurs. Emotional instability made for superb art. The need for attention built great political leaders. But anger, in his experience, led only to inertia. He remembered when he'd offered to pay Rob's tuition at this very event, in this very gymnasium—an offer he'd never made to any student before or since. As a financial master, Mr. Cawley looked at the world in terms of investments, of risk and reward. In 1998, the “investment” in Rob had struck him on paper as one of the lowest-risk and the highest-return; he saw no possible downside in giving this rare boy the slight push (Yale's four-year tuition of $140,000 being slight for a bank CEO worth nine figures) he needed to reach the pinnacle for which he was already headed. Almost a decade later, as Rob broke off eye contact to gaze down at the floor as if there were a pit between them, Mr. Cawley understood that a life wasn't lived on paper. He was not disappointed so much as confused, and he opted not to inquire further into what exactly had happened to Rob's psyche between Yale graduation and now. He wanted to spare himself the sting of his own poor judgment. This conversation was the last he ever had with Rob.

The fact was that Rob hadn't filled out any grad school applications. He'd been too busy over the last few months poring over real estate information, and all the study had led him to the conclusion that Newark and the Oranges were not the places to invest in property right now. Cory Booker's ambitions, predictably, were expensive, and the mayor had already installed an 8.3 percent hike on property taxes to help pay for them, the largest such increase in the city's history. From his experience managing the Greenwood property, he knew that finding tenants with the credit to make security deposits was hard enough, and extracting rent from them on time was harder still. Even so, the average property value remained in the high five figures to low sixes, inflated by their proximity to so many well-off neighborhoods just beyond. Profit mar
gins were thin, and effort expenditure was high. Lenders were hard to deal with, suspicious and often crooked. Jackie had been right: buying property in the neighborhood where he'd grown up was a bad idea. So he looked elsewhere, and he landed on Ohio.

A few of his aunts and uncles lived in and around Cleveland. Rob had visited many times, and he'd seen an opportunity: modest houses on decent plots in diverse working-class neighborhoods where the economy was driven by historically stable manufacturing companies. Newark had been just like that, once, before Rob's time. He'd been making weekend trips to the area to do title research in the records offices, make connections among the lending community, and prospect houses in person. Home values in many of these exurb communities fell as low as the mid five figures. The people who wanted to live there tended to have stable jobs and families. Money was still easy enough to come by. As a starting point for Peace Realty, the location made sense.

But all the traveling had been expensive, and would become more so once he actually established a presence. Rob was naturally frugal; he always had been. He hated paying $300 for a ninety-minute flight, hated renting cars, hated paying more than $100 a night for dingy hotel rooms. Above all, he hated the fact that nine months after having established Peace Realty as his next career move, he hadn't actually accomplished anything—and so he would need a paying job to float him in the interim between leaving St. Benedict's and profiting off his first group of properties.

Rob did end up going on the Appalachian Trail hike early that summer. He took the position in the back of the line to prod the stragglers. He helped with tent setup, cooked beans and rice over campfires, and led circular conversations about goal setting as the logs broke down. Mostly he walked alone through the quiet forest, appearing pensive and often unapproachable. The hike itself was uneventful, one of the easiest they'd ever had. When the bus picked them up at the Delaware Water Gap, Rob was given a send-off in the form of an ovation and a school
T-shirt.

An hour later, the group disembarked on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in downtown Newark, filthy and weary, and the students scattered toward their parents' waiting cars, and the teachers went to the parking garage to head home to their families. Rob lingered in and around the school for a few more hours. He went to the science offices to make sure his stuff was all cleared out. He went to the pool to check his coach's locker and take a shower after ten days on the trail. Then he went, almost immediately, to his new job at the Newark International Airport.

From left to right: Rob Peace, Curtis Gamble, Shariff Upton (one of Rob's high school water polo coaches), Drew Jemison, and Julius “Flowy” Starkes. At house parties like this one in East Orange, the Burger Boyz could travel back to simpler times in high school. 

Part V

Baggage

Rob visiting Pula, Croatia, for the second time.