The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (4 page)

“Elbows, elbows, elbows,” he would chant. “No one ever sees them coming.”

It was okay, Jackie told herself in spite of all the ragging she'd endured for spoiling the boy herself. It was okay because there was no denying, or interfering with, the degree to which the son worshipped the father, a kind of worship she hadn't anticipated. Skeet wasn't the type to understand an infant or toddler; he didn't possess the physical and emotional
patience required by the very young. As such, the rhythm of Rob's first four years had been mother heavy, with Skeet present to a degree slightly beyond what might be expected. But all of a sudden, to Skeet, the child became a human being who could process situations, who formed opinions about people, who had muscles growing beneath the skin of his chest and back and arms. He looked like his father, too, with the overhang of his brow giving his eyes a hard, caged expression even at rest.

Whenever his father was due to pick him up, Rob waited in the parlor just to the right of the front door. Jackie didn't let him peer out of the glass, which was always shrouded by three layers of curtains to preclude even a sliver of visibility from the street. All the windows on Chapman Street were treated like this to prevent any canvassing by potential burglars; the crack addicts who squatted in the abandoned apartments on Chapman and Center would take anything. But the moment Skeet's Volvo choked around the corner and his footsteps shook the front porch, Rob stood, beamed, and his breaths grew short with anticipation. When his father appeared in the doorframe, Rob would run and drive his shoulders into the powerful man's thighs. Then Skeet would bend over and grab the boy's legs and somersault him upward until Rob was over his shoulders, arms around his neck, and the boy would piggyback on his father upstairs. Then they'd work the punching bag for a half hour, and Skeet would take him out around town. When Jackie got her son back in the evenings—always before nightfall, a steadfast rule—Rob would be talking about the four or five people they'd gone to visit. He gave little in the way of details, not because he couldn't remember but because he seemed to relish these adventures, these characters, shared only with his father. The boy kept them close to the vest, the hours he spent with other men.

O
NE WEEKDAY MORNING
in the spring of his first school year, Rob wouldn't get out of bed. He moaned about an aching stomach. He had no temperature, so Jackie was skeptical. But she was also tired and late
for work, so she made sure Frances would be around to watch him.

As Jackie opened the front door to leave, she heard him call. Reluctantly, she went upstairs.

“What?” she asked. “You want soup?”

“Your son's sick and you're going to work?” he asked, the question an accusation.

“I don't get personal days.”

“Whatever,” he mumbled and turned away from her.

She stayed home. As the day progressed, he began writhing and crying, the hardness cultivated under his father's watch slowly crumbling beneath the physical pain. Though Frances told her she was making a fuss over a faker and thus encouraging these manipulations, Jackie took him to the hospital in the late afternoon. After three hours in the ER waiting room—standard, even though she was employed there—she finally harassed their way into an examination room.

His appendix was swelling fast. Late that night, it was removed. The doctor said it could have ruptured at any moment, and Jackie might have saved her son's life that day by not doubting him.

J
ACKIE KNEW
S
KEET
better than he knew himself. And so she knew that no matter how authentically he presented himself as the tough guy—acidly cutting down the concept of private school, instructing the boy on dirty lyrics and dirtier fistfight tricks, driving Rob around East Orange while giving coded shout-outs to the hustlers—Skeet valued intelligence above all, and the early manifestations of Rob's intellect (picture books notwithstanding) excited him truly. The image became regular and nourishing: father and son crouched over second-grade homework assignments splayed across the coffee table, going back and forth over simple sentence structure and arithmetic. The same intensity with which Skeet could battle her he brought to that coffee table three or four evenings a week.

Skeet harped on particulars that Jackie, in her own childhood, had
never even considered: penmanship, consistency of format, and above all, the importance of memory. With an old wisdom in his attention to detail, Skeet would drill Rob heavily on vocabulary, definitions, states and capitals, until the facts became embedded in the cerebral circuitry. She could not believe how patient and tireless they could be, the father and the son, both with the work and one another. She would pretend to be cleaning in an adjacent space, but really she'd watch Skeet as he watched Rob set his lips and point his eyes upward to ponder some elusive connection. And their son—sometimes prompted but usually not—would invariably make that connection. Skeet would grin and squeeze the back of the boy's neck in his hand, then look at the subsequent entry to make sure the handwriting was clean. These quiet, unassuming moments, embedded as they were within her harried days, gave her not only pride but also a simple beauty she'd always sought but never known—made more powerful by the fact that she participated only as an observer. Something positive could happen without her wrangling it through sheer force of will, and it could be shared within the trinity of mother, father, and son.

I
N THE SHADED
rear compartments of her mind, Jackie had always expected the call to come in the middle of the night, when it would jar her awake from the pleasant seclusion of dreaming.

When the call did come, on August 9, 1987, she was at work, just before the lunch surge on a Sunday. Frances told her anxiously that the police were looking for Skeet. They hadn't said why.

“What'd you tell them?” Jackie asked.

“I said I don't know where he lives or anything about that man.”

Jackie asked her to pick up Rob from summer camp at Branch Brook Park, since Skeet now wouldn't be able to.

She kept working, eyes and ears in a heightened state of alertness as she waited for men in uniforms to arrive and pull her aside in front of her coworkers. She thought mainly of what excuse she could give to
her boss. After that, she thought about money and time. One of the maintenance staff had a record for dealing; it was all she could do not to ask him about the particulars of a man's being arrested for selling drugs. How much was bail? How much was a lawyer? What was the average sentence? But the police never came, nor did they call. In this moment, more than any other that had come before, she was thankful for the domestic arrangement she'd wrought. Because she didn't share Skeet's name or address, she would be free to manage the consequences this event would have on her and her son's future.

She went home that evening and assumed Skeet's role with homework; the summer camp assigned short exercises to keep the children busy. She was relieved that Rob, who had turned seven two months earlier, didn't ask her why. Jackie was less patient than Skeet when it came to addition and subtraction problems and subject-predicate structure. She did her best, though, and only when Rob fell asleep did she start calling around, starting with Carl.

“When they find him, how long's he going to be away for?” she asked.

“They found him already. He was at Irving's house.”

“How long? How long for dealing?”

Carl paused, the silence a reply. Then he told her that Skeet hadn't been arrested for drugs. He'd been arrested for murder. Two, in fact—both young women, neighbors of his in that apartment building on Chestnut Street.

Chapter 2

F
IVE DAYS AFTER
Skeet's arrest and three days after his arraignment hearing, Jackie went to Essex County Jail for the first time. She went alone. The jail was a two-story, blue-and-white modular structure made of cinder blocks, surrounded by two concentric rectangles of ten-foot-high chain-link fences. Sandwiched between the Passaic River and the New Jersey Turnpike, the atmosphere smelled of toxic, unfamiliar elements due to the General Chemical plant directly across Doremus Avenue, a towering cistern of polyaluminum hydroxychloride used in wastewater treatment.

Passing through checkpoint after checkpoint—and asked at each what her relationship was to the prisoner, to which she replied succinctly, “He's my son's father”—she felt herself racking up distance from the outside world. She knew only as much as Carl did, which was hardly anything. Her lone hope, aside from the whole situation turning out to be a wrong place–wrong time misunderstanding, was that it would be resolved quickly. She knew that this impulse was selfish; she was thinking about the adjustments she'd have to make to get on with her life. She still hadn't told Rob. That a week had passed without her son seeing his father was uncommon but not truly strange. The boy hadn't asked, but she knew he was attuned to the anxiety coursing through the house on Chapman Street; she knew that the question was coming.

A guard escorted her down a hallway, past the reception room for prisoners held here on lesser offenses, who were allowed to sit in open air across a table from their friends and family. Jackie was led to a narrow room with concrete walls, tight cubicles, low stools, guards stationed on either side of the Plexiglas partitions. Knowing that her son would ultimately come here to visit, she'd hoped the place would be less than completely grim. It wasn't. A buzzer sounded, the steel-reinforced door across from her opened, and Skeet entered wearing bright orange, with his wrists manacled together and palms facing toward her.

She hadn't expected him to be smiling, but the fact that he wasn't jarred her nevertheless. Even during the worst of their arguments over the years, Skeet had been able to grin his way through any conflict. He seemed curiously energized, but the energy was an uncomfortable one: fidgety, pent, his eyes darting everywhere except into her own.

They had fifteen minutes. He asked her if she could find him a lawyer to handle the bail situation and get him out of here quickly. At the arraignment hearing, bail had been set at $500,000. That amount had to be lowered if he were to get out, plan his defense, talk to some people, and see his son.

He didn't seem to comprehend yet that his charge could not be evaded through guile and charm. She wanted to tell him this, tell him that people—
two young women
—were dead, and he might very well be sentenced to pay for their lives with his own. Instead, she said she didn't know any lawyers and didn't have the money for one anyway. She spoke clearly and directly, leaving no room for Skeetesque rebuttals. The maintenance man at Jackie's workplace had told her in the intervening days about lawyers and the hours they billed. This was a capital case. Good lawyers would be beyond unaffordable; bad lawyers would be ill equipped for the task. And even the cheapest lawyer around would find a way to bill five figures, minimum. He'd told her that contacting the public defender's office might be the best option. Skeet could get lucky by being assigned one who truly became invested in the client. Not likely, but possible.

She tried as hard as she could to look at him and not see a man who had killed others, to commit herself to the idea of innocent until proven guilty.

“How's our boy?” Skeet asked.

“He's good,” she replied. Soon their allotted minutes were up, too few for him, too many for her.

T
HE MURDER VICTIMS
, sisters Charlene and Estella Moore, had been in their twenties. Charlene's infant son had been in the apartment, along with a third woman who had been shot in the face and arm but survived. (Jackie's underlying hope was that this woman had witnessed the violence and would clear Skeet's name; she didn't know yet that the survivor, Georgianna Broadway, had identified Skeet as the murderer in the hours following the shootings.) Jackie couldn't help visualizing the scene. She had no context, and so, while lying wide awake in the middle of the night, she would make up scenarios that varied in detail but all shared the same expressions of disbelief or denial among the victims, the same pleas of “Don't” or “Why?” and the same silence that must have settled in the moments after, interrupted by the unharmed and suddenly motherless baby's cries. She would think these thoughts and, when morning came, stare at her own son and hold him tight, to the point where he'd squirm away and say, “Ma, c'mon now.” As he'd grown, he'd become less responsive to physical affection in the way boys did once toughness became a desirable quality.

Rob was very tough, and he had been making a name for himself in neighborhood football games on weekends. These games were played in the street, with the lines of parked cars forming sidelines (these sidelines were considered “in play,” such that one could be pushed or tripped or outright tackled against one). Rob was neither fast nor agile, but he had broad shoulders with premature muscle mass. He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-
littered asphalt, sometimes causing a fumble and always inciting cheers from onlookers up and down the street—especially when he punctuated the hit with the words “Patent that!” (He didn't know what a patent was, but the expression was used among his father's friends when something clever had been said.) This permissible violence was unique in that it elicited respect from the victim rather than calls for retribution. Neighbors would watch from second-floor windows, and Rob imagined that these were the upper decks of the Meadowlands, where the New York Giants played, and he was Lawrence Taylor, a Giants linebacker so athletic and mean that NFL coaches were currently reinventing their entire offensive philosophies, not to stop him but simply to slow him down.

East Orange, with congested traffic and little in the way of street greenery to oxygenate the atmosphere and provide shade, could feel poisonously humid during the late summers. Visible waves of heat clung to the blacktop. Men walked around bare chested with their shirts hanging like rags from their low-slung belts. Malt liquor in tall, cold glass bottles was passed around groups of stoop-sitters, often offered as refreshments to the boys playing football. A positive energy coursed through the neighborhood, because up and down and across the grid of residential city streets, everyone was outside. Plumes of dark smoke that smelled of seasoned meat rose above the houses from backyard cookouts. Elderly women opened their front windows wide and sat there all day behind fans that blew across bowls of ice cubes. Cards, dice, checkers, jacks, jump rope, hopscotch, craps, step dance–offs, stickball, handball, basketball—one could not turn a corner without encountering a game being played, often with the elderly cheering on the young, dispensing their peanut gallery wisdom gained from decades of playing the same games on the same blocks. Because of all these crowds, it was the safest time of year, even if one of the least physically comfortable, to be outside. This was the time of year when Skeet and Rob, wearing matching sleeveless undershirts, would normally walk from Chapman Street to Taylor grocery, where Skeet bought ice cream for Rob and cigarettes for himself, and then just keep walking together, farther and farther east, into the
center of East Orange, stopping multiple times on every block to chat with people Skeet had known his whole life as well as people he was meeting for the first time. Skeet was not old but certainly not young, and he enjoyed that temporal in betweenness. He could watch a hoops game from the sidelines and comment on the sloppiness or talent on display with the other retired veterans, or he could take his shirt off and enter the game himself and usually hold his own. Despite the heat, this time of year had always been Skeet's favorite, and so it had always been Rob's, too.

A memory, which must have seemed innocuous at the time but which ultimately Rob would hold close, began with a Yankees game that two strangers were listening to on their stoop as Skeet and Rob walked past. Skeet asked what the score was; it was close. They stopped and listened to a few at bats. Someone else walked past and began chatting and listening, too. Teenagers who lived in the house came outside to convene with their friends. The game remained tight. The crowd of listeners grew, overflowing onto the sidewalk, then the street: middle- and lower-middle-class people who worked and raised families in this neighborhood, whose primary desire was for their children to have better opportunities than they had, and who had long since accepted the fact that, though they represented the majority population of East Orange, their home would always be characterized by the few thugs and dealers whose presence kept them inside on most other evenings like this. The radio's owner kept turning up the volume. Suddenly a glass of lemonade was in Rob's hand; he didn't know who'd put it there. Late afternoon became early evening, and amiable sand-colored light slanted across to the east side of the block and made the houses there momentarily luminous. The temperature dropped, only a couple degrees but just enough. And as the game ended with a Yankees win and the cheers erupted and the back-talking Yankee haters scowled, Rob looked around at the crowd of people that had amassed here together and felt the kind of kinship with his world that his father had always spoken of but that Rob, overprotected as he was, had never before known.

That day had been in August 1986, one year ago. Now, in the middle of August 1987, Rob's football game ended with the side mirror of a car being taken off by someone's shoulder. The boys dispersed quickly, and Rob walked back to Chapman Street. Over the past week, more than a few acquaintances had asked in passing where his father was, and Rob was eager to see him and have a day together like the one that had culminated in the Yankees-themed block party.

Jackie couldn't tell him. Not that day, not the day after, not the day after that. She let her son call the apartment on Chestnut Street and get no answer. She lied and said that Skeet had taken a last-minute trip to see extended family, knowing that every hour that passed increased the likelihood that one of the kids on the street would hear the gossip and take it upon himself to tell Rob that his father was locked up. Lord knew that the concept wasn't exactly new or novel among Rob's peers.

Frances urged her to tell him before the school year started. “Don't put it all on him at once,” she said. “Summer's over. Father's locked up. It's too much for a boy his age.”

“I know, I know,” Jackie replied, and still failed to tell him.

A few days before first grade began, Jackie found him alone in the front living room, past dusk, kneeling on the sofa with his elbows perched on the headrest, pressing his face against the window to peer up and down the block. He crouched in the expectant way he did whenever he knew that Skeet was en route. The ceiling fan creaked and wobbled on high speed above his head. She'd told Rob many times not to situate himself this way. Stray bullets didn't actually concern her, though this was sometimes the reasoning she used. She just didn't want him to become too interested in the daily and nightly rhythms of their block; she didn't want him to know all the loiterers and hustlers by name, the way Skeet always had. She told him to sit back, away from the window, and then she initiated the hardest conversation she'd ever had with her son.

Afterward, she didn't remember what exact words she'd employed to explain what had happened. She'd told him that the crime was ­murder—
but not how many victims and not that they were women. She'd told him where his father was and that she had no idea how long he would be there. She'd told him that he could visit when he was ready.

The boy nodded throughout and picked at his thick, coarse hair with thumb and index finger, saying less and less as his face tightened into an almost sepulchral mask. Unusual for him, he never asked, “Why?” The question he kept asking instead was, “When is he coming back?”

At that point, Jackie had no idea. All she could say was, “Soon. He'll come back soon.”

T
WO ARMS OF
the criminal justice system—the county prosecutor's office and the office of the public defender—had already begun moving. As usual, both moved glacially, the former a little less so.

Thomas Lechliter, the Essex County prosecutor assigned to the case, immediately began interviewing the police officers who had first encountered and searched the crime scene and the detectives investigating the murder that had occurred there. He did not need much time to assemble the events that unfolded between the night of Friday, August 7, when Georgianna Broadway, Estella Moore, and Charlene Moore convened at the Moores' apartment for a night of liquor and cocaine, and the morning of Sunday, August 9, when Robert “Skeet” Douglas was arrested in a friend's home near Branch Brook Park, the loaded murder weapon reportedly tucked into his belt.