If You Really Loved Me (24 page)

The layout of Summitridge made it difficult for Newell to drive by the Brown house casually and see who might be home. The incline was steep, and the street was not a well-traveled thoroughfare. Strangers stood out. He parked down the street on the other side and strolled along, looking at the houses. In a pinch, he would become an instant real estate agent, a breed that swarmed over Orange County.

David's most recent car wasn't in the driveway. Still, Newell felt relieved when he spotted
Arthur
Brown in the yard. Wary, the old man agreed to talk—but only for a moment or two. He would not sit in Newell's car and kept edging away nervously.

Newell explained that Cinnamon was upset over something her grandfather had said to her, and that the counselors at CYA were concerned.

"I don't know what I could have said to her," Arthur Brown waffled as Newell began to question him. But he readily agreed to keep the conversation confidential. As frightened as he was, it was clear he cared for Cinnamon: "She's a very darling little girl."

"Do you have much time to talk to Cinnamon?" Newell asked. "You and she evidently have some rapport. Does she ever open up to you?"

"No—I'm always ... with David, her dad."

Arthur Brown said that he and his wife had been unable to visit Cinnamon for some time because Manuela had lost her ID card and he hadn't wanted to go up without her, but "Cinny did call me and said she wanted to talk to me, so I just went on up there by myself—and let the wife sit in the car."

"What did she say?"

"Just how much we loved each other, and how she got six months off her sentence."

"You wouldn't say anything to her to give her false hope, would you?"

"I try not to."

The old man was nervous as a cat. "That's no place for her. I don't believe that she had anything to do with it. And I still don't. I never will."

"Well, what did you say to her?"

"I told her that I was sure I knew who planned the whole thing."

Carefully, Newell suggested that Cinnamon might not be carrying the whole burden of guilt, even though she had been convicted. He watched the old man's face and saw silent agreement there, but Arthur Brown was clearly scared to death of saying the wrong thing.

"I told Cinny that I felt like I knew who planned it, because I heard her say that she was going to do something to save David—"

"Heard
who
say?"

"Her . . ." Arthur Brown looked over his shoulder, as if expecting someone to come up behind him. "The little girl he's taking care of—Patti. ... I was with them the night she made the statement that she heard Linda [on the phone with her twin, Alan] planning to do away with David—to take his business. And she said that [David's being hurt] wasn't gonna happen even if she had to do it herself. . . she'd get rid of her."

Jay Newell felt a surge of triumph. This was the first breakthrough—the first overt admission that Patti Bailey might have been part of a plot to kill Linda. Newell kept his face calm and let the old man ramble on.

"When she was killed, I just lost my goddamn mind."

Newell waited. "How long before Linda was killed did you hear this conversation?"

"Might have been two weeks—might of been two days—I was in the car with all of them. David and Linda and Patti and Cinnamon. Linda got out of the car and Patti started shootin' off her mouth like she always does."

"Where were you going in the car?"

"Looking for some place to have a picnic."

Manuela had stayed behind with Krystal. Grandpa Brown had sat in the back of the van, but he had heard a lot. "She's a foulmouthed bitch," he said, spitting on the ground to emphasize his disgust with Patti. "She was discussing it when Linda got out of the van to pee—Linda had kidney trouble. Patti's got a very vile, big mouth. Just to talk to her normally, you'd think, 'Damn—she's a doll,' but she's a bitch—pardon."

Patti had, Arthur Brown claimed, said she
would get
rid of Linda to save David.

"You feel," Newell asked, "that maybe that's what happened?"

"It took me five or six months to remember all this. I couldn't remember hardly my own goddamned name for a while. I haven't liked Patti since—and I never will. I have to live here with David and Patti because ... it feels like he owes her his life."

And yet, Arthur Brown could not remember that he mentioned any of this to Cinnamon. Pressed, he admitted he might have told her. But what was the use? He didn't believe any of it would hold up in court.

"Even if someone can't be prosecuted," Newell offered, "we want all the details. It may or may not help Cinnamon. If Cinnamon isn't fully responsible for this, why should—"

"I'd bet my life on that," her grandfather cut in.

"You wouldn't make up a story just to get Patti in trouble because you don't like her, would you?" Newell asked.

"No way. No, sir. If it wasn't true, I wouldn't of said it. . . it's bad enough that it happened—no use of me adding any stories to it. I was in hopes it might help Cinny because as far as I'm concerned, she's a doll."

The case had just taken a complete spin. If Arthur Brown was believable—which was the salient question—Patti Bailey, not Cinnamon, was a killer.

Newell heard a car engine lugging up the hill behind him and turned to see David Brown himself driving up. Arthur looked panicked.

Sotto voce, Newell said to the old man, "I'm a real estate man. If you want to maintain that, fine."

"Okay. If I stick my neck out too far, I'll lose my son, my granddaughter, plus another granddaughter."

"We don't want that to happen—but we are concerned with the truth," Newell stressed. "Here comes David. We can talk about it later," and then, in a louder voice, "Yeah, I've sold a couple of houses on this block."

Newell grinned, held out his hand, and introduced himself to David Brown as "Jerry Walker, Realtor."

"How ya doin'?" David Brown answered.

For a beat, Newell's breath caught, and then he knew that Brown had not recognized him. His eyes were drawn to a solid-gold pendant of some creature that David wore on a chain around his neck. It glittered in the sunlight—gold, and beneath that, orange and yellow stones. He knew what it was; he'd talked to the jeweler who had made it, but he wanted to hear David's explanation. "That's unusual," he said, "what is that—a dragon?"

"A phoenix." David offered nothing more.

Newell launched into a discussion of what a shame it was that a neighboring house, needing paint, was such an eyesore in such an expensive neighborhood. "I feel guilty showing houses up here because of that."

Newell slid his eyes toward the old man and saw that Arthur Brown's mouth was shut tight. He wasn't going to give him away.

It was odd. Finally talking to the man he had stalked for almost two years. David Brown was animated in the way of weak men who strive to appear influential and macho. He was most interested in making more money in real estate, he said, although he explained he'd already done very well indeed. He did not seem ill, although he was certainly out of shape, and he smoked like a chimney.

"This stuff is goin' up though," Newell continued, as smooth as if he had been selling real estate all his life. "Anything over three hundred thousand dollars is selling."

David brightened. He had been thinking about making a change.

"This new tax thing is forcing people to get something more expensive, and the write-offs are gone, and old Uncle Sam gets it," Newell said easily. "I have four condos myself, and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to keep them. But these bigger houses—they're selling. I've got friends interested in moving up here."

Newell tossed off some impossibly high figure he could get for David's house, and he could see David salivate.

Grandpa Brown, standing behind David, was getting nervous, sweat beading on his forehead. He would never make a poker player.

Newell slapped his breast pocket, murmured that he had run out of cards, but he would be back. He turned and strolled easily down the street to his car.

He had plenty of cards, but they all read "Jay Newell, Orange County District Attorney's Office, Senior Attorney's Investigator." At the moment, they didn't seem appropriate.

"Well, have a good day, you guys," he shouted.

Newell had been in any number of dicey spots, pretending to be someone he was not. Drug buys. Gang infiltration. But there was something about David Arnold Brown that chilled his blood. A certain flatness in his eyes, even when he was grinning. From a distance, he looked like a tubby cartoon figure. Up close, he looked like . . . what?
Evil.
Newell surprised himself with that one. Evil wasn't a concept he usually thought about.

He wondered if the old man could hold firm. He had gone on and on about
his
illnesses and ailments. Between Arthur and David, the Brown men seemed to suffer from every ailment mankind is prone to. Newell believed that Arthur Brown wanted to save Cinnamon, but he also knew the old guy was weak. He had been strong enough to finger Patti Bailey, to suggest that
she
was the shooter—not Cinnamon —but would he ever be strong enough to get up and say it in court, or even say it in front of his son? Grandpa Brown seemed to shrivel up when he was around David.

Newell had good reason to doubt Arthur Brown's fortitude. Even before that evening was over, he had confessed to his son that the man he had been talking to was not "Jerry Walker," but rather, Jay Newell of the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

David was both furious and alarmed. He called his father a fool, told him that he had endangered the whole family by even considering talking to the police. It was not Arthur's place to protect Cinnamon; that was David's job, and there were a lot of things that Arthur did not understand, could never understand.

Chastened and fearful, Arthur went to his room and stayed there.

David, enraged, confronted Patti. She didn't know what had happened, but she obeyed him as he told her to find their wedding certificate and the prenuptial agreement she had signed. Weeping, she did so. He tore them into small pieces, and then he marched her out to the backyard and pointed toward the brick barbecue.

"Burn them."

"Why?"

"Never mind why. Burn them and stay here until you're sure every single piece of them is ashes."

As she always had, Patti did as her husband said. But watching the flames, it seemed as if her marriage were going up in smoke too. She didn't know, and apparently David didn't think about it, but the original of the marriage certificate was on file and could be replaced. David's lawyer had a copy of the prenuptial agreement. That document, giving her only the old MG, had been to protect David—not Patti. But it could come back to haunt him.

Patti knew only that something had gone terribly wrong. It would be days before David stopped scowling. And Grandpa Brown tiptoed around the house as if he were going to jump right out of his skin.

Even though they were legally married, Patti and David had to sneak to be together. If they waited until the old couple were asleep, they could share physical intimacy. Even better, they had time alone when Arthur and Manuela went home on weekends to take care of their house in Carson, mow the grass, and trim the hedges.

David was jumpy. He no longer wanted Patti talking to her own family—about anything. "He was afraid my family would connect us to the crime 'cause we were still living together," Patti said, "and I hadn't gone back to live with them." But then David had never wanted the Bailey family to know about his business. That distrust was simply magnified.

It seemed to Patti that David was getting more paranoid all the time, that he didn't trust anyone—not even her. Ever since the night he made her burn her marriage papers, it had been getting worse. David became obsessed with knowing where she was
all
the time. He fitted her with a beeper so that he could always find her and check on what she was doing. She was never allowed to leave home without David, and when
he
left, he called her often on the beeper to be sure she was still at the house.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1987, David, Patti, Krystal, Manuela, and Arthur lived their uneasy existence in the palatial home in the Anaheim Hills. Arthur's fervent wish to have Patti out of the house went unheeded. If anything, she seemed more entrenched.

Arthur longed to live back in Carson, no matter how fancy David's new house was, but Manuela didn't trust Patti with the baby, and David wouldn't let the older couple take Krystal home to Carson with them.

"Patti's so goddamned, stinking jealous that she keeps Krystal away from Grandma," Arthur complained to anyone who would listen. Still, they didn't leave. With David being so sick, his parents hated to leave him alone. You could never tell when he might have an attack of some kind.

Things got a lot dicier for David in February 1987 when Patti told him she thought she was pregnant. Whatever his many physical ailments, they had apparently not compromised David Brown's sex life. He remained both potent and virile. But he was outraged at what he considered Patti's stupidity. A pregnancy for Patti could bring disaster. David insisted that she have an abortion. For once, Patti refused to obey him. No matter how vehemently he argued, she would not kill this baby.

She had played what she considered a loving trick on David. She had told him that her doctor said she would never be able to conceive a child. And he had believed her—and never concerned himself with birth control. Now, Patti allowed David to believe that her pregnancy was a strange aberration of fate—that she was as surprised as he was when she proved fertile after all. David was mad enough at her without her telling him the whole truth.

David insisted that, if their
marriage
had to be kept secret, her pregnancy would be doubly dangerous for them. The cops kept sniffing around, looking for some damn motive to show they had been involved in killing Linda. It didn't matter if they had or hadn't—the cops enjoyed trapping innocent people, just to make themselves look good. A baby was superfluous, anyway. They had Krystal to take care of. Wasn't that enough for Patti?