The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

by Jeff Hobbs

  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.

  JACKIE 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.

  “You can’t pass through this way, ma’am.”

  “It’s my son,” she said, “my son is in that house.”

  “You can’t pass through this way.”

  Flowy towered behind her, his confusion and sadness turning into anger. “It’s the boy’s mother. Let her through.”

  The house was crowded with uniformed men clustered around the basement door and the stoop. Two more officers came down from the porch and approached. They consulted with one another and with their radios, then faced Jackie again. “You can’t come through here, ma’am.”

  “Motherffff—” Flowy began, but Jackie laid her hand against his chest. Her face remained calm, so impossibly calm, amid the lights and uniforms and spectators looking on with the sober, downcast expressions that Flowy had seen surrounding crime scenes growing up on his block, that Jackie had seen on her block, too. These expressions appeared only in reaction to violence, to pointlessness, to tragedy.

  “Where is he?” she asked. “Is he still inside there?”

  The officers consulted again, this time only with their eyes. They told her that a man had been taken to the hospital, but they refused to give a reason, name, or condition.

  Flowy’s big hands, so perfect for palming water polo balls, were on her shoulders. Quickly now, he was realizing what he’d known intuitively since he’d answered that call from Tavarus. His friend was either dead or close to it. Police behaved differently when someone had died than when someone had been wounded; they behaved just as they were behaving now, repeating evasive, scripted statements over and over. You can’t come through here, ma’am. Flowy pulled gently on Jackie’s shoulders, and she turned away from the house with him. T
hey went back to their cars, and he followed her again, this time to East Orange Hospital, where she had once spent twelve-hour days cooking meals.

  Flowy took over the questioning while Jackie sat in the ER waiting room, hands folded in her lap, eyes pointed at the floor as her body rocked gently forward and backward. Anyone who looked vaguely associated with the hospital, he grabbed and asked where Shawn Peace was. Then he realized that these people wouldn’t know Rob’s middle name, the name he went by in the hood, and started asking for Robert Peace instead, what Rob had called his “nom professionnel.” Regardless of the name, nobody could tell him anything. He kept being passed off by doctors and nurses and administrators who seemed to put a special effort into looking harried and important and being needed urgently somewhere else. “It’s the man’s mother here, and nobody’s telling her anything? This is fucked-up . . .” Flowy was not a violent man; his nickname had derived from growing up peacefully in one of the city’s most unpeaceful neighborhoods. But he had anger in him that began to rise very fast up his spine. An administrator appeared and threatened to kick him out of the hospital if he couldn’t be more patient and less profane. He sat beside Jackie. Finally, almost an hour later, a nurse said that a John Doe had been brought in from 34 Smith Street, nothing more. Another hour passed. Flowy, fuming, noticed that Jackie was crying as quietly as it was possible for a human being to cry.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to rest. Shawn’s okay. We’ll find that out soon enough.”

  He followed her home from the hospital and walked her to the front door. The phone had been ringing at the house, and Carl and Frances were awake. It was five in the morning, the first faint glow radiating from the horizon to the east, where the city was. Carl had spoken with Tavarus by now. He knew that Rob was dead. On the front porch of 181 Chapman Street, while Flowy watched from the cracked stairwell by the sidewalk, Carl took Jackie into his arms and whispered into her ear. Frances was wailing faintly inside, her respiratory system not capable of volume. Jackie nodded silently as if she already knew, then moved slowly inside with him.

  “Ma,” Flowy called, but no one heard him or else didn’t respond. He didn’t know what he’d meant to say, at any rate. He drove back to his apartment on Munn Avenue. His girlfriend, LaQuisha, was out of town. His cell phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn’t answer or call anyone back. He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling. The room was dark and very quiet aside from the neighborhood sounds that invariably rose to the seventh-floor window: cars passing by with the early-to-work shift, dogs barking in backyards, and the ever-present sirens.

  THEY’D CONFISCATED EVERYTHING, including the dismantled planters, and now the basement was a mess of overturned furniture, chalk and fingerprint dust, decades’ worth of the Gamble family’s stored detritus. They’d searched the entire house for more drugs and money, so the upper floors were a disaster, too. Darlene had taken Christopher to her parents’ house, and Curtis had been taken into custody by the police. Tavarus found himself drawn to the basement. The blood remained pooled in and around the chalk outline of Rob’s body, lying on his side as he had rolled off Curtis’s lap when the police had arrived. The narrow profile drawing didn’t look anything like Rob, or any person at all. The red trail that led to the drain had congealed. Tavarus squatted at the trail’s midpoint. They would be back before long, maybe even in minutes, and he’d been instructed not to enter the basement or touch anything. Too, there were murderers out there in the hood somewhere, probably laughing about having done the smart-ass Yalie but good. ­Tavarus didn’t care. His friend had been here in the house, with Curtis, talking, laughing, being Rob. And then he was unconscious and bleeding out on the floor. And now he was gone. Rob Peace was gone. He would never come back the way he had from all those trips abroad, coasting through the front door to make himself a drink and catch up on what he’d missed. He was just gone, gone, gone.

  THE HOLDING CELL where Curtis waited between questioning sessions was crowded with the vagrants and dealers and johns and drunks of Newark. Curtis had made his phone call, to his mother. She would get him out of here soon. He sat on a bench in the corner, leaning far over so that his head was nearly resting on his knees. For the most part, the other criminals left him alone; each man seemed lost in his own interior. In the basement of his house had been a dead body, dozens of pounds of marijuana, and thousands of dollars of illegally obtained cash. The questioning both at the scene and here at the precinct had been aggressive, beginning with the events directly surrounding the murder and segueing harshly into the circumstances of the basement lab and growhouse. He forgot most of what he’d told them, except that he’d been honest about the home intrusion and his whereabouts during it, but he’d pleaded ignorance regarding the drugs as well as the gun that had jammed on him, which he’d left lying beside the refrigerator. He must have sounded like a fool saying that he never went into the basement, that the basement was Rob’s room, that Rob paid rent for it, no one else knew what was going on down there. Charges would be formally filed against him; no universe existed in which they wouldn’t be. During the questioning, he’d gotten the impression that he might even be held accountable for the murder itself. These were the immediacies that his mind had no option but to confront, even as they paled in comparison to the life that had been taken tonight. He thought of all those parties in high school, all those cookouts in the backyard, all the nights out at the bars and clubs. He thought mostly of Rob cracking his joints, laughing, calling him a bitch for something he’d said or done. Rob’s laugh had been oddly high-pitched compared to his baritone voice, as if his true spirit were released only in those moments, the stupid, humorous ones. Curtis cried, sniveling tears like those cast by a small child, and he feared that as a result these other imprisoned men would be drawn toward him, attuned to the naked weakness and looking to take some kind of advantage. But everyone remained still and quiet as night became morning.

  IN THE MORNING, Jackie received a call from the police, asking if she would be able to go to the city morgue and identify the body thought to belong to Robert DeShaun Peace. She told Carl to stay with Frances, and she drove downtown, nearly the same route she’d taken to St. Benedict’s on the days she’d dropped Rob off. She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son’s face. She nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s Shawn, that’s my son.” From there, she drove straight to work.

  Chapter 17

  From: Facebook

  To: Jeff Hobbs

  Subject: Victor Raymond sent you a message on Facebook...

  Hey Jeff,

  You might not remember me but I was your roommate’s Rob Peace’s best friend. I came down to visit him at Yale a few times throughout the years.

  Well I regret to inform you that he passed away. I am trying to figure out a way to notify his Yale friends. The only one I knew to contact was you. Please let me know if you need further information.

  Sorry to inform you this way!!!

  Victor

  This message brayed on my phone just before midnight on Thursday, May 19, the day after Rob died. The words wiped away the drowsiness caused by two Seinfeld reruns. A few shocked back-and-forths confirmed what I instinctively knew already: my college roommate of four years had died violently. But they did not give much else, not even the minor consolation of knowing he’d made the ultimate transition without pain.

  The death of someone you know is so vastly different from reading of the same event happening to a stranger. You are familiar with your friend’s face and voice, and so you are haunted, during the overstimulated state of being wide awake at four in the morning, by the very specific expressions and sounds he might have made as a bullet, perhaps more than one, passed into his body. The terrible resoluteness of this passage had likely happened not long after my wife and I, three thou
sand miles away, had undergone our nightly square dance—one flosses while the other brushes, then switch—padding softly on the floorboards so as not to wake our little girl.

  A Yale graduate lost to the drug trade seemed so far-flung and bizarre that the task of relating this to our college community was barely short of incapacitating. But still, the tidy Facebook search-poke-send features provided the necessary distance for me to friend a few dozen people I was no longer—or, in some cases, had never been—friends with in order to inform them that our mutual friend was gone. The responses I received all fell along the lines of, “Jeff it is so great to hear from you but what HORRIBLE news!!! How did this HAPPEN???” The bombardment of questions to which I had no answers only made me feel less fit for the task, particularly when I was corresponding with those who knew him far better than I, such as Raquel and Daniella. Some inquiries were as simple as the when/where of the funeral (I had conflicting times/addresses), while others asked, in the cosmoreligious sense, Why? (Being more or less a Christmas and Easter churchgoer, I had no clue.) The answers I did manage to learn in the days preceding the burial remained broad and overearnest and sometimes contradictory: he was dealing only to support his mother; all he wanted was to live in South America; he was broke; he was trying to go back to school; he was going to get out of it soon; he was trying to open up his own pharmacy; what had happened wasn’t supposed to have happened. And yet they still rendered the predictable media spin of potential squandered, the gift of education sacrificed to the allure of thug life, etc., not only simplistic but offensively so. Equally unilluminating were the brainy musings of classmates, accompanied by the requisite, almost haughty “borne back ceaselessly into the past” references. The fact was that what he’d been killed over didn’t seem any more sinister than what he’d done in college, when the “farmacy” he’d opened in his dorm room had seemed as far removed from lethality as the Ivory Tower itself.