If You Really Loved Me (34 page)

Richard Steinhart, aka "Liberty," former Hessian motorcycle gang member and one-time hired hit man, was a surprising witness at the trial.
[Don Lasseter]

In a police surveillance photo, Huntington Beach police detective Bob Moran, as "Animal, the hit man" (left) and Richard Steinhart (right) collected a $10,000 check from a go-between. The person who orchestrated Linda Brown's murder intended the money to pay for the murders of Jay Newell, Jeoff Robinson, and Patti Bailey.

Cinnamon Brown, twenty, as she waited for an end to her long ordeal.

David explained that he could arrange to have Patti convicted. Patti was the one with the gunpowder on her. "All this time I thought
you
did it because you love me," he breathed. "This is not what I wanted. I would have much rather had you home all the time."

"I would have liked to have been at home."

". . . Don't be angry at me for something I didn't know, Cinny. ... All the books and stuff I read. I thought I knew a lot about everything."

And with it all, David Brown was still tap-dancing in, out, and around his interchangeable plots. He never once suggested that
he
had any guilty knowledge. Newell saw another zinger telegraphed every time he heard David say "honestly" and "honest to God."

David appeared to be thinking hard. The best thing, still, was for Cinnamon to pretend she remembered nothing— just as she always had. Yes, that was still the safest plan. He instructed her carefully. "Then your truth is that you don't know anything.
You don't remember anything.
'Cause if they come to me, that's what I'm going to tell them. I don't know anything. And I don't remember anything. Because if
I
go to jail, I can't survive jail. Especially with my heart and my liver and my kidney problem. I can't. ... I would kill myself before I would let myself die a slow and painful death in a cell. It's a lot worse, you know, for grown-up men in prison."

Lieutenant Favila checked Cinnamon's pass again as she and her father moved inside to join Manuela and Krystal and Arthur. He whispered to her, "They want you to tell them to bring Patti in so you can bury the hatchet. You want to hear from Patti that everything is done and over. You want to kind of make peace with Patti. See if you can get a confession."

But visiting hours were almost over, and Cinnamon was exhausted, her shirt soaked with sweat. There was no time. She knew Patti, and she knew Patti wouldn't tell the truth in fifteen minutes. It would have to be next time.

Cinnamon hugged her father good-bye, and Grandma and Grandpa, and Krystal. And then she hurried into the hidden room to have the wires and transmitter taken off.

"How do you feel?" a male voice asked on the tape.

"Nauseous."

"You can go in there and untape that stuff and get that off of you."

Drained, Cinnamon peeled the apparatus from her breasts. She had done it; she had defied her own father. She was still afraid of him, and suddenly, her legs began to tremble. She wanted very much to believe that Jay Newell and Jeoff Robinson could really keep her safe. Her father was going to be enraged when he found out what she had done to him.

28

S
omehow, in some combination, or separately, there had clearly been
three
main "players" in the sudden death of Linda Marie Brown.

Cinnamon.

David.

Patti.

Jay Newell and Jeoff Robinson had heard David— alternately stuttering, blustering, ordering, and cajoling— on their hidden transmitter, but it had been a long time since anyone had heard from Patti Bailey. With David blithely offering to exchange Patti's freedom for Cinnamon's, as much as admitting Patti's culpability, the dead woman's sister was next on the list for the investigators.

Cinnamon had urged David to bring Patti up for a visit, and he was apparently nervous enough about his daughter's unexpected assertiveness and sticky questions that he, indeed, brought Patti along on the next possible visit.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon on August 27, 1988, when Cinnamon whispered, "Jay . . . can you hear me? I hope so 'cause I don't really want to go and mess up the tape. . . . Hello. Thank you."

Newell could hear her well, but he could not see her. He was in the same room where he had set up his equipment before, and Cinnamon, Patti, and David would be across the quad, behind the guard tower, out of his sight completely. Walt Robbins, deputy security chief at the CYA, was in the guard tower, less than twenty feet away from where Cinnamon and her visitors would be. He would be taking pictures.

Cinnamon was not quite as nervous this time. She had managed to get through the worst part, the first time taping her father. Now she would face Patti Bailey, the girl—now woman—who had been a childhood friend, a teenage irritant, perhaps a co-conspirator in murder—and who she suspected was probably her father's mistress and the mother of his latest baby.

Cinnamon hadn't seen Patti for a long, long time.

Now she saw Patti and David headed toward her, holding Krystal by the hand. Patti looked older, a little heavier. She wore blue jeans and a pink blouse, and her thick blond hair was pulled back into a curly ponytail. Her father wore a pink T-shirt, stretched tight across his massive midsection, and gray slacks.

Cinnamon remembered his "gotcha" from the last time, and Newell grinned as he heard David say only, "Hi," and Cinnamon quickly respond, "I love you too!"

Cinnamon knelt to Krystal's height and said, "Hi! Are you my friend?"

Listening to this family visit inside the reformatory was strange. And a little sad. Children in the background laughed and cried. Krystal wanted a doughnut, then promptly dropped it. It sounded so normal, and yet it was anything but normal.

Cinnamon and her two visitors moved over to a round table, shielded from the sun by a large white umbrella. Twenty feet away, Walt Robbins snapped pictures. David drank Perrier while the girls sipped Cokes.

Much of their transmitted conversation was about mundane things, as if Cinnamon, Patti, and David were hesitant to speak of the real reasons they had finally found themselves all together again. At one point, David looked toward the young women playing on the field nearby.

"Great," Cinnamon teased. "You want to stare at the people on the field, don't you?"

"My daughter knows me," David said with a laugh. "And I like the dark meat myself."

"You like the
what?"
Cinnamon asked.

"The
dark
meat." He was referring to the black girls playing ball and vulgarly pointing out their physical attributes.

"You're disgusting," Cinnamon said.

"Yeah," Patti echoed.

There was that same inappropriate behavior. He was the adult, almost thirty-six, and yet Newell realized David interacted with both his daughter and Patti as if they were all the same age. The girls seemed more mature, however, and David only a case of ugly, prejudiced, arrested development. He complained bitterly about the freeway jam-up on the way up.

"They got the freeway up here—five lanes—and you get on this part, you know—"

"No, I don't know," Cinnamon said softly.

"Well, you get out of L.A., you come to five lanes—"

"I guess I miss out on a lot of things."

He was oblivious to her meaning. He rattled on, about traffic, about bills for Cinnamon's stationery. Suddenly, he asked, "Why did they hassle you so much the last time I was here?"

Why was he so wary? Newell wondered. There was no way he could have known that Cinnamon was wired. Not two weeks ago. Not today. She wore the same bulky blue shirt. Not a wire or a bulge showed.

Cinnamon fielded the question smoothly. "'Cause my pass—the staff didn't know I was off the cottage."

"How did you get a pass if they didn't know you were off the cottage?"

Newell held his breath.

"They have shift trade at two o'clock. . . . And when I was up here in between the last—somehow they lost me.

"It was so irritating," David complained to Patti. "We were just sitting there on the grass. That stupid asshole kept coming over and scaring the shit out of us. [Mimicking] 'Are you
Cinnamon Brown?'
I need to see your pass. This pass is no good.' "

Cinnamon laughed. He wasn't suspicious. He just hated authority figures.

Both David and Patti explained that they
had
sent Cinnamon their new phone numbers—
David's
new phone numbers. The letters must have been lost. Newell waited for something he could sink his teeth into, but Cinnamon couldn't seem to steer them away from trivia. And this time, David didn't ask what she was worried about.

Patti explained that she had hired Betsy Stubbs to babysit Heather in the van. It had cost her $20.

"How old is Heather now?" Cinnamon asked suddenly.

". . . She'll be a year next month," Patti answered, biting her lip.

David quickly changed the subject. "Where did you find the doughnuts? Were they under the bed for the last thousand years?"

"Hundred,"
Patti said.

"Get your digits right—or don't get them at all," Cinnamon said.

"My digit's fine," he said. "Want to see it?"

Newell shook his head. The guy was always thinking about sex; he was steeped in it, and he censored nothing for his daughter.

Cinnamon was persistent. "I wanted to ask you some questions about the baby," she said to Patti. "I never get to talk to you."

Patti said nothing.

"I don't even know what the kid looks like."

"Like a turd," Patti answered.

"Doesn't she look like the father?"

"She doesn't look like anybody; she looks like a baby. All babies look the same."

"Who's the father?" Cinnamon asked.

"She told me she was dating Doug on—" David cut in. Patti said nothing and stared down at the table.

Again, David changed the subject, back to Betsy Stubbs, who "said she was pregnant, but then she said she had a miscarriage. She said she threw up the baby. I told her if that was true, you got a major physical problem. . . . She's that stupid. . . ."

Patti brightened. "Honest to God, I'm beginning to think she's a lesbian!"

"She does," David said. "She follows Patti into the bathroom."

"I'm really scared to undress in front of her—"

"Well, you undressed in front of somebody," Cinnamon shot out. "And I'm curious. This is driving me crazy. Who is the father, Patti?"

Patti refused to discuss Heather's parentage. It was "too upsetting."

David started to chime in with his guess, but Patti stopped him. "Be careful. I don't want you to tell her."

Patti turned away and bent her head near Krystal's as David talked. "He's still living at home with his momma and daddy and he drives a Trans-Am or Firebird," David continued. "I've seen him once and he's about as intelligent as a grapefruit. He's got real, real curly hair, not like anybody I see here. Greek kind of looking."

Heather's hair was red, David said. "And you and her," he said, pointing to Krystal, "you guys have, you know, my color of skin, and this kid you can see almost through to the bone—just like her [indicating Patti]."

Cinnamon knew who the baby's father was. They all knew.

This time, Cinnamon allowed David to change the subject. For the next twenty minutes, they talked aimlessly. Newell waited impatiently. Why was she holding back? He didn't care about records or watches or Betsy Stubbs's latest peccadillo or why David preferred Perrier. David was offering Cinnamon more and more presents. Both he and Patti were being most gracious and generous.

They laughed, and Newell could hear David and Patti relaxing, assured that Cinnamon wasn't going to push this thing after all.

Abruptly, Cinnamon turned to Patti. "So—did Daddy discuss with you what we talked about last visiting?"

Patti stopped in mid-laugh and answered slowly, "And I told him and he told you."

"He did not tell me anything."

"That I'd trade?"

"I want to know what you think about it," Cinnamon said.

Patti was apathetic. "If that's what you want to do."

"We could walk on the Twilight Zone or something," Cinnamon said sharply. The idea was ridiculous, yet both Patti and her father seemed to think you could just shuffle prisoners around willy-nilly.

"The only thing," David pointed out, "you would have to still do what you've always done. You don't remember anything and she'll come forth with her story and clear you."

"But will she tell the
truth?"

"She'll tell them whatever she wants to tell them. "

"Are you going to tell them the truth?" Cinnamon asked.

"What's the truth? I'm, I'm—"

David ignored Patti's question and drilled Cinnamon. "The thing is you don't know the truth. You don't know what happened. Stay the way you did from the day you got here. You don't remember—"

"So you're going to tell them the truth?"

David explained that Cinnamon was not to remember, because Patti was the one who knew everything. "She did it. That's how come you don't know."

Patti saw a flaw. "Then they'll ask
me
why did
she
take the pills."

"You gave them to her," David instructed.

"She didn't give them to me," Cinnamon argued.

"However you want to do it, I'll do it," Patti offered.

"Just tell them the truth," Cinnamon repeated for the tenth time.

What was David up to? Newell tried to follow the conversational volleys. David was reconstructing history. And Patti was allowing him to serve her up on a plate.
Why?
And then the whole plan changed.

"There's nothing to tell them," Patti said.

"None of us remember a whole lot," David agreed.

Cinnamon was incredulous. You could hear it in her voice.
"You don't remember a whole lot of what happened that night? Even Grandpa knows. "

Cinnamon began to pepper her father and Patti with questions.

How many gunshots?

Who shot the gun?

You had me write that note. Why?

Both David and Patti were suddenly seized by a hazy kind of amnesia. They were stonewalling Cinnamon. David thought maybe Larry or Alan had broken in. Patti could not remember the tiger tapestry in her room. "I can't think of tapestry—I'm thinking Tupperware. I don't know. . . . Believe me, if I was to remember, I'd come here and talk to you."

Cinnamon stared at her visitors with incomprehension. They had come up to Ventura with their stupid plot to play switcheroo, and now, suddenly, their minds had gone blank. Neither remembered more than their own names.

"You don't remember anything said at the house or when we were in the van or
anything?"

"The van?" Patti asked vacantly.

"Oh, now you're going to say,
'What
van?' Right?"

It must have seemed so ridiculous to Cinnamon that Newell heard her laugh. It must have seemed like a bad joke to her.

"No, I don't remember," Patti said. "All I remember is stuff that I read in the paper."

". . . You know I'm trying to make sure I'm not crazy," Cinnamon said. "That's what I'm trying to do—review some of this with you so that I—I'm trying to find myself—"

"I understand," David said with a trace of smugness. "And I don't have any problem."

"All the lies and stuff, it makes me go delirious."

"Delirious," Patti agreed. "I hallucinate the way you wouldn't believe."

Cinnamon asked her father if he remembered telling her to get rid of all the rejected suicide notes.

"Probably ... I don't know. I don't remember."

"Are you
related
to me?" Cinnamon laughed. "Are you clones of the people that I knew out there?"

"Cinny, when my liver went bad," David whined, "it fucked up my whole body. I don't remember a lot about Data Recovery."

"I've been here," Cinnamon answered. "It's fucked up my life."

Newell listened to the mazes of David Brown's reasoning, once again marveling at his fancy conversational footwork. He was suddenly going the sympathy route, trying to convince Cinnamon that she had it a lot better in prison than he did on the outside.

"I know, I know," David said in a tired voice. "I have to rely on Dad—"

"If I can be strong," his daughter argued, "you also can be strong."