If You Really Loved Me (19 page)

Of all the Bailey sisters, Linda was the one who was the warmest, most affectionate, and fun loving. What she felt for this man so full of pretense and braggadocio was a mystery to her family, but they loved her and wanted to stay close. They had mixed emotions when Linda and David announced plans to remarry. Mary Bailey, of course, disapproved. Frankly, she thought Linda could have done better. She had argued against David as a husband until she was blue in the face—but to no avail. Linda adored the man.

"I finally gave up and said nothing. I could see it wasn't doing any good, and it was driving a wedge between Linda and me. But even when we made up with Linda, we didn't see her often. David didn't like to have her spending time with her family, our visits weren't encouraged, and he was furious if she ever discussed any problems with us. He wanted her all to himself."

Others in the Bailey family were glad to have David back in the fold. He was such a go-getter that they believed him completely when he talked about all the businesses he was going to start. He was an egomaniac and a bullshitter, but David Brown might well be a way out for more of them besides Linda. He hinted that there would be jobs for many of them when he got his enterprises going.

Manuela and Arthur Brown, while a little surprised at their son's many marriages before the age of thirty and not particularly fond of Linda, were relieved that he finally seemed to have settled down. All those marriages and divorces couldn't be good for his health. The emotional strain of having one marriage after another disintegrate must surely have contributed to his ulcers and colitis and asthma, and all the other ailments he suffered from.

The mercurial state of his health was only one of the many paradoxes about David Brown. He talked of being constantly ill and of having little energy, and yet he exuded an aura of self-confidence and can-do. Nobody he interacted with ever seemed to doubt him—in either mode. David was not a well man and had to be coddled, but he was also a winner in the world of business.

Either deliberately or with some innate sense he possessed, David surrounded himself with people who viewed him as an infinitely superior man. He was smarter, savvier, better educated, and older than all his women. He really had no male friends—only employees. He had crafted his own world—where no one would question him or doubt him, or second-guess him. He was good to those he let into his life, free with his money, and he continually hinted at rewards yet to come.

He gave the women in his life jewelry and presents and promises and poems. He made jokes and kept his women laughing. He became, for three young females, as vital as the very air they breathed. Interestingly, they all used the same phrase to describe him:
their life support system.

EXCERPTS FROM TWO ORIGINAL POEMS
BY DAVID ARNOLD BROWN
(
TO HIS WIFE
)

That Inward Sun Is Our Hope & Faith For Tomorrow One Good, Happy Tomorrow Can Wash Away A Lot of Ugly Yesterdays.
I Am Here For You—Today, Tomorrow, Forever.

Life Will Be Wonderful

Love Will Be Too

Both Will Be Cherished

While I Share Them With You

16

R
omantic that he was, David Brown did not let it interfere with his own ambitions. "The Process" was his breakthrough. It verified what he had always promised. The Process would bring him financial rewards far beyond what even he had visualized. And it would give him prestige and respect, which he craved even more. No one would ever remember the David Brown who had scraped by on welfare. He had already done well financially; he wanted to be a millionaire.

In a mushrooming computer age, there were inherent nightmares. Anyone who has ever relied on a computer lives in dread of losing the precious information stored on disks. Business files, customer lists, accounts payable, creative work, in the blink of an eye, all of it can disappear, swallowed up somewhere deep in the bowels of a previously user-friendly computer.

In the early 1980s, even more than today, computer data was vulnerable to siege. Fires, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, floods, power surges and outages, and human error can wreak computer disaster. "Disk error" was a message that sent a chill through the user. A "crashed" system could bring a company to its knees financially.

David Brown was not an "egghead"—computer-programer type; he was a specialist in a new kind of rescue service. His knowledge was deceptively simple—but there was a demand for it, and he always spoke of it in a hushed voice, enhancing the impression that he was onto something really big.

David started his own company, which he called Data Recovery, and he got a big leg up in 1981 when he went to work for Randomex Inc. in Signal Hill, California, as a subcontractor. Randomex had designed a system to repair damaged computer disks so that they could be read for backup and the vital information hidden there miraculously recovered.

Randomex profited from the fact that too many computer users neglected to keep backup disks stored outside their offices or had backup systems that had failed. The specialists at Randomex had refined their techniques to the point where they could recover data from fourteen-inch removable disk packs, and from hard drives and floppy disks. They were successful in retrieving 40 to 60 percent of the data lost by their frantic customers. That salvage could mean the difference between bankruptcy or survival for the small businessman.

David Brown studied the Randomex system as he worked for the company. He learned how to treat and clean the "media"—the disks—and make the heads fly back over the damaged area, bring the drives up to speed, and copy the
good
data onto another disk or tape. If he could improve on Randomex's percentage, David figured he would have himself a gold mine.

As indeed he did.

Randomex made all the contacts with potential customers, and David or Linda or some other family member on David's staff would pick up the damaged disks for treatment. When David came down himself, he never talked much. The executives at Randomex didn't like him, and they didn't dislike him. They never really knew him. He was simply "Data Recovery," a little subcontractor.

David added a few twists of his own and came up with what he called The Process. It was his, and his alone. He gave no credit to those who had taught him; his improvements were the real key. He soon was able to retrieve consistently a solid 70 percent of the data on the damaged disks given to him. David's special area of expertise was minidisks, the tiny hard disks that hold an unbelievable amount of data.

Cautious almost to the point of paranoia, David trained only those people he truly trusted, or over whom he wielded some power, in The Process. Even to detectives later, he could not bring himself to describe The Process in any detail. He called it "a hands-on project—what people out there call 'the magic of making it work' ... I guess you call it the power of what we do—see, all this time, no one else can do this."

He always lapsed into inscrutable and deliberately vague phrases when asked to describe The Process. Linda was the first to have all the pieces of his formula. David trusted Linda because she adored him. "Well, I developed The Process," he explained. "I designed computers and disk drives and all kinds of stuff like that. I trained people like Sperry Univac. ... I trained other engineers, so training Linda ... I used training materials I used to teach other people to teach her, training materials I had written and developed."

Linda had no high school education, but The Process didn't require that. It required careful, tedious attention to the job at hand—but no special intelligence or talent. Actually, despite all the mystery surrounding David's process, and his determined efforts to remain obscure about the magic he wrought, his technique required little more than patience, Q-Tips, rubbing alcohol, and nonoily detergent. Sometimes he and Linda would have to run the damaged disks through The Process only once, and sometimes over and over, but they delivered what the customer wanted, and Randomex rewarded them with more and more jobs.

David Brown's 1099 income tax forms reflected his growing skill at data retrieval. In 1981, he was paid $ 11,255 by Randomex. In 1982, $98,143.85; 1983—$124,905.82; 1984—$171,141.79. His data retrieval income dropped in 1985 to $ 114,081.02, but that was understandable, given his shock and grief over the loss of his wife and business partner.

The Randomex income was gross—not net; David had to pay salaries and the required state taxes and withholdings out of that for his employees. His employees were all "family." Linda's twin brother, Alan, worked for them some, and sometimes David's father, Arthur, helped out. Once in a while, David gave some work to Linda's brother Larry, but he had slight confidence in Larry and was cautious with him. Larry was fired more than he was hired. Later, David taught Arthur some of The Process.

Still, nobody but Linda and David knew the whole process.

That was best. Even though it was not nearly as esoteric as David liked to suggest, it took exactly the right combination of ingredients. That belonged to David Arnold Brown and he was zealously protective of his technique.

Beyond David's Randomex income he had other interests —coin collecting, for one. No one who knew him doubted that David Brown, from one source or another, was well on his way to becoming a millionaire.

As the 1980s progressed, both David's second and fourth wives were long since relegated to dim history. He kept in touch with Brenda only because of Cinnamon. He enjoyed the fact that she still lived with all the old furniture she had cleared out of their apartment. "She's bitter because I'm a millionaire," he liked to tell people.

He and Linda were solid. His place in the Bailey family was established. He was the rich relative. Thus far, the changes he had wrought in their lives were mostly positive. Even those who didn't care for David's high-handedness acknowledged him as a member of the family. They maintained only a gritty, bare standard of living. David Brown had the power to cast a warm, monetary glow over their existence.

Although he barely noticed her at first, there was another member of the Bailey family who gazed at David with eyes glazed with pure worship. She had been only a little girl of seven or eight when she sat shyly in the corner and listened to the man who brought them hamburgers. She found him quite wonderful and loved to listen to the rumble of his deep voice. He was a man and she was a child. Almost sixteen years yawned between them.

But Patti Bailey adored David Brown almost from the start. He was kind to her and to the rest of the family, and she had always wished she could curl up in his lap and feel safe forever. Patti was so young the first time David married her older sister, not old enough to feel real jealousy—only a kind of wistful longing. Linda got to move into David's nice house and be safe with David. And Patti had to stay behind.

"With Linda gone, Patti was the last young girl left in the Bailey household. She had no one left to run to." Patti was afraid so much of the time. She slept with one eye open, aware of soft male voices and the smell of sweat. Men's and boys' whispers in the dark, their quick hands. Patti thought that, if only she could live in David's house, she would be in heaven.

When Linda's first marriage to David ended, Patti wasn't sure what she felt. Sadness certainly that David wouldn't be part of their family any longer, and perhaps a certain smugness that Linda wasn't as smart as she thought she was. Patti held on to her little girl's dream that someday David would come and take her away and marry her. He was always so nice to her, and he winked at her as if they shared secrets together. She found him handsome with his shiny brown hair and his mustache.

When Linda and David started living together again, Patti was jealous and angry that Linda had had two chances, and she none. She was twelve and she would be a teenager soon. Why hadn't David waited for her? In a way, it was the plight of little sisters everywhere who suffer from hopeless crushes. But Patti Bailey had real, dark reasons to long for rescue. She was as vulnerable as a rabbit trembling in a clearing, and she viewed David Brown as all things kind and good and safe.

Linda knew how things were at home in Riverside, and she invited Patti to spend many weekends with her and David in Victorville where they were living then. David was buying a small house up there and the acre of land surrounding it. Victorville was about forty-five miles north of Riverside, up near Barstow and edging into the Mohave Desert. Patti loved it up there; it was another world. She dreaded going home when Sunday night came. Finally, Linda took Patti aside and told her that she didn't have to go back to Riverside anymore. Linda and David were going to get married again, and that meant Patti could stay.

Patti was ecstatic. When Christmas vacation started that year, she moved out of her family home and into David and Linda's. She would go to Yucca Valley school. Patti Bailey was delivered from despair into the fulfillment of most of her young aspirations. She would live in a clean house with new furniture. She would have all she wanted to eat. She would go to school wearing clothes bought at K Mart and J.C. Penney, new and fashionable. She would watch color television and be able to buy records.

Best of all, she would be near David.

David had rescued her, and Linda had said she could live with them. Her gratitude to both of them was boundless. But most of all, she loved David. He made her so happy. Years later, she would remember the exact date she moved in with David and Linda: "December 19, 1981. I was thirteen."

Once more, David and Linda drove to Las Vegas to be married. She was both his third and fifth wife. It would be the first time in years that David spent two consecutive Christmases with the same wife. And from that point forward, Patti was an integral part of David Brown's family. David and Linda and Patti. And sometimes Cinnamon.

Cinnamon was bounced back and forth between her parents; they often seemed to treat her more as a weapon against one another than a child to be loved and nurtured. If Cinny didn't mind Brenda, she called David and demanded he come and pick Cinnamon up. If David wearied of the day-to-day care of a small child, he packed her clothes and sent Cinnamon home.

Cinnamon was living with David and Linda in Victorville when Patti moved in. They soon moved to a house on West Street in Anaheim. Cinnamon was attending Patrick Henry Elementary School, and she lived with her father's family until July 1983. The girls got along, fighting occasionally as sisters will. They had known each other since Cinny was four or five. Cinnamon was two years younger than Patti, and they were very different. They were not really sisters, not even cousins—but friends. Even after she eventually went back to live with her mother, Cinnamon didn't seem to be jealous that her father let a girl close to her own age live in his home all the time when she only visited during weekends and vacations.

Cinnamon's trial time with her father and Linda and Patti didn't work out. Nobody could really explain why. But she didn't fit in, and her independent spirit was an irritant. Cinnamon was an extrovert where Patti was quiet. Cinnamon had a sense of humor, even then, and she was quick to see the humorous side of things. Patti was solemn and failed to get the puns and quips that Cinnamon tossed out. Cinny was slapdash and detested doing chores, the vacuuming and dishes that were required of the two girls. Patti was neat, maybe because she had lived so long with disorder and because she treasured her new possessions so much.

As dissimilar as the two girls were, Cinny was part of the family. This new family. Linda and Cinny got along fine for most of the year they shared a home, and Cinnamon apparently accepted her stepmother—even though Linda was only twenty. Her father recalled that Cinny was sent back to Brenda "because she wouldn't obey Linda."

Cinnamon was humiliated when David ordered her to stand in front of the whole family in her underwear while he spanked her with a leather belt. (The incident that caused Dr. Howell to report David to authorities for child abuse after Linda was murdered.) Despite the red welts David's belt raised, Cinny refused to cry. She only looked at him defiantly and said, "I hate you. ... I can't live with you anymore. I hate you."