The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Page 4

  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.

  THE 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 t
hat. 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.”

  TWO 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.

  Late on that Friday night, Georgianna Broadway and her roommate, Deborah Neal, went to visit the Moore sisters at 7 Chestnut Street in East Orange. The four women took turns holding Charlene’s four-month-old baby boy, they drank cocktails and malt liquor, they danced and complained about work and men and poverty—until midnight, when Georgianna took Deborah home to the house they shared on Palm Street. Georgianna then proceeded to 17th Avenue in Newark, one of the most dangerous areas of the city, to buy $40 worth of cocaine. She returned to the Moores’ apartment at around one fifteen. At that point, Estella left with a man named Mervin Matthews to go drink at a nearby bar. Georgianna and Charlene sat together in the dining area. Georgianna drank Colt 45 malt liquor; Charlene drank rum and Coke. Both smoked cocaine while the baby slept in the crib in the bedroom. Georgianna smoked regularly, and so her highs lasted only fifteen minutes. For four hours, while Charlene nodded off, Georgianna had hit after hit, until $40 had been cooked into her respiratory and nervous systems. The baby cried but fell back to sleep.

  When Estella came home with Mervin at five thirty on Saturday morning, Georgianna asked if she could sleep there. She’d been up for twenty-four straight hours that had begun with a full workday. In the bedroom, with the crib at their feet, Georgianna and Charlene curled up together, backs to the door. They slept.

  On his way home, Mervin Matthews stopped to buy cigarettes and realized he still had Estella’s keys, so he returned to Chestnut Street at six o’clock to return them. He encountered Skeet Douglas standing in front of the entrance of the complex with another man. Mervin knew who Skeet was and assumed that he had interrupted a drug transaction, so he tried to slip past them casually, but Skeet entered the building with him. Skeet’s apartment, 2D, stood perpendicular to the sisters in 2E at the end of the hall. The two men went into their respective doors. Estella was still awake, Charlene and Georgianna sleeping, but Mervin stayed only a minute or two. When he left, Skeet joined him again on his way back outside, saying that he was waiting for a pickup to take him to Newark International for an eight o’clock flight to North Carolina, where he had family—though he carried no luggage.

  Georgianna woke up at seven thirty, groggy and cotton mouthed and with an angry pulsation in her head, all that pleasure she’d stoked fewer than two hours ago replaced by deep aches and pains. She heard voices down the hallway, probably from the kitchen, a man and a woman. Charlene still slept soundly beside her, the baby asleep in the crib. When Estella came into the bedroom, Georgianna asked her for some food. Estella brought her leftover Chinese from the refrigerator. Georgianna then requested salt. Estella, apparently too distracted by whatever exchange was happening in the kitchen to be annoyed, went and grabbed the salt, which would be Estella Moore’s final movement on this earth. She returned to the darkened bedroom with a salt shaker and what Georgianna would later describe as a “scared look.”

  Then the bedroom door opened. Five shots were fired immediately, in quick succession. Estella fell first, onto the floor, a single bullet embedded in her brain. Charlene, who had rocketed upward out of her sleep, fell next, into mortal repose behind Georgianna, bullet holes in her chest and head. Georgianna felt a kick in her arm and a sharp sting beneath her chin as the bullet ricocheted upward off her humerus bone, and she fell backward off the far side of the bed without ever glimpsing the shooter.

  At nine thirty, 911 dispatch received a call from Deborah Neal’s home on Palm Street. Georgianna was there with Charlene’s baby, wearing Estella’s blood-soaked trench coat. The police and an ambulance arrived at the same time, and before Georgianna was taken to University Hospital she told Officer Alfred Rizzolo that “Skeet” shot her in apartment 2E of 7 Chestnut, and there were two dead bodies at the location. None of the responders understood why Georgianna, critically injured, had chosen to drive there on her own, why she hadn’t sought a neighbor’s help on Chestnut Street, why she hadn’t gone straight to East Orange Hospital, less than a block from the building where she’d been wounded.

  Three police officers pulled up to the Chestnut Street address at nine forty. They proceeded inside with caution. The doorway to 2E was wide open, and the inner hallway was spackled with blood. They found the bodies in the bedroom, still very warm. They searched the apartment according to protocol and found no weapons, just the remnants of the previous night of drinking and drug use, an infant’s playpen, Georgianna’s Chinese food barely touched on the bedside table. Because the dispatcher had alerted them to the possible suspect residing in 2D, they moved on—carefully—into Skeet’s apartment, the door to which had been ajar when they’d arrived.

  In 2D, they found absolute squalor, which the lead officer, Michael Brown, would later liken to that of an unclean, unsupervised child: dirty clothes everywhere, filthy dishes and rotten food, naked lightbulbs, and torn, stained furniture. Since there was no sign of any physical struggle or burglary, they could only assume that this was how the suspect lived day to day. On a table, they found scales, glass bowl pipes, a razor blade and spoons dusted with
cocaine residue, a bag of marijuana, a plastic container of cocaine, an empty black gun holster on a chain buried beneath dirty clothes, two black cestuses (fighting gloves weighted with iron studs), and a thick Rolodex.

  By now, investigators and medical personnel had begun arriving, including Captain John Armeno and Detective Sergeant Alan Sierchio. Without a warrant, they were permitted only to “look around” the apartment, specifically for weapons. They found no firearms, but Captain Armeno did gravitate toward a conspicuous framed photo lying on its side on a built-in shelf. In the photo, Skeet Douglas wore a bright green tuxedo complete with top hat, and—bizarrely—he was swinging a bejeweled cane. Armeno immediately sent this photo to University Hospital, where Georgianna was lying on a gurney in the emergency room, in critical condition due to shock and blood loss. She had been intubated and couldn’t speak. But she remained conscious, and when asked whether she knew the person responsible for the shootings, she nodded. The officer took out the photograph and asked her whether the pictured person was the shooter. She nodded again and began to cry. Later, she would admit that she had never actually seen who pulled the trigger, but she would claim to have recognized Skeet’s voice talking to Estella in the kitchen. She’d met Skeet once, a week before the murders, when he’d come over to the sisters’ apartment to fix their faulty door.

  That same afternoon, Detective Sergeant Sierchio used this exchange to obtain an official search warrant for 2D and access Skeet’s Rolodex. A short time later, Frances Peace received the call inquiring as to Skeet’s whereabouts, and she relayed this to both Jackie and Carl.