If You Really Loved Me (20 page)

Cinny went back to Brenda in Anaheim, brokenhearted. She didn't really hate her father. She loved him beyond reason.

If Cinnamon was really incorrigible, it was not apparent to anyone but David. Everyone who knew them had always marveled at how well Linda and Cinnamon got along. Cinnamon would be tossed back and forth a lot over the next few years. At an age where she especially needed to know where she belonged and that she was a worthwhile person, she was tethered nowhere; she floated like a balloon without a string.

She was, however, a child with remarkable insight, who unlike most of her peers accepted the consequences of her own actions. She was frank about her flaws. "I totally hated everybody at the time," Cinnamon recalled. "I felt mad and I was a big snot." At other times, she said she was "a brat. I drove my mom nuts."

But
incorrigible?
No. Perhaps she seemed so to a mother who was only thirty herself and was trying to juggle a new marriage, a new baby, and problems of her own.

"Living with my mom was much different than living with my dad," Cinnamon said. "Living with my mom, I felt more independent. I got to go with Krista and my friends. I learned to appreciate things more while living with my mom—I valued things more. But I didn't receive as much attention as I wanted. I understood that my mom worked very hard and tried her best. I tried to do things to please my mom. I always wanted better communication with my mom, but she would yell a lot. I'd ask for an explanation and be spanked. I was curious to know what I'd done wrong—so I would not do it again. But she'd be so stressed and impatient, she didn't take the time to communicate."

Still Cinnamon's thirteenth year was, comparatively, her best. Her
only
teenage year. "Krista and I were very happy and active teens. Always doing things like riding each other on my Beach Cruiser [bike] handlebars all over Orange County. . . . Going to the beach with Krista seemed like another life or chapter. We spent a lot of time together. I was active in running and bike riding. I rode my bike to and from school too, while I was living with my father."

Cinnamon still visited her father's home, and she lived by his rules when she stayed there. Everybody did. David wanted to know where they all were, and he expected them to be home on time. David was always in charge. People who didn't obey David's rules didn't stay around long.

"Eventually, I didn't receive as much attention from my dad," Cinnamon remembered of the visits. "Because of his marriage changes and divorces ... I had to share him with Patti. I wasn't included in family affairs anymore—well not as
much
as before. I wasn't receiving any quality time with my dad. Of course, we still had some great memories. I appreciated my dad's sense of humor, but I also saw my father as selfish with everything ... he wanted to be the center of attention. He was greedy with material things. Those are things I noticed as I grew up with him."

The doors of any house David Brown and his girls lived in were revolving. He was sporadically generous about letting Linda and Patti's family visit—if they toed his carefully defined marks. Ethel visited with them from time to time, and Linda's twin," Alan. Even Larry stayed over on occasion. But David discouraged more than surface relationships outside his immediate family. He much preferred his own household—not the extended Brown-Brown or Brown-Bailey families. He stressed the need for a closing-in, his modern circle of wagons against intruders.

From the time she was twelve, Patti Bailey believed in the family that David had created. His philosophies became ingrained in her mind, and she followed David as devoutly as any cult member. Anyone who observed his interaction with his teenage sister-in-law could see that Patti had a crush on David, but nobody teased her about it. Linda mentioned it to Mary Bailey, and they smiled and shook their heads. They knew Patti would outgrow her feelings for David when she started to date boys her own age. Linda still thought of Patti as her baby sister, a child.

Patti didn't know much about David's job at first, but she knew it had something to do with computers, and that it was very important. They moved often, so he could be closer to work, and sometimes because he and Linda wanted a nicer house. They always stayed close to Orange County, and they always stayed together so it didn't really matter to Patti that they moved so much. The family meant more than any friends she had at school.

She had to struggle to remember the different places they had lived. Most clearly, she recalled visiting her sister and brother-in-law first in Victorville. Then there was Anaheim, Yorba Linda, Brea, and finally Garden Grove, all within a space of three years. She wasn't concerned about graduating from high school. Linda hadn't graduated, and she had what Patti perceived to be the perfect life.

The family always had fun together. Often David's parents joined them for trips out to the desert or the mountains. They watched television, rented movies, and played board games. David was no athlete, but he was superb at organizing family get-togethers. "It's hard to believe now—but
I
was funny," David recalled much later. "I was always— whatta you call it—the life of the party."

When they lived in Victorville, the house David was buying had plenty of open space around it, and David and Linda and Patti—and whoever was living with them or visiting—would shoot at beer cans, laughing as the cans flew off stumps and somersaulted in the air. David kept several guns, both "big and little." That was the way Patti distinguished between rifles and handguns.

They often drove deep into the Mohave Desert beyond Barstow to the ghost town of Calico. David had a camper and they took iced chests of food and soda pop up into the Calico Mountain area. They would spend hours horsing around on the all-terrain vehicles that David bought them. David loved his "toys," and when he was feeling all right, he played with them just like a kid.

Patti and Linda soon learned that David grew bored quickly with his possessions; he always wanted the newest model. Larry Bailey was driving one of David's ATVs when he crashed into something and bent it up, but didn't do serious damage. David saw it as an opportunity, not a loss. "I don't know the damage," Patti said, "but I know it was minor. David discussed it with Linda and Larry that, well, hey—if we took it out to Calico and pushed it off a cliff, then it'd get really smashed up. Then the insurance company would pay for it."

Patti and Linda helped drag it back out of the gully where it lay crumpled after the "deliberate" accident and steadied it while Larry and David put it on the trailer. "David took it back and he filed a claim. That's when I got an Odyssey instead of an ATV," Patti remembered.

Although David Brown was almost doubling his income each year in his data recovery contracts, he frequently used insurance companies as a way to update his equipment. He collected on a number of automobile accidents. He sued a supermarket, claiming he had injured himself tripping over an extension cord. There was a shed, filled with old furniture and building materials, on the Victorville property. David no longer wanted any of it; he rented a bulldozer and tried to enlist Alan Bailey as the operator. He wanted Alan to crush the shed with the dozer so that he could collect insurance on both the outbuilding and its contents. Alan reneged. He didn't think they could convince anyone that he had
accidentally
run into a structure of that size, and that he would have kept on going until the contents were smashed.

And after they all moved to Garden Grove in 1984, a neighbor's driving mishap proved fortuitous for David. An elderly lady next door lost control of her car in her own driveway when she panicked and pressed down on the gas pedal instead of the brake. Her car leapt across the narrow space between the homes and hit below the window on the side of the Brown house—right at the middle bedroom. Although the damage was minimal, David saw a chance to replace the Commodore computer he was using. He wanted an IBM.

"He moved his desk and the old computer out of his office into the room where the house was hit, and then I guess the computer fell on the floor somehow," Patti recalled. "I wasn't there—I didn't see it happen. Anyway, he made it look worse outside, added dirt and stuff." The neighbor's insurance paid off, and David Brown replaced his computer with a state-of-the-art IBM. He explained to Linda and Patti that that was what insurance was designed to do—pay people for their losses.

All along, David was building up his collections. Rare coins. Gold and diamonds. His rings were all custom designed. The phoenix pendant. David also had business cards printed, with a stylized phoenix "guarding" computer banks. He liked the imagery. He retrieved and revived data that seemed to have been hopelessly lost in fires. He helped it to emerge almost unscathed.

David Arnold Brown saw himself in the phoenix. Mr. Magic.

David not only employed his in-laws, he drew his own family members into his business ventures. He boasted that he had taken a brother and a sister "out of ceramics and started them in data retrieval." The data retrieval business fit right in with David's view of family life. Much of it could be done at home.

David claimed to have fielded extremely important phone calls "from the government or some major corporation. The phones rang all day. It might be the Pentagon or Coca-Cola or whoever." He was quick to brag that he was instrumental in rescuing data from some vital projects and businesses. Data Recovery, he told everyone, had reconstructed most of the lost data in the "towering inferno" First Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles. He loved to describe his role in rescuing dozens of people from almost certain death in the MGM Grand Hotel fire on November 21, 1980. Because the hotel computers were badly damaged in the conflagration, David said the hotel turned to him for help. Within two hours, he was able to reconstruct its files. This was vital, he pointed out, because the files were the only way to show which rooms had occupants and which were vacant. "I was instrumental in saving the lives of one hundred and twelve hotel guests by directing rescue efforts in Las Vegas—while I was in California. They went directly to the rooms with people in them and didn't waste time on the empty rooms." Despite David's alleged role in the rescue attempts, eighty people did perish in the MGM Grand fire.

When the San Diego blood bank was also hit by fire, David said he was able to restore its computer network so that blood bank employees could trace blood units desperately needed in southern California hospitals.

And then there was the Coca-Cola Company. "Linda and I weren't supposed to fly together," David explained. "The Coca-Cola Company wouldn't allow it. If we were both killed, they'd be in deep trouble. They even called us Mr. and Mrs. Coca-Cola! We were that vital to them. But we didn't care what they said. Neither Linda nor I thought we could go on without the other. If we went down, we wanted to go down together."

The boy who never got past the eighth grade was the man who proudly boasted of being referred to in both
People
and
Time.
"I'm known as the 'Red Adair of the computer industry.'" It was he, and his particular skill and talent, David bragged, who unlocked the tragic puzzle of the explosion of the
Challenger
space shuttle on January 28, 1986. "I worked for two days with NASA and the Department of Defense to find the cause of the explosion," David explained in his deep baritone. "I was able to prove that the crew members were killed instantaneously—I could guarantee they didn't suffer."

This claim, at least, was an outright lie. But few people questioned David Brown and his skill; he had a convincing way about him and he talked computerese like an expert. He was making money and he was sought after in the data retrieval industry. Who could say how many of his stories were true and how many were gross exaggerations?

Whatever the truth, by 1984, business was booming. Patti and Linda folded and stuffed envelopes. They took turns typing. Phones in the house were all on speakers so David could talk to his many clients from every room without having to pick up the phone. That way everyone in the family could keep up with which orders were coming in. There were no secrets in the business, not among the three of them.

Or so it seemed.

Had Cinnamon Darlene Brown been a jealous child, she might have had good reason to feel she was odd child out in her parents' lives. She was always being shuttled back and forth, and she had no sense of permanency. If she was even a half hour late getting home, her mother would sometimes call her father and demand he come and get Cinnamon. She was a pawn used for threats and revenge.

Cinny loved both her parents, but her father had Linda and Patti; her mother was remarried—to Tracy Sands, a man a few years younger than she—and had given birth to a second daughter. Cinnamon's stepfather was a struggling musician, and much of the attention in Brenda's house in Anaheim was given either to Tracy's career ambitions, or to the new baby girl, Penelope.

Cinnamon, however, loved her half sister, just as she greeted the news that Linda was pregnant with happy excitement. Linda was due to deliver in July of 1984. There would be almost exactly fourteen years between children for David. Cinnamon had been born to poor teenage parents; David was now in a financial position to give this expected baby
everything.
The preparations for the birth rivaled those for a royal offspring. The family had settled into the rental house on Ocean Breeze Drive in Garden Grove by 1984, and there was room for everyone—the master bedroom for David and Linda, the large front bedroom for Patti, and the middle room as a nursery.

Room for everyone but Cinnamon.

Every minute that she wasn't working with David or cooking or cleaning, Linda spent fixing up the middle bedroom for a nursery. David let her buy anything she wanted for the baby. She got the nicest crib, the kind that could be turned into a youth bed later, and matching chests and a little chair swing that moved automatically and played music too. It made Linda happy to know that her baby would have all the things she had never had.