If You Really Loved Me (26 page)

23

J
ay Newell decided it was high time that someone wised Cinnamon up to what was going on at home. As far as he could tell, the only information she ever got was from her grandfather, and that came to her in obscure bits and pieces. But Newell could not go to her directly. Since Cinnamon was still a minor and would be one until her eighteenth birthday on July 3, 1988, he could not talk to her without her parents' permission.

Cinnamon's custodial parent at the time she was arrested was the very person Newell was investigating—David Arnold Brown. Everything he was coming up with made Newell that much more suspicious that Brown had played some role—however ephemeral it might have been—in the murder of his fifth wife. He was obviously still living with the suspect Grandpa Brown had fingered. Brown was a smart man; he had to be aware of the possibility that Patti was involved. Why would he stay with her?

David Brown was the last person Newell wanted to alert. He preferred to watch David and Patti without their knowledge. And he sure as heck didn't want to ask David Brown for permission to question Cinnamon. He couldn't imagine that Brown would acquiesce.

One thing that Jay Newell
could
do and remain strictly and ethically within the bounds of the law was to pass certain information to Cinnamon's parole officer. Newell couldn't talk to Cinnamon, but he could have a kind of secondhand input. It was akin to fishing in murky waters at midnight; he didn't know what would come up on his line.

Newell was convinced now that Cinnamon Brown was serving out a kind of penance, shouldering all the punishment for a crime she might not have committed. Something was keeping her from talking to the parole board or to her counselors. He didn't know if it was fear or misplaced loyalty, or part of some prearranged plot.

Newell would have liked to let Cinnamon know she had a friend working on the outside for her. Himself. But he didn't dare tell her. By the time he finished his investigation, he might even turn out to be an enemy instead of a friend. He didn't know the girl. He didn't know what drove her, and what it might take to get her to tell the complete truth.

If she even knew it anymore.

Jay Newell began by taking pictures of the lovely new homes where David and Patti lived—the sumptuous field-stone mansion in the Anaheim Hills, and the sprawling six-bedroom complex on Chantilly. He took a picture of the pool at the new house. It was blue-green with statues of Grecian goddesses watching over it. Luxurious tables and lounge chairs were grouped around the sun-drenched patio. He took the photos with him when he drove up to the Ventura School in Camarillo. He moved through the high-security check-in building and asked to see Cinnamon's PO.

As he waited, Newell could not help but notice the tremendous contrast between David's living conditions and his oldest daughter's. David had it all—and Cinnamon had almost nothing.

The school itself, with its low red-brick buildings, swimming pool, grassy area, and round picnic tables with umbrellas, didn't
look
that forbidding. But it was an institution; all the windows were secured, announcements blared continually. The sound of flat keys in slotted locks was familiar—a sound Jay Newell had left behind long ago at the HOJJ. This was Cinnamon's world, and it had been for three years. Guards and body searches and passes and lockdowns.

Newell discussed with Carlos Rodriguez, Cinnamon's parole officer, the feasibility of letting her know what was going on at home. He gave the pictures of the homes where David and Patti had been living to Rodriguez.

Jay Newell felt Cinnamon deserved to know that her father and Patti were still together. That they drove expensive cars, traveled often to Las Vegas to gamble and see the shows, that they not only walked free, they were also living high and well. David, at least, walked free. Patti was constantly leashed in with her beeper.

"I didn't know at the time if she saw the pictures or not," Newell said. "I didn't want to know." But if Cinnamon did see those pictures, she could not help but be shocked by how well her father was living.

Maybe she already knew—but Newell doubted it.

The counselors at Ventura School told him that Cinnamon still had no way to get in touch with her father directly. She could call the answering service for the business, or she could write to the business address, a box number in Anaheim, but for all the information she had, her father might be living in Australia. One thing seemed to bother her, however, more than anything. She had been asking questions about Patti's baby.

Newell kept track of Cinnamon and of how she was doing at Ventura, although he never spoke to her directly. Occasionally, he caught sight of her across the quad, but she didn't see him. He had never spoken to Cinnamon. By the time he would normally have questioned her after her arrest in March 1985, she reportedly had no memory of what had happened.

Newell learned Cinnamon was a loner who didn't hang out with any particular group, not the Caucasian girls or the Hispanics or the blacks or the Asians. After three years, she still kept to herself, didn't cause trouble, and cooperated with the cottage parents and teachers. Her grades were nothing to brag about, but she wasn't flunking either. Except for the fact that "Ventura School" was a prison, Cinnamon's reports were probably exactly what they would have been if she were back in Anaheim going to Loara High School. But instead of heading for the beach on weekends and in the summer, Cinnamon went back to her cell after school.

Newell learned from her counselors that she hadn't become institutionalized, and she certainly hadn't become tough or hardened. She was a normal kid, save for the fact that she had been removed from real life for so long that she seemed almost afraid to go back out into a changed world. She had a "boyfriend"—not a real boyfriend, but a young man she saw and talked to when she went to work in the evening. She would lose him too; he was being paroled.

Newell had no idea what Cinnamon was really like now, nothing beyond what others told him. He doubted that he would be able to reach her—at least not emotionally. No one else had. If all the psychologists and all the counselors and her own attorney had been unable to break through her wall of forgetfulness, how on earth could he hope to? If Cinnamon
had
seen the photographs of the fancy houses her father now lived in, how had she reacted? She might have closed up even more. Her psychological tests had shown a young woman almost totally devoid of hostility. Newell wasn't a psychologist, but it seemed to him that that kind of personality might not come out fighting for her fair share of life. A girl with no hostility in her might simply turn her face to the wall and give up.

Cinnamon had now been locked up for three years, three of the most important years of a teenager's life—from fourteen to seventeen. Newell had seen the visitors' sign-in sheets and noted that David rarely visited his daughter any longer—although he kept her commissary account solvent. It was as if he had written his oldest child off, giving her
money
and
things
to assure himself that she wouldn't bother him. More incomprehensible, it was as if he had his new life and he had left Cinnamon, at least figuratively, to rot.

At some point, might not Cinnamon Darlene Brown get mad? Even for a girl with only a teaspoonful of hostility, couldn't there be a breaking point?

* * *

The case had become an obsession with Jay Newell. He took the case file out of his drawer often, reading it over, worrying it, approaching it from oblique angles. More than three years. A man with good sense would have given up long ago, he told himself.

But every time he opened up the dog-eared file, he found something else—some little fragment of information—that made him believe he was on the right track. He didn't know
who
had shot Linda Marie Brown as she slept, but he was absolutely convinced that the impetus that led to her murder had not originated in Cinnamon Brown's mind.

Somebody else had to be involved. And since Cinnamon was the only one locked up, that somebody or
those
some-bodies were walking free. Maybe it
was
Patti, as Grandpa Brown insisted. Maybe it was David. Maybe it was even other members of the Bailey family as David had suggested. And even if it turned out that Cinnamon herself
had
pulled the trigger, Newell wanted to find a way into the void of her memory and learn
why.

Newell contacted Brenda Sands, hoping that she might help him get Cinnamon to open up. Fred McLean had talked to Brenda several times with no problems. Newell barely survived his first encounter with Cinnamon's mother. With all his experience with the toughest gangs in southern California, with all the midnight drug busts, getting shot at on patrol, and staring Charles Manson straight in the eye, Newell had never met anyone like Brenda Sands.

Their meeting was akin to a hawk trying to peek into a mother wren's nest. David had convinced Brenda that Jay Newell was a major force threatening her daughter and one of the villains who had put Cinnamon in prison (which, in truth, he had to admit he was). Brenda chased him from her door, and the big detective ran for cover when the petite brunette took off after him. A friend waiting in the car for Newell saw him come bucketing out in total rout and said, laughing, "Are you sure you
like
this job? It sure doesn't look like much fun from here."

Brenda kept in touch with Cinnamon and visited her whenever she could, driving a funny old humpbacked station wagon that David had given her so she could make the trip up and back to Ventura. Fortunately, as time passed, Newell was able to convince Brenda that he was still trying to unearth the truth about her daughter's case. They met again and she told him everything she knew, but it was so very little. Yes, David had rushed to her and to Susan Salcido on the very day of Linda's murder, hurrying to warn them to be sure to portray Cinny as flaky and suicidal.

Brenda smelled a rat too, but she was in the same position as the rest of them. She had misgivings and doubts; she did not have proof. And she was still afraid of her first husband, terrified to cross him.

24

W
hen the call came, Jay Newell was absolutely astounded. He had laid the groundwork, he had hoped that it would happen—but he had never really believed it would. Then, and in retrospect, it was the longest shot he had ever played.

But it worked.

It was July 19, 1988, and the caller on the line was Cinnamon's parole officer, Carlos Rodriguez, at the Ventura School.

"I have someone here who wants to talk to you. She wants to talk about her case."

It was Cinnamon.

Newell quickly called Deputy DA Dick Fredrickson to pick up an extension, and the two members of the Orange County DA's staff heard the small voice come across the phone line from the Ventura School. It was a wispy, half-frightened voice.

"Hello, Mr. Newell?"

"Cinnamon?"
Newell identified himself, and at the same time reassured himself that it was, indeed, Cinnamon Brown at long last.

Cinnamon Brown wanted—
needed
—to talk to someone. She did not balk at having Fredrickson listening, but her first question was startling—and telling: "Will I be protected, or will my father be listening?"

"Who?"
Newell asked, surprised.

"My father."

Assured that David Brown was not listening, she burst forth, "He was in the wrong for what he did, and I was too young to realize it. I know now that it's time for him to take the responsibility for the crime that's taken place. ... I was a little bit involved 'cause I knew what was going to happen—but I didn't actually do the murder."

Jay Newell's voice was as calm and steady as always. But there was an undercurrent of excitement and relief in his voice when he spoke to Cinnamon. She finally felt safe enough—or mad enough—to call. She was hesitant to go into details on the phone, but Newell needed to know more, to be assured that she was really ready to deal in specifics.

"It's possibly something you can work with," she told him. "He said that Linda was going to be killing him, for insurance or something for her and her twin brother, and he said
we
had to do something about it. I said, 'What is it that you want me to do?' and he said, 'We're going to have to think of a way to get rid of her or I'll have to leave town.' I said I didn't want him to leave town, and he said, 'You're going to have to help me then.' So we went for several drives while he and Patricia thought of ways to dispose of Linda."

Cinnamon recalled to Newell her memory of catching her father kissing Patti in the store. "Later things started getting worse. He'd take off with Patricia, and sometimes I'd go with them. To banks and stuff to cash checks. We'd be gone for hours. Well, him and Patricia started talking about ways to get rid of Linda—like we'd throw her out of the van when we were driving down the freeway . . . she suggested hitting her over the head to knock her out. . . different ways ... I was listening ... I wasn't involved."

Oh, my God
. . .

The long-held secrets burst out like floodwaters knocking down a wall. After the crime, Cinnamon said her father had first told her to say she had done it, and then he had told her not to say anything, not to remember anything. "I didn't because I trusted him."

Newell questioned Cinnamon about the gun, and she said she knew it was Linda's, and she knew that Patti had wiped it off with a towel.

Cinnamon said she had not talked to her father for four weeks, and then only to ask for some supplies she needed. Asked if she had ever confronted him with her thoughts on Linda's murder, she said she had, but that her father always pushed the subject away and said, "Well, you'll be out soon."

"For some reason, he won't talk about it at all. He pretends not to hear."

Cinnamon said Patti never visited her, never talked on the phone, but sometimes listened in when Cinnamon called David.

"Do you know Patti had a baby?" Cinnamon asked suddenly.

"Yes," Newell answered.

"Do you know that baby is my father's baby?"

"I know all about that."

That was it. Cinnamon Brown had been betrayed in so many ways, Newell suspected, and in ways he didn't even know about yet. But the birth of Patti's baby, fathered by David Brown, had shattered her steadfast belief in her father. She finally realized she had simply been thrown away.

"Are you willing to give a formal statement about this . . . and open up the investigation?" Newell asked.

"I could probably help you . . . but I don't want to endanger myself with my father."

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Yeah, I'm afraid of him. To me, he seems very powerful."

Cinnamon's coming forth might help her in her hopes for freedom, but Newell was adamant that he could give no such assurances. "I don't know what you're going to lead us into."

Over and over again, Cinnamon asked that her call be kept confidential from her father. She asked for protection. Newell told her that, if it seemed necessary, she would be protected.

Dick Fredrickson came on the line. He had two questions to ask. "You said you heard your father drive away before you heard the shots?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever handled the gun?"

"I'm not sure. My father had so many guns. I'm not even sure which one it was."

"How do you know it wasn't Patti who drove away?" Newell asked.

"Because Patti didn't know how to drive."

Cinnamon thought she had heard the Ranchero leave, and that was David's car. It made a lot of noise. Or maybe his Prelude.

Newell told Cinnamon that he would have to come up to the Ventura School to talk to her in person. He asked her to jot down notes to herself, to help her remember. Nothing in his voice betrayed how he felt—whether or not he believed what she had just told him. He warned her to tell no one that she had called the DA's office—no one—not even her mother.

She promised she would not.

Newell and Fredrickson talked briefly to Carlos Rodriguez, and then this enthralling call was over.

Newell sat back in his chair in disbelief and stared at the lithograph on his wall without seeing it. It had finally happened, the first tiny crack in that vast wall of silence. Then he leapt to his feet and raised one fist triumphantly over his head, punching the air like a winning prizefighter. Dick Fredrickson raced into Newell's office and they clapped each other on the shoulder.

It was a moment of high emotion. The impossible had happened. Cinnamon Brown had talked.

But Cinnamon's rush of words puzzled Newell. For instance, he had not expected to hear that David Brown had left before the shots were fired. But then, Newell was not convinced he was hearing the whole truth. He was not convinced he was hearing
any
of the truth.

The most important thing was that Cinnamon had finally begun to talk. Three years and four months to the day after Linda Brown's murder, Cinnamon had broken her silence and had agreed to talk to Newell in person.

Would he come to Ventura?

You bet he would.

It was not as simple a process as it might have seemed. Newell had been working this case basically on a "request for more information" from the California Youth Authority. It was certainly not an official, full-fledged murder investigation. The murder of Linda Marie Bailey Brown had been
solved,
adjudicated, and the case closed long ago. Newell did not have the authority to take the giant plunge of reopening the case. It was one thing to keep track of David Brown and Patti Bailey. But it was a long jump from his surveillance to go to the California Youth Authority Prison and open up the can of worms he knew was waiting for him there.

Cinnamon's call left Newell both exhilarated and cautious. He had to find himself a deputy DA who had the time, enthusiasm, and temerity to reopen this case. Dick Fredrickson was behind him, but he had too many other responsibilities to see this thing through if it turned into something they could go back into court with.

An admitted killer, locked up in the joint for three years, who suddenly changes her mind, was not the ideal prosecution witness. She would be the prey of choice for a defense attorney. Most deputy DAs, given an alternative, would rapidly walk in the opposite direction if they encountered Jay Newell headed their way with such a case.

But Newell had somebody in mind.

Jeoff Robinson had no free time at all, but he was rumored to be ripe for impossible challenges and was gutsy as hell. A fighter such as Robinson was the kind of DDA it was going to take to reopen this long-dormant case.

Orange County deputy district attorneys worked their way up from misdemeanors to felonies—particularly homicides. Once they reached that rarefied position as a prosecutor of homicide cases, each worked a specific city in the county. In July of 1988, Jeoff Robinson was the DDA who handled all homicides in Garden Grove.

Robinson was something of a legend in Orange County. In many ways, he was exactly what central casting would have chosen to portray a crusading district attorney. In most others, he was a revelation.

Robinson, thirty-five, was a strikingly handsome man with dark hair and crystalline blue-green eyes. Six feet tall, 180 pounds, he had the physique of a star quarterback— which he was, at the University of the Pacific. "Well," he said with a laugh, "let's say at least in my own mind. To be honest, if I'd been six feet three and weighed two hundred and thirty, I would have wanted to play professional football. But I wasn't."

Six feet was big in the forties; in the seventies, it was the Goliaths who were the draft choices.

But it wasn't really that. It was the law itself calling to him. Jeoff Robinson had been weaned, reared, steeped, and tutored in the law from the time he was old enough to comprehend. Not criminal law. Civil law. It was assumed that Jeoff would come into the family practice. For a long time, he assumed he would too.

His father, Mark Robinson, Sr., was renowned for his landmark success in product liability suits. Jeoff's older brother, Mark junior, in partnership with their father, won a stunning victory over the Ford Motor Company in the incendiary-Pinto suits of the seventies, and they had since won many more multimillion-dollar judgments—both actual and punitive—for their clients.

"As a kid, I wasn't questioned," Jeoff Robinson remembered. "From the time I was five, I was cross-examined. I loved it. I loved watching my dad in court. I respect my dad more than any man I've ever known. He has an internal toughness that I've never seen in anyone else. My mother— well, my mother's a saint."

Mark Robinson, Sr., an Army Air Force pilot, was shot down over Yugoslavia in World War Two and was missing in action for several months before he was discovered to be a prisoner of war. His bride, Rita, nineteen, was pregnant when Mark vanished. His first son was born while he was missing in action and was named after him.

After the war, the family settled in Los Angeles's Hancock Park, on Irving Boulevard, and grew to eight children. "It was paradise for kids. I think we had seventy-five kids on our one block alone," Jeoff remembered. "Big older houses —when neighborhoods in Los Angeles were much different—a sort of Catholic ghetto."

Later, as his practice grew, Mark Robinson moved his family to Fremont Place where he had made a once-in-a-lifetime buy on a large house with a tennis court—and an elevator. But Jeoff was not raised a rich kid. His father's tremendous success peaked
after
most of his children were grown. The Irving Boulevard days had the most impact on the eight Robinson kids, rough-and-tumble, and in and out of neighbors' houses in a Los Angeles that no longer exists.

Like his siblings, Robinson was brought up to be unfailingly polite, devout, and to work like hell for what he believed in. There was a Kennedyesque energy among the Robinsons, and Jeoff inherited twice his share. Mark junior practiced law with his father, and brother Greg coached football for UCLA for nine years and would later join the coaching staff of the New York Jets.

Jeoff graduated from law school at Southwestern University in Los Angeles, and he would have been welcomed into the family firm. But he wanted to strike out on his own, to prove he could make it on his own merit, without being "one of the Robinsons." Once he had done that, he would probably join his father and brother—but not until then.

"I wanted to try cases too," he recalled. "About the only way a young lawyer got to try cases immediately was to go to work-for the public defender's office or the district attorney. I preferred to
prosecute
crimes."

And prosecute crimes he did. Jeoff Robinson revved himself up for trial as if he were still playing football, stopping short of actually charging his office wall like a lineman attacking an opposing team. He worked through the night on arguments, acted out all roles, and prepared for any eventuality. He was also known for his willingness to get in there and dig for evidence—both figuratively and literally—with the investigators, and a forty-hour week meant nothing at all to him. He often worked sixty hours.

In trial, Robinson was utterly consumed by the case at hand. He was brilliant in voir dire and closing arguments. His direct- and cross-examination techniques were imaginative and maddening to the defense. He was emotional in the courtroom, but it was a sincere reaction, in no way contrived. He wore his feelings on the outside. When he was angry, the gallery knew it. When he was amused he had trouble hiding it.