The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  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 family 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 peopl
e 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 family 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.

  Skeet kept a button in a small wooden keepsake box. The button was the size of the circle created by touching his thumb and index finger together, blue and white, with the Yale bulldog logo in the center. Jackie had sent it to him after Rob’s acceptance. He kept the trinket tucked in the bottom of the box, beneath pictures of Rob, letters Rob had written, a postcard from Rio, and a mix tape Rob had recorded in junior high.

  In the winter of 2005, halfway through Rob’s second year of teaching at St. Benedict’s, Skeet became conscious of a new shift in his son: Rob began asking him for advice. He had tenants on Greenwood now, and—as Jackie had warned him—extracting rent was a part-time job in itself, tiresome with false threats on both sides, providing only enough to cover the ever-present costs of the property, no more. The teaching job was secure and mentally easy, but—as Wayne Ridley had warned him—emotionally taxing. Each day left him with little reserve energy, just enough to want to smoke up and go to sleep. He had girl problems. He had money problems. He had problems with Jackie. Skeet confided to his friends in the Christian discussion group that, as a father, all he wanted to do was help his kid. But as a prisoner, he did not have the capacity to offer advice regarding the world outside these brick walls and turrets. The only thing he could confidently tell his son was to prioritize Jackie above all else. His mother was a great woman, he would say.

  Skeet had been feeling weak lately—nothing new, considering the D-grade food they ate, the lack of exercise and sunlight. A different kind of fatigue began overtaking him that winter, which felt terminal, trickling down through his body from his head. He didn’t visit the prison doctor, though, because the medical ward was depressing and thick with others’ diseases. And perhaps he didn’t truly want to know what was happening to him.

  THE PENN RELAYS at Franklin Field in Philadelphia were like a national party, with races instead of a DJ at its center. Tens of thousands of people came to watch runners ranging from below-average high school athletes to Olympic medalists compete. The crowded corridors of the stadium resembled an industrial cattle ranch. I’d been coming to the relays since I was a kid, with my father. I’d run at them for eight years through high school and college. In April 2005, I brought my fiancée down from New York to meet up with old teammates and coaches.

  I’d met Rebecca one year earlier, through a friend, in a bar on the Lower East Side. Six weeks later—six weeks of walking around the city in a state of intoxication together, talking until three and four in the morning each night, feeling so in love that we sometimes forgot to eat—we’d been sitting on a sidewalk bench drinking margaritas from paper cups, and I’d blurted out, “So will you marry me?” (the concept having occurred to me only a half second earlier).

  My parents and siblings had barely spoken to me since—because we’d known each other for less than two months, because I’d just turned twenty-four years old, because I was an aspiring (or “wannabe”) novelist who walked dogs to supplement nonprofit sector wages. I’d always been the quiet one, considerate in my actions and conservative in my decisions. That I could be ignorant and disrespectful enough to make the most important decision in my life spontaneously, without their wise and experience-based input, without a single thought as to the implications of that decision—this was beyond the comprehension of anyone who loved me, and it tore my allegiance between a woman I’d known for weeks and the family I’d known all my life. No one was wrong, necessarily, and my parents were acting purely out of love and an understanding of long-term life that I did not possess. But still, a year’s worth of holidays were rendered tense and fraught. Exchanges with family members became strictly informational. Discussions on the matter with Rebecca often became fights, and more than one night had found her weeping facedown into the bed while I walked alone with my dog around the city in the early-morning hours, with no idea how to make things good again.

  Such was our state when Rebecca and I trained down to the Penn Relays. I held tight to her hand as we navigated the maelstrom of human bodies toward the end zone bleachers where Ty Cantey and a few other former teammates were supposed to be. We found them, caught up, swapped a few college stories that seemed to bring forward just how young and stupid we all were—just how naïve I was to be engineering my life around whimsy.

  Then Rob was sitting on the bleacher right above and behind us, with an arm locked around my and Ty’s necks. “Whassuuuuup?” he said, imitating a popular Budweiser commercial at the time.

  I hadn’t seen Rob in two years, since that night in New Haven. He was slightly heavier than he’d been then, but his laugh was the same, his rapid-fire knuckle cracks were the same, his grin was the same.

  I introduced Rebecca, and Ty interjected, “Da Jeff is getting fucking married to this girl.”

  Rob thought it was a joke. Then he leaned back, examined me as if in appraisal. He slapped his palm against my back hard enough that I had to grab the seat to keep from toppling forward. “Damn, son,” he said. “That’s a strong move.”

  The wind swirled around the stadium as the four of us sat and talked about where we were. Ty was two years into a seven-year MD-PhD program at Harvard, and he seemed worn out. The only way he knew how to study was very, very hard, all night, multiple times a week. He’d been studying this way for six years and racking up debt daily along the way. Between Yale and Harvard, he now carried more than $300,000 in student loans. On that day, he hinted at the reality that the research career he’d once aspired to would not go very far in repaying that amount, and he was considering cutting short the PhD component in order to specialize in a more profitable field of medicine, like orthopedics or dermatology.

  I couldn’t believe that word, “dermatology,” had exited my friend’s mouth. That Ty Cantey—who had won the graduation award at Yale for overall achievem
ent in the entire senior class, and who had seemed destined to add a Nobel someday—was considering a life spent treating zits and giving Botox injections felt sobering. Yet Ty seemed as slaphappy as ever, and we remembered a night when his girlfriend—“the Predator”—had gotten so angry with him that she’d clawed his arm, drawing blood, and he’d shut her out of the apartment. Throughout, Rob had been rolling around on the couch, gut laughing harder than I’d ever seen. “She made you her bitch!” he’d squealed over and over, through tears, and he said it again now while Ty blushed, unable to deny it.

  In the context of old friends, Rebecca’s presence made me feel more grown-up and presentable to them—certainly more so than the nonprofit job, or the unpublished novel that I spent most of my days and all of my nights editing and reediting. Rebecca and I had our own narrative in the fast engagement, the family pressure that only strengthened our bond, the wide-open future in which we would surely succeed. This narrative was silly if not stupid, but we remained in that punch-drunk stage of love, oblivious of how annoying we might have been to others, and so we blithely rendered the romance to Ty and Rob. Not present in their reactions was the skepticism we’d been receiving from almost everyone else in our orbit regarding the choice we had made. Ty was already talking about the bachelor party. Rob nodded along quietly, not jumping up and down but very present, very there, the way he’d always been for us in college, emitting a kind of wisdom even when he wasn’t speaking any words.