The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (47 page)

Two days later, on Wednesday, Rob woke up late after a long night working in the basement. He picked up Christopher from school and brought him back to Smith Street, where he hung out with the boy for two hours in the backyard. When Darlene came home, Rob took a Tupperware container with the leftover pork to Chapman Street. Jackie was working, so he left it in the refrigerator with a note that read,
Ma—Bon apetit. Love, Shawn.
That evening he texted some friends and watched TV with Curtis, the two men sprawled on the sofa like college kids in a dorm room. Tavarus was upstairs with his family. Rob was in an upbeat mood, as if beginning to see through to the other side of this task he'd undertaken. After a time, they moved to the kitchen to cook dinner. Curtis washed sweet peppers from his garden in the sink. Before he finished the stir-fry he was preparing, Rob stood up, arched his back severely with his hands locked behind him, and let all those bones pop.

“Hang out and eat,” Curtis said. “Then go to bed. You haven't slept in, like, a week.”

“I'll hang out later. Gotta do some work downstairs first.”

“Come on, just take a break.”

“Just want this all done,” Rob mumbled, leaving the kitchen through the rear door, turning left down the stairs.

Then they heard the car pull up in the driveway.

Chapter 16

F
ROM HIS ANGLE
in the kitchen, Curtis couldn't see what happened in the rear stairwell. He heard Rob open the back door on the landing half a level below the kitchen and above the laundry room, to see who had pulled up. Rob muttered, “Ah,
shit
!” and began to close the door, then froze with the door half open. It must have been too late. In the days following, when Curtis gave his account to the police, he would guess that at this point, not three seconds after his final exchange with Rob about eating and sleeping, someone outside already had a gun trained on his best friend.

The door swung open, and Rob was saying, “Chill, chill, chill . . . ,” as the footsteps of at least two, possibly three, men seemed to back or prod him down the stairs toward the basement. Curtis didn't try to get a clear look into the stairwell, because he was running toward the front of the house, his diaphragm pressing up against his lungs such that breathing became difficult. Already, he heard yelling in the basement, though he could not make out the words. The men who had invaded his home wanted something, and Curtis did not need to be thinking coherently—which he was not—to discern what that was. Because they had pushed Rob immediately downstairs without even checking the rest of the house, they must have known where Rob did his work, which meant they had talked to someone with knowledge of both the money and the drugs.

Curtis reached the front door, his plan at this point simply to start
yelling outside as loud as he could, draw some bodies out of the neighboring houses and onto the street. During any time of year, during any time of day or night, a street was always safer when people were on it. If neighbors congregated outside wondering what the hell was going on, these men would hear that, and they would leave the way they'd come in. If Curtis was lucky, he wouldn't even have to call the police.

Curtis was not lucky. Before he opened the front door he saw a man—or possibly a teenager—standing watch directly outside, wearing a hoodie and leaning against the wall at the bottom of the front steps so that he could cover the stoop, the sidewalk, and the front basement door simultaneously. His hand was buried allusively in his pocket. His face was hidden.

The basement had been largely cleared since that initial procurement of their stash. The marijuana was hidden in a trunk wedged back on one of the metal storage shelves. The hydroponic planters had been dismantled, as Rob had dried enough plant matter to see him through the remaining poundage of Sour Diesel. Money was down there, maybe a few thousand dollars.

The men had been inside the house for maybe twenty seconds at this point, and they were still yelling—the kind of yelling that indicated something important was at stake, yelling that negated the value of human life. Curtis couldn't pick out Rob's voice, which was alarming, because Rob's voice was so distinctive and it was unlike him to not be taking control of a situation, calming people down, as he'd done with Boobie a few years ago on the sidewalk where the watchman now stood. Talking was Rob's talent.

Curtis moved backward, away from the front door and its guard, toward a storage closet in the hallway. As he did so, his mind cycled through the possible circumstances in play downstairs. They could have been some of Rob's buyers desperate enough to risk ripping them off. They could have been involved with a threatened local dealer, here to make a statement. They could have been Amin's people responding to rumors. They could have had something to do with Kamar and his re
cent associations with the Double II Set Bloods. They could have been anyone, really, any of the dozens of people, both local and farther flung, with whom Rob worked now or had in the past, people who Rob had confidently assured the Burger Boyz they would never know anything about. Curtis thought—here, now—of how vastly compartmentalized his best friend's life was, how even with all the hundreds and hundreds of nights he'd spent in this house, he'd spent just as many nights out there in places unknown. For the most part until recently, Rob's shadiness and mysteriousness regarding his conduct outside the realm of 34 Smith Street had been a source of amusement: he was always acting as if he were living a hustler's life, when most likely he'd been home on Chapman Street watching sitcoms with Frances and Jackie, or at some woman's house helping her kid study math, or getting laid in Brooklyn. All of his cumulative dour expressions and weighty sighs and murmured phone calls taken in the other room had always struck them to some extent as being staged by a guy who, hard as he presented himself to be, was just a mama's boy Yalie at heart. They'd always let him play the role, as most people in his life had, believing it to be for the most part simply that: a role. It wasn't real. It wasn't dangerous. It wasn't uncontrollable. It was just marijuana. It was just Rob Peace.

Maybe thirty seconds had passed since the break-in. Curtis was pulling the gun from the closet, the gun Rob had been carrying around town lately. Except for visits to the firing range with Rob and a few other friends, he had no experience with guns. He checked the chamber, which was loaded, and he moved back toward the rear stairway. He cocked the gun, unaware that this motion was unnecessary when a round was already chambered. He heard Rob's voice now, his tone defensive and deflecting and scared, and then Rob stopped speaking abruptly, too abruptly.

Curtis descended the stairs slowly, first to the landing by the back door, then down the last flight into the laundry room. He squatted behind the wooden railing for cover. On the far side of this area, about eight feet away, a very tall, robust black man filled the entire doorway of
the basement, facing away from Curtis and into the room. He was wearing a ski mask and holding a gun at his side.

The majority of men figure that, when put in a situation where life hangs in the balance—both your own and that of those you care about—some dormant, primal instinct will activate, and you will be strong and decisive and precise and intelligent with every movement. In this moment, Curtis learned that such an instinct did not exist, or at least not in him. His weapon quavered, as did his voice when he called out to Rob to ask if he was all right.

The man in the doorway turned but didn't seem particularly startled. They exchanged charged words from either end of the laundry room. Curtis wouldn't remember exactly what had been said, only that he'd alternated a few times between ordering the intruders out of his house and pleading for Rob to say something, just one word, to let Curtis know he was okay. But behind the blocked door, Rob remained silent, which signaled that at least one more man was in the basement, most likely with a gun aimed at him.

Then the large man opened fire toward the stairs where Curtis crouched, and Curtis pulled his own trigger, but the gun didn't fire; he'd jammed the chamber when he'd cocked it moments earlier. The large man was advancing now, gaining an angle over the railing, and Curtis bolted back upstairs, crouching low. The back door was closed and locked, so he pivoted 180 degrees on the landing and climbed back toward the kitchen. The large man's weapon was popping off behind him, sounding like the M-80s they'd set off in the yard as boys. On the stairway one level above, Tavarus was standing with a laundry basket. He'd been on his way down to do a load of Christopher's school clothes. Curtis screamed at him to get back upstairs before fleeing behind the refrigerator. He peered around the edge and saw the large man's arm curled around the stair railing on the landing, firing blindly, bullets strafing the side of the refrigerator, the stove, the walls. Then the firing stopped.

Curtis was cornered. If he tried to run across the kitchen, back ­toward
the front of the house, the man would have a line of sight on him. If he stayed here, with a gun that didn't work, he was most likely dead, too. He was breathing fast enough that he couldn't hear very well. He remained huddled against the refrigerator until he heard footsteps on the back stairs, more shouting voices, the back door opening and closing, the car peeling out of the driveway, then silence.

Curtis ran outside; they were already gone. Perhaps two minutes total had elapsed since they'd first entered, maybe less. What his first impulse had been to do, Curtis did now: he screamed to bring the neighbors out of their homes, to make the area safe with people the Burger Boyz had known since high school. But people were already outside in response to the shots. An elderly woman next door—whose bedroom window was not more than six feet away from the back door of 34 Smith Street—had already called the police, who were on their way. Tavarus was outside now, too. Christopher had woken up but was groggy. Darlene was upstairs with him. They were safe. Curtis told Tavarus to call people, as many as he could, just get people over here. And then, since the police were coming, he headed for the basement to see about getting the drugs out of his house. He figured that Rob was already doing the same thing; he figured that Rob, as ever, was one step ahead of everyone else.

Downstairs, beyond the laundry room where Curtis had almost been killed, the tarp had fallen back over the basement door. Curtis lifted it, calling out to his friend.

Rob was lying facedown on the floor, his knees bent and tucked beneath his torso, his arms folded under his chest. He had crumpled forward off the sunken love seat on which he'd been sitting. He wasn't moving. Blood that had pooled underneath him, contained by the position of his limbs, was just beginning to trickle past his face toward the small water drain just off center in the faux-tile floor. Afterward, Curtis wouldn't remember any words he said, or whether he had even been breathing. He just knew that his friend was not. He turned the body over. Rob was a dense man, maybe 175 pounds, but Curtis, still pulsing with adrenaline, didn't register the weight. Rob's shirt, soaked with
blood, clung to his chest and stomach. His eyes were closed, and his mouth parted as his head tipped back over Curtis's thigh. He must have been screaming for someone to get down there, because that's what ­Tavarus did. And he must have been rocking the body, cradling the head in his right elbow, weeping, because that was how the East Orange police officers found him twenty-odd minutes later, before ordering him to stand up and put his hands in the air.

J
ACKIE WAS AWAKENED
at one thirty by someone knocking on the front door. The knocking was barely audible, which meant it was likely some vagrant testing to see if anyone was home. This had happened before, which was why she refused to sleep in this house without a man present. Carl was there tonight, in Rob's old room. She waited to see if he would rise to take care of it, but he'd been drinking and never stirred. So she got up, put on a housecoat, and went halfway down the stairs, ready to hiss that whoever was out there was about to wake her sick mother and, in the meantime, the phone was in her hand to call the police. But she recognized the tall, long, lanky silhouette outside the front door immediately: Flowy. She turned on the porch light and opened the door.

“Ma,” he said. “It's Shawn. We gotta . . . we gotta . . .” He turned away from her, back toward the deserted street, eyes wet and swollen. Tavarus had called Flowy an hour earlier, frantic but not making much sense, and he'd hung up quickly. Flowy had driven to Smith Street, but he hadn't been allowed past the yellow tape. Police cars were lined up at odd angles, flashing rhythmically. He'd seen the ambulance and connected its presence with the one decipherable word Tavarus had said, “Shawn.” From the porch where officers were talking to Curtis and ­Tavarus, Tavarus had managed to call out to him: “Go take care of Ma.”

Flowy had driven to Chapman Street, and now all he could say was that they needed to get to Curtis's house.

Jackie remained calm and composed. She imagined that Rob had
been arrested for something she'd always convinced herself that he hadn't been involved with, and the days ahead of her would entail hours in precinct waiting rooms, the logistics of bail and lawyers, and the hard but doable task of aligning her vision of her son's life with what that life actually was. “Let me get dressed,” she said.

“I'll drive you.” He was choking on his words, she assumed out of embarrassment, or because he might be in trouble, too.

“I'll drive myself,” she replied, and she turned back into her house, calling to Carl's unhearing ears that she was going out.

Flowy followed her east along Central Avenue, then right onto Telford, down into the dark, narrow gridwork of the neighborhood. Another right on Tremont, then left on Smith, where the red and blue lights spun two hundred yards down the block. Cars were backed up from the house, some belonging to friends who had heard something about the night's events, others just people trying to get through to South Orange Avenue. Jackie was already out of her car and hurrying down the sidewalk when Flowy put his in idle. Walking to the house, he passed policemen asking neighbors if anyone had surveillance footage of the street, as if these people's homes were equipped with modern security systems. He caught up to Jackie. A young, white policeman had met her at the tape barricade.