If You Really Loved Me Part 19

"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 felta"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 officea"no onea"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. d.i.c.k 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. d.i.c.k 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 h.e.l.l. 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 feloniesa"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, Jeolf 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 quarterbacka" 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 a.s.sumed that Jeoff would come into the family practice. For a long time, he a.s.sumed he would too.

His father, Mark Robinson, Sr., was renowned for his landmark success in product liability suits. JeofFs 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 judgmentsa"both actual and punitivea"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 mothera" 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 Hanc.o.c.k 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 a"when neighborhoods in Los Angeles were much differenta"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 courta"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 h.e.l.l 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 brothera"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 evidencea"both figuratively and literallya"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.

Robinson could be a juggernaut. He was fiercely compet.i.tive. To almost everyone but defense attorneys, he was immensely likable. Intense and quick-thinking on his feet, he was also possessed of a comedic view of life that endeared him to juriesa"if not always to judges. One of his trials involved thirty motions for mistrial and so many bench conferences that Robinson quipped, "I could wear out my shoes this way, back and forth, back and forth." The judge frowned, and the defense attorney shouted for yet another mistrial.

At the same trial, the opposing attorney was given to references to his wife, and how he had discussed the case with his wife only the night before, giving the impression of his loving, stable home life. Robinson, a reluctant bachelor, looked at the jury with a mournful glance and said, "If I had a wife, I could ask her."

A juror in the back row, carried away with sympathy and the impulse to matchmake, cried out, "I don't have a daughter, but I have a granddaughter you'd love!"

Again, everyonea"but the judge and the defense teama" thought it was hilarious.

Jeoff Robinson had won fifty of his fifty-one felony cases. (He had one hung jury, but he went back and won that one too, second time around.) In short, he was a maverick. He respected the law, and he respected the truth and aimed for what was morally right. He might, however, seek out moral and legal truth in his own unique fashion.

This was the kind of DDA Newell needed. If he could persuade Jeoff Robinson to reopen the Brown case, they would have a triumvirate who were superb in their jobs, and who were all known to fight like tigers: Fred McLean, Jay Newell, and Jeoff Robinson. As different as three men could be from one another, but each of them obsessed with revealing a long-hidden truth. Newell liked the sound of it and headed from his office to the DA's Homicide Unit.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office was huge, both physically and in terms of personnel. The offices were spread out like rabbit warrens on both the first and second floor of the courthouse. n.o.body beyond the district attorney's own staff, and the detectives who came there with cases to review, could find his way outa"if he managed to get inside. The entrance to the District Attorney's Office was on the second floor, but once through the locked door behind the receptionists' desks, the uninitiated faced a bewildering network of hallways, offices, stairwells, and hidden doors. It was just as well; Orange County DAs had their share of threats. The maze they worked in allowed them to come and go at will, using elevators and exits that appeared to have nothing to do with the District Attorney's Office.

At full strength, there were 175 deputy district attorneys, and 140 district attorney's investigators. That much investigative a.s.sistance was a situation unheard of in most areas, but Orange County gave their deputy DAs exceptional support.

Homicide DAs occupied the first floor of the Orange County Courthouse; their offices were eight-by-ten cubbyholes tucked here and there, well off the beaten path. Jeoff Robinson's office was a mess. There was no way to cushion the description; his surroundings plainly did not reflect the precise organization of his thoughts. He was always on the verge of cleaning his office up, but he was also always in trial, preparing for trial, or waiting for a verdict, ora"to ease the tensiona"running or playing basketball. Robinson liked to run, and sometimes Newell would run along with him, bored, because that was often the only time they had to discuss the fine points of a case.

Files and books and papers and who knows what covered every surface of Robinson's office. His phone-message spike still had calls from March 1988a"which he insisted he had answered. A sign on the wall read "I hate USC!" and tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert were taped to that. A gym bag stuffed with jogging clothes blocked easy access to his desk. Robinson's pa.s.sions.

There was a photograph on one wall of Robinson digging for a missing body, caught unaware by some phantom lensman. Underneath, there were three dozen or so suggested captions, most of them obscene, from fellow deputy district attorneys. It was quite possible that there was, indeed, a law degree somewhere in the clutter. It was also possible there was a telephone somewhere on the DDA's desk.

It didn't really matter; Robinson was a man in constant motion who walked on the b.a.l.l.s of his feeta"like an Indian or like the athlete that he wasa"moving through the two floors of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Receptionists usually paged him before they even tried to ring his office. They knew he wouldn't be there. And if he was, he took pride in having the most difficult office to locate in the whole maze .of homicide prosecutors' cubicles.

His name was not on the door, but there was a page from a court transcript with a judge's oblique ruling: "Whether or not Mr. Robinson is a buffoon has no bearing on this case."

"I didn't put it there," Robinson said. "My door is known as a repository for the inane. I never know what's going to get tacked up there."

In 1981, Jeoff Robinson promised that he would stay with the Orange County DAs Office for at least two years. Seven years later, he was still there, happily entrenched.

His first homicide case was the nightmare that any prosecuting attorney dreads. He had to prosecute an elderly man who had shot his wife because she was dying of a terminal illness and in terrible pain. "How was I going to get that poor old man up there and cross-examine him?" Robinson asked. "I didn't want to. I felt sorry for him. And any jury with half a heart would too. Together with defense counsel, we came up with a way outa"after many hours of collaboration. The dead wife was the one who had actually pulled the trigger. The defendant only helped the victim hold her finger on the gun's trigger. We were able to get the charge lowered to "aiding and abetting a suicide."

A convicted rapist who had served four years for his alleged crime had his conviction reversed when Robinson read the case and saw a number of flaws. "It appeared the man was innocent," Robinson recalled. "I went to his attorneya"who happened to be A1 Forgettea"and asked if I could talk to the man, with the stipulation that his client's answers could never be used against him.

"It had been a very brutal gang rape of a couple on the beach. This man was the only one caught and convicted, and I believed there were others involved who were still free. It turned out this man had been dead drunk, dressed just like the actual rapists were, and the victims misidentified him. Unfortunately, he took the rap at trial. We were able to find and convict the half dozen real rapistsa"just six months before the statute of limitations ran out."

An innocent man was set free, but woe be unto the guilty defendant who came up against Robinson in court.

Jay Newell had never had occasion to work with Jeoff Robinson. But he wanted to. "The Cinnamon Brown case was so darned intriguing to anyone who started looking into it. I couldn't let go of it, Fred McLean couldn't let go of it, and I was counting on it hitting Jeoff the same way."

Robinson was semiprepared for a visit. Bryan Brown, the chief trial deputy in charge of the DA's Homicide Unit warned him that there might be an old case coming backa""a 1985 conviction." Brown mentioned no names.

"I was wary," Robinson admitted. "I wondered what this 'hummer' was that I was about to be taken in on." When Jay Newell came padding down the hallway with his request, Robinson had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. "He started laying out this Brown case for me, and I could see the work that would be involved, and I'm wondering why reopen something that's dead and buried. I was listening to Jay and thinking, 'This one's no slam dunk. This one could be trouble.'"

Robinson sat behind his desk and listened to Newell for fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. "At about half an hour," he admitted, "I began to get excited. I thought I could smell miscarriage of justice. With that, he had me hooked."

As Gary Pohlson, a much-respected defense attorney and frequent opponent commented wryly, "Robinson will prosecute anything. Just toss him any case at all and he'll go for it. And he wins."

That was not quite true. Although he would be loath to admit it, Jeoff Robinson had a wide streak of "crusader" running through him. "I was getting fired up, listening to Newell. I'd rather take on a case that is morally offensivea" yet tougha"than a sure thing. As far as I'm concerned, I could lose the next ten cases, and I wouldn't care. Not because I like to lose, but because I guess I want to be part of doing the 'romantic' part of what's right. That's the great part of this job! This one cried out for the prosecution to ride in and save the innocent and punish the guilty."

Newell outlined his surveillances of David Brown and Patti Bailey, the phone conversation with Cinnamon. If what Newell believed was true, Robinson was a natural for this case. "I want to prosecute the worst kind of criminal," Robinson explained. "This may sound odda"but I have more respect for a bank robber who goes in and sticks a gun in a teller's face and asks for money, who is, in his own way, truthful and up-front about what he does, than I do for a white-collar criminal who pretends to be one thing and is something else. I am offended by moral crimes."

If Cinnamon Brown had taken the rap and long incarceration for someone else, this moldering 1985 case that Jay Newell was so obsessed with seemed to Robinson to be the most heinous of moral crimes. Yes! Yes, he would take it on. But he warned Newell that they had absolutely nothing at the moment. There was no way that he could reopen the case on Cinnamon's word alone. "I told him I was going to ask for morea"and then morea"and more and more."

Jay Newell knew he couldn't do all the legwork and all the investigating by himself. Fred McLean was no longer a.s.signed to the Garden Grove detective unit, and Newell had to figure a way to get him back on the team. He went to McLean's old sergeant, who went to his new lieutenant. Would they cut McLean loose from his new detail for a while? Fortunately, they agreed. n.o.body knew the 1985 case the way McLean and Newell did. In order to reconstruct it, it would take both of them.

Impatiently, the two of thema"and Jeoff Robinsona"had to wait for a go-ahead from the upper echelons of the Orange County District Attorney's Office. They could do no more until they had that. Newell could not even go up to the Ventura School and talk to Cinnamon.

It was the longest three weeks of Jay Newell's life. He got his permission to pursue the case. But even with all he and McLean had learned in the more than three years since Linda Brown's murder, neither they nor Robinson knew how complex the case would become.

if ust after sunrise on August 10, 1988, Jay Newell and Fred McLean were on their way to the Ventura School to talk to Cinnamon. Her phone call had provided them with enough information to get this far, on the road headed north. They had no idea what she was going to say, but they would be able to watch her face as she spoke, to evaluate her body language.

It was quite possible she only wanted to get out of prisona"but neither McLean nor Newell truly believed that was Cinnamon's reason for calling. More likely, the secrets she had held on to so tightly had begun to burn. And she was probably angry. That was good; justifiable rage almost always brought forth the truth.

It was early when they drove through the gates at Ventura School, the August morning cool before the heat of the day to come. Cinnamon was still asleep when they arrived. Her work schedule on the TWA flight reservations line kept her up very late at night. They waited, and when she finally appeared, both Newell and McLean were stunned by the vast change in her appearance, her bearing. Cinnamon had dressed carefully, as if she were applying for a job and not meeting with detectives to discuss a long-ago murder. She had been short and a little chubby; now she was very slender. The pudgy cheeks were gone; the planes of her face were sculpted and enhanced with subtle, skillfully applied makeup.

McLean, especially, had difficulty equating this young woman with the scared, sick child he had pulled from the filthy doghouse three and a half years earlier. That Cinnamon had given him a confession he had never really believed, and then she had faded on him. All these years, he had been poised, waiting for the rest of the story; he had not realized how much so until this moment.

It was 11:37 on that Wednesday morning when Newell began the first tape. He had explained to Cinnamon that she needed no attorney. She had already been convicted of the homicide they would be discussing. She could not now be placed in double jeopardy. In other words, she could not be convicted twice for the same murder.

Again, Newell stressed that neither he nor McLean could promise her anything for the information she chose to give to them. No deals. No expectations of an earlier release from prison.

Cinnamon nodded. She understood that she would be flying without a net. It didn't matter.

Newell wanted to take Cinnamon back, figuratively through a tunnel of time, to elicit total recall of the events of early 1985, if that was possible. "First of all," he began softly, "put your mind back a couple of years ago when all this happened, to a point where you can even remember what the weather was like ... it may be so insignificant that you don't think we even need to know . . . What were you wearing, whether or not the gra.s.s was mowed, how the air smelled . . . how old were you?"

"Fourteen ..."

Cinnamon had seen only the most rudimentary reports on her case, and that had been two years agoa"the files kept on her at CYA. She had seen no newspaper accounts. She had not seen her attorney since her trial, and even then, she said, "Mr. Forgette didn't let me read anything pertaining to my case."

"You haven't refreshed your memory in any way thena" other than by just thinking about it?"

She shook her head. "Just thinking about it. Trying to go back, because I've pitched it out of the way so far. Like I was told toa"and I pitched it out so far that it got out of touch with me. I almost started believing it myself."

Newell laid down five proof sheets of photos of the exterior of the house and yard at Ocean Breeze Drive. Cinnamon identified the small frames easily, tapping them with one long, perfectly manicured fingernail. She pointed to the aqua and white travel trailer. "That's where I was told to stay."

She identified each picture, all correctly. The green house was caught in her memory, as much as she had tried to forget it.

"Why don't you just start anywhere," Newell suggested. "Tell us what you remember about the incidenta"leading up to it, that day, and from then on."

Cinnamon took a deep breath. "Well... I was in the living room one day with my father and Patricia. Patti had left to go to the kitchena"we had a dining room before you would reach the kitchena"and she stopped there by the door. . . . She goes, 'Shhh!' so I was quiet."

Patti had stood frozen for minutes. When she came back to the living room, she looked perplexed. "I just heard the strangest thing," she said. She told Cinnamon and David that she had overheard a phone conversation between Linda and her twin brother, Alan. She said it sounded as if they were planning to kill David.

Cinnamon had laughed, but Patti was adamant. "She goes, 'No, I'm serious. . . . Linda was talking to Alan about killing David!' My dad goes, 'What have you been smoking in the kitchen?' but she goes, 'I'm serious.'"

Cinnamon said David sighed and asked Patti what she had heard, but she had seemed very upset and said she couldn't discuss it in the house because Linda might overhear. "And I was saying, 'She's pulling your lega"she wants attention,' and after a while Linda came out and everything was okay. She told me to go get ready for dinner."

"Do you have a time frame?" Newell asked. "How long was this before Linda was killed?"

". .. At least seven months before."

The subject was dropped for the evening, but David had brought it up again the next day when he, Patti, and Cinnamon were going to the chiropractor. (They all had been in an earlier accident.) "Patti said that Linda was going to kill my father to get him out of the way." Cinnamon said she could not believe it. She had looked at Linda later and thought, "Linda wouldn't say something like that. I was thinking, like, because she was so pretty. . . . No, Patti's hallucinating."

Cinnamon had tried to write it off as a practical joke. "Our family's a big bunch of practical jokers."