If You Really Loved Me (9 page)

"They were just here," Brenda commented, unaware that she had injected a new element into the probe.

"Who
was just here?" McLean asked.

"David and Patti. David told me that Cinny had overdosed on some of his prescription drugs. He told me not to tell you detectives that Cinny was always a good, behaved girl."

McLean's antenna went up again on that one, and he was annoyed that David Brown had beaten him to Brenda, but he said only, "I want you to tell me the truth—and not let anyone influence you."

"I will. I'll tell you everything I know."

Brenda told McLean that she was surprised to find David and Patti taking the tragedy so quietly. Her ex-husband could be a very emotional man, but she had found him quite controlled.

That was another revelation for McLean. Even so, he figured Brenda didn't understand what profound shock could do to people. To check her perceptions, he questioned her. "Patti wasn't crying when she was here?" he asked. "David wasn't chain-smoking, hands shaking?"

Brenda shrugged. "David always chain-smokes," she answered. "But he wasn't shaking. He was pretty calm. I asked him where the gun had come from, but he said he didn't know. Then he said it must have been Linda's gun. Patti was positive it was Linda's gun."

McLean asked Brenda to evaluate her daughter's state of mind in recent months. She seemed mystified at Cinnamon's actions, including the attempted suicide.

"We're close," she said. "She shares her feelings with me, and secrets—things that worry her. I know Cinnamon believed that Linda was afraid of David."

"Has Cinnamon ever spoken to you about suicidal thoughts?"

Brenda looked up at McLean through disbelieving eyes and shook her head. "Oh, you know—how teenagers can be dramatic. If she was mad, or if her feelings were hurt, she might say, 'I wish I was dead!' She wasn't serious. I know she wasn't."

"When was the last time you saw Cinnamon?" McLean asked.

"Yesterday. Just yesterday. My grandmother, Ruby, and my aunt were here visiting from Salt Lake City. We went over to David's house so they could visit with Cinnamon. David even came out—after Cinnamon begged him to— and he acted glad to see my relatives.
I
know him, and I knew he was faking it, but they didn't. They thought he was just charming."

"And how was Cinnamon?" McLean interrupted.

"She was fine, but she wanted to come home with us and visit. I couldn't take her then because my car was just jam-packed with their suitcases. I told her I'd come over after I'd unpacked the car. But when I called later to tell her I'd be over, David answered the phone. He said everyone had settled down for the night, and he didn't want to wake her."

Brenda looked at her hands, shredding a piece of Kleenex. "That's what bothers me so much. If I'd just made room in the car, or if I'd gone over last night to get her, it wouldn't have happened. I keep going over that in my mind."

No matter how many times he approached the question of Cinnamon Brown's emotional stability, McLean got essentially the same answer. She was, her mother said, a completely normal teenager. The only time she was down was when she had a cold or suffered from menstrual cramps.

Why then would David Brown insist that Cinnamon was flaky, suicidal, out of control? He had said it. Patti Bailey had said it, and David had even asked Brenda to describe Cinnamon that way. Maybe he was trying to protect his daughter by building an image that would suggest a "not guilty by reason of insanity" motive. If a normal, rational girl committed murder, she might get a stiffer sentence than one who was clearly insane. That could explain David's scurrying ahead of the police to be sure that image was created.

Brenda struggled to recall what frame of mind Cinny had been in over the few days preceding the shooting. Cinnamon
had
suffered from menstrual cramps a few days before. Her mother was not aware that Cinny had ever before taken an overdose of drugs or medication.

"Would Cinnamon lie?" McLean asked.

"I suppose she was capable of stretching the truth, but I can always get the facts out of her."

"How about drugs—any problem with that?"

"Never. She always puts down drug users."

"How about school? How was she doing?"

"Well, she got poor grades last spring, so she was going to summer school—"

"Summer of 1984?"

Brenda nodded. "She got a B in U.S. Government and History, but she still only got a D in Math 8 in summer school. I know she cut some classes to go to the beach."

When McLean asked how Brenda felt about Cinnamon's living at her father's house, she repeated what David had explained to her. She really had no choice but to let Cinny live with her dad. "He said Cinny said she would run away if she was forced to come back and live with me."

Brenda told McLean that she and Cinnamon had had a doozy of a blowup, and she had been more than glad to have her daughter go live with her father for a while. But they weren't still angry. They talked all the time.

"Cinnamon wanted to go to school here in Anaheim— back at Loara. She didn't feel safe at Bolsa Grande, not after that man exposed himself to her and then there was a drive-by shooting near the school. She missed her friends at Loara too.

"Cinny never told me she thought of running away. Oh, she complained. Sometimes, she said she felt like a slave at David's house. She said she had to do so much housework, and Patti didn't do her share."

"That's kind of par for the course," McLean offered.

"No, something was wrong there. Cinnamon said that Linda and David weren't getting along. And she said one time she, David, and Patti came home and they overheard Linda and her twin brother—Alan—talking about getting rid of David."

"Getting rid of David?"

"That's what she said. 'Getting rid of David.'"

"What was David's reaction when he heard them say that? Did Cinnamon say?"

"No. I just know Cinnamon said the three of them backed out of the house and left without letting Linda and Alan know they'd heard their conversation."

"Why would Linda and her brother want to get rid of David?" McLean asked.

"I have no idea. Something was going on. Cinnamon told me that Linda was afraid David might leave her for Patti, and that David told her he might hire a detective to follow Linda."

McLean wondered if Cinnamon had an overactive imagination. It seemed unlikely that so much intrigue had been going on behind the bland green walls of the house on Ocean Breeze Drive. "Patti's only sixteen or seventeen, isn't she?" he asked Brenda.

"David likes them young. Linda was younger than that when he started with her," Brenda said with a touch of bitterness. "So was I."

Asked to recall what David Brown had told her of the events leading up to Linda's murder, Brenda repeated almost word for word the familiar story detectives had heard several times now. David had told his ex-wife that he was upset over an argument with Linda, went for a drive to calm his nerves, and returned home to find his wife shot.

"Patti told me Cinnamon shot at her and missed— because Patti ducked," Brenda said, her voice heavy with disbelief. "That just doesn't sound like Cinny. None of it does."

"Let me throw out some names," McLean said. "Tell me if you're familiar with them?"

"Okay."

"Oscar . . . Maynard . . . Aunt Bertha?"

Brenda half-smiled for the first time. "Maynard was Cinnamon's make-believe friend. Kids have them. She'd tease us, and say, 'Well, we will go tell Maynard.' There wasn't really a Maynard—she knew it, and we knew it. David made up Maynard a long time before Cinnamon was even born. There isn't any Aunt Bertha either—Cinnamon makes jokes about her."

"And Oscar?"

"That's new. I've never heard of Oscar."

Just before five on March 19, Fred McLean returned to the Garden Grove Police Department where Alan Bailey waited to talk to him. The wiry man with straight reddish-blond hair and a number of missing teeth had obviously been crying. He introduced himself as "Linda's twin."

Alan said he had last seen Linda around the first of March and had spoken to her on the phone only four days ago. There had been nothing unusual, nothing in her voice that alarmed him. And they were close—as close as twins often are. He would have known.

But Alan said that there had been some change in Cinnamon's attitude toward Linda. "That included me. She used to call me favorite uncle'; now, suddenly, she can't stand me."

Alan Bailey felt that Cinnamon Brown had been allowed to live "more or less where she wanted. If she was in the trailer, it would have been because she asked to be there."

As for Cinnamon and Patti's relationship, they had never been close. "Patti has no sense of humor—none. She gets ticked when Cinnamon has fun and jokes with Oscar and Maynard, her imaginary friends. Patti can't see anything funny about it."

As far as Cinnamon's being unstable, that characterization surprised Alan Bailey. He hadn't heard about that or any suicide threats from her. He thought that
David
might have attempted suicide in the past—when he was being divorced from Brenda. And Alan recalled that Patti "was very disturbed for a while."

But not Cinnamon.

Alan felt that Patti had caused a lot of friction in the Brown marriage, although he didn't believe the story that David was interested in Patti. He knew that Patti had a teenage crush on David, and that she was jealous of Linda's position in the household and with David.

Alan Bailey viewed David Brown as a very dominant personality, and very protective about his immediate family and their privacy. David had often had go-rounds with Ethel Bailey, Linda and Patti's mother. Patti liked living with David and Linda, Alan thought, because she had more freedom and because she was able to have nice things.

"Did you know Patti was no longer in school—that David hired a tutor for her at home?" McLean asked.

"No ..." Alan said, surprised. "I didn't know that."

Alan said that David had started dating Linda when she was around fifteen, and that they had been married, divorced, remarried.

"Did they argue?"

"Oh, yeah. But she usually gave in. He always convinced her he was right. David can turn things around with his words."

"You don't like him?"

Alan Bailey shrugged. "We had a falling out over a paycheck. I took the matter to the Labor Board. I work landscape gardening now with my brother."

"Did you ever threaten David's life?"

"What?"

McLean's voice was casual, despite the questions he was throwing at Alan. "Maybe you and Linda were angry at David? Even kidding, did you ever say anything about getting rid of him?"

"No way." Linda's twin seemed genuinely surprised at the question. "I don't kid like that."

McLean switched gears. "Would you have thought your sister and David were happily married?"

"Yeah ... I think so. Especially since the baby. David is so proud of that baby. They've both seemed happy since Krystal was born."

So far, no one, beyond her father and Patti Bailey, had described Cinnamon as anything but a normal, overdisciplined, sometimes rebellious teenager. If there was some pathology working in Cinnamon Brown, she had kept it well hidden from most of the people she was close to.

Steve Sanders moved on to Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove, hoping he might find some information there that would either confirm or deny what he and McLean had been told about Cinnamon. This wasn't the way a homicide investigation was supposed to evolve. Almost always, background checks on the suspect elicited witnesses who firmed up the charges—not the other way around.

Cinnamon and Patti had both attended Bolsa Grande High from September of 1984 until March 6—two weeks before the murder. They were well-known at Bolsa Grande. The school counselor, Bill Reynolds, was as stunned as everyone else about Linda Brown's murder. He had never had occasion to meet Linda—or David, for that matter. Cinnamon and Patti had occasionally come to his office to have a "typical sibling problem" settled, but never anything major, and they seemed to him to get along very well. Even though Patti was actually Cinnamon's step-aunt, they interacted more like sisters. Cinnamon was the spunky one, the mischievous one—and Patti was the quiet one.

Bolsa Grande principal Don Wise
had
talked to Linda Brown and Patti and Cinnamon about two weeks before they withdrew from school. It was to have been a family conference, but David Brown had said he was too busy to come in.

Cinnamon and Patti said they had both had radios stolen from their lockers, that some students had weapons in the classroom, that some of their teachers did not know how to teach, and that they allowed dope dealing in the classroom. Wise perceived at once that the girls wanted to transfer from Bolsa Grande, and that they were simply making up outrageous complaints to effect their withdrawal.

In retrospect, the principal felt that Linda, Cinnamon, and Patti got along well with each other, and he had seen no hostility at all among them. Linda had brought her baby with her to the conference. If anything, it seemed to Wise that it was the
father
who was blowing incidents all out of proportion, and that David Brown seemed to be the catalyst in the group—even though he was not physically present at the conference.

Two weeks later, David Brown
did
appear—to remove Cinnamon and Patti from Bolsa Grande High School. School officials recalled a short, florid man who seemed extremely hostile. Brown had shouted,
"This one
[pointing to Patti] is going to Nebraska!" and
"That one
[indicating Cinnamon] is going to Loara High School!" With much huffing and puffing, David Brown had unceremoniously withdrawn his two charges from Bolsa Grande on March 6, 1985, leaving behind school personnel puzzled by his anger.

The girls themselves had been compliant and easy to get along with, and until the conference with Linda two weeks earlier, there was no reason to think they were unhappy in school. Sanders found that they both had good attendance records, and that Cinnamon had only two minor incidents that had brought her to the vice principal's office: she had "disrupted the class" with her antics on Halloween, and she had been truant from two class periods.