Asked why they had smiled as they walked into the courtroom on that last day, several jurors said it had nothing to do with whether they had voted innocent or guilty. "We were surprised to see so many people out in the gallerya"we had stage fright, and if we were smiling, it was because we were nervous!"

The phoenix remained inert in the ashes of his life. On Monday, July 23, David Brown pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to have Jeoff Robinson, Jay Newell, and Patti Bailey murdered. Five lesser charges were dismissed. In essence, this was a plea bargain; Brown was given six yearsa"to run concurrent with whatever sentence Judge McCartin would hand down on August 22.

Two years apiece for plotting to take three lives. It rankled those who cared about the would-be victims, but the time meant nothing. It might help to keep David Brown inside prison walls longer if he should ever come up for parole.

On July 18, Jay Newell interrupted his family's vacation trip, and Jeoff Robinson joined him in Sacramento. In an unusual move, the two appeared before the Juvenile Parole Board. They wanted the board to know that they were responsible for Cinnamon's recent reticence in talking about her offense. In order to convict David Brown, it had been necessary for Cinnamon to remain silent. Newell and Robinson asked that she not be penalized for this.

Cinnamon had already done more time than most juvenile homicide offenders. Given the revelation of her father's murder plans, Newell and Robinson urged the board to consider Cinnamon's next appearance before the boarda" probably in early 1991 a"in a favorable light.

There had been no deal at all. But both Robinson and Newell felt it was high time Cinnamon had someone on her side.

August 22 came and went without a sentence for Brown on the murder charges. The new sentencing date would be September 17. David Brown said that he would produce a number of letters on his behalf from huge corporationsa" even from the Pentagon. Letters that would support probation. None came.

Deputy Probation Officer Bruce B. Carel did, however, receive a number of letters condemning the convicted man, letters from Linda and Patti's sisters and brothers, from their mother. The messages were all full of regret and fear.

"Please make the sentence where he can never get out and do harm to anyone elsea"because I believe if he gets out, he will,"

"He messed up so many people's lives, all for his own selfish reasons. ... I feel he should never be able to see the light of day or night."

"This kind of person doesn't belong out with the human race, where he may do this again to someone else's family."

"What he has done is just plain sick and I don't feel there is enough punishment too hard for him, and I hope he has to do some of the suffering the family has done over the past five years."

There were highly literate letters and near-illiterate letters, but the message was all the same. Lock him up forever, and then watch him closely.

Newell added his own warning. "I feel David A, Brown should not only remain in prison for the rest of his natural life, but that it should not be forgotten that he will use and manipulate whoever he can to do his bidding. He should be closely monitored."

On September 17, 1990, the major players gathered for the last time in Judge Donald McCartin's courtroom. Everything was the same; only the jury box was emptya" although several of the jurors sat in the gallery now to watch David Brown's sentencing.

Brown wore a huge neck brace. One explanation said he had fallen in the shower; another that he had fallen out of his bunk. The neck brace was possibly only a last bid for sympathy. Since Judge McCartin had suffered continual severe neck and back pain throughout the trial, Brown's ploy was so ill advised as to be utterly stupida"if it was a ploy.

McCartin gazed down at the man convicted in his courtroom three months earlier, and the television cameras caught his image. He had refused to set aside the special acirc.u.mstances, feeling that the excessive insurance on Linda Brown's life was certainly an equal motive in her killing. "I won't strike that.

"... This started out as a death-penalty case," McCartin said, moving into the most serious conviction. He looked directly at David Brown for the first time. "Somewhere it was struck. .. . Maybe because you had no prior record."

McCartin spoke to Pohlson and Schwartzberg. "If this had gone to the jury as a death-penalty case, I'd have no problem sentencing your client to either life without possibility of parole or to death. I drove Mr. Robinson into the ground on this one, and Mr. Pohlson is one of the besta"if not the best [criminal defense attorney]."

McCartin took a deep breath and turned again to David Brown.

"The trouble is, Mr. Browna"you're a scary person. ... 1 have some concerns for my own safety. You don't look like Charlie Mansona"he's crazy to look at, but you look a lot saner than your own defense attorneya"but look what you did from jail. Look what you did to your own children, to your sister-in-law. It's scary to think you can manipulate people and do all this and not bat an eye. Even Charlie Manson didn't use family. . . . You're a master manipulator. I think the circ.u.mstances of this case are unbelievable. . . . You [seem to] have a pleasant personality, but you had no concern for your daughter, for your sister-in-law, for your wife. If Cinnamon had gone under, you would have walked away."

"Mr. Brown, you make Charlie Manson look like a piker."

With that said, Judge Donald McCartin sentenced David Arnold Brown to life without possibility of parole and added a $10,000 fine. "With six years to run concurrent already on case C-80475."

The brace hid David's neck, but the tips of his ears were blanched white. Whatever he had expected, it was not this. He twisted in the wind while McCartin lambasted him with words.

David Arnold Brown had been in custody over seven hundred days, and he would get credit for that. Probation was denied. He had sixty days to file an appeal.

"Do you have any questions, Mr. Brown?" McCartin asked.

Mr. Brown did not, but he complained to his guards on the way out of the courtroom that the judge had had no reason to be so mean about it all. "He didn't have to say that about Manson."

On September 20, 1990,1 went to see David Brown. With the gracious help of Judge Donald McCartin, Gail Carpenter, and "Mitch" Miller, I was armed with a piece of paper that ent.i.tled me to one official visit. David's parents still visited faithfully, and he didn't want to miss a regular visita"but my "official" status allowed me to visit David once during any time he agreed to see me and to stay as long as I wanted.

The street scene outside the Orange County Jail looked like a small-scale fiesta. Vendors sold fast food and watermelon to visitors. Inside, there was no sense of fun. It has always saddened me to see jail visitors waiting to see someone they love. The waiting room of the IRC was vast and furnished with bright-turquoise molded couches and chairsa""Barbie" furniture, blocklike and legless; it wasn't very comfortable, but appeared totally indestructible.

Mothers and fathers and children and babies and pregnant teenagers and friends and baby-sitters either crowded into line to talk to the desk officers or perched fretfully on the unyielding plastic blocks. Jail visitors get little respect, and they always seem burdened with worry and anxiety.

My piece of paper carried little weight with the desk officers, and I languished with the rest of the visitors. Finally, at length, I was directed to an elevator that went to J Module. I walked down a long, long windowless hall. It could have been a cattle rampa"if it had not been for the surveillance cameras mounted high on the corners. There was not a soul in sight. The hall smelled like a zoo, a smell that blossomed as I walked farther down toward the visitors' cubicles.

I had interviewed so many prisoners in so many jails and prisons, but I had never shaken the claustrophobic feeling that now gripped me as I moved farther and farther into the bowels of a custodial facility.

I had been given number nine. Cubicles one and nine were reserved for attorneys, the clergy, and other official visitors. They were more than cubicles; they were little rooms with doors that closed, with pale-yellow cinder-block walls and one little steel jump seat in front of a gla.s.s part.i.tion.

The air was hot and still, fetid.

David Brown, wearing a voluminous mustard-colored jumpsuit, sat down on the other side of the gla.s.s and picked up his phone receiver. How strange it was to look at the front of him when I had spent the spring looking at the back of his head!

At first glance, David's eyes were dark; on closer perusal, they were silver, hazel, gray, and yet none of these; they reflected light like a pool with many-colored leaves adrift. He rarely blinked. His acne-scarred face was a mask. He was wary of me, so cautious that he had no spontaneity. He had apparently recovered from his neck injury; the collar he wore in court three days before was gone.

I asked if I might tape our conversation, and he refused. He had been badly burned by hidden tapes; he apparently didn't realize that a tape made in full view would only substantiate what he said to me. No matter. 1 had taken notes for years. Fingers before ears. Where I came from, tape recorders were not allowed in courtrooms or jails, and I had a permanent callus on one finger from clutching a pen through scores of interviews and trials.

David Brown had things to get off his chest. He would, of course, appeal. "They're scared to death of me, you knowa" afraid I'll kill the judge. I think McCartin was just making a show at sentencing. He pounded on his chest like Tarzan so he can go home and tell his wife. I found him totally unprofessional."

Brown wanted to know where I stood on Jeoff Robinson a"did I not agree that he was a "dishonest man, a manipulator," who was given to temper tantrums?

At the risk of alienating my subject, I shook my head.

"No," I murmured. "I found him very competent. He's charismatic in the courtroom."

Brown disagreed. He viewed Jeoff Robinsona"and Jay Newella"as men with overweening political ambitions. "They are dishonest men. Robinson's manipulative. I have always tried to do right by people." He mentioned other interestsa"newspaper sales, for instancea"that were profiting from his own misfortune. He hastened to explain, however, that he was not unused to media coverage. "I was famous before Linda was murdered."

Once again he listed his credits, the lives he had saved, the corporations that would have perished without him. He told me about his fame, his money, the MGM fire, the Pentagon connection, the "towering inferno" Los Angeles bank fire. "I've been in almost every magazine you can name. Robinson can bring down a millionaire and he gets people's attention." David a.s.sured me he didn't need all this notoriety. Fame had courted him on his own merits. He was after all "Mr. Coca-Cola," and the man who had extricated the Challenger secrets.

I commented that he had been lucky to be in the right place at the right time in the booming world of computers. He corrected me. "I like to think it was my skill and intelligence."

David a.s.sured me that he had made a fortune, although he had always been unusually fair in billing his clients. He explained his modest billing approach. "I recovered data for one bank that located three hundred and eighty million dollars for them! If I charged even one percent of what I saved them, I'd have got more than three million dollars."

He smiled slightly, enjoying the tease. "Maybe I did. But I always kept a low profile. I didn't pay taxes on ita"if I got it."

Undeterred by my positive comments about Robinson, he warned me nevertheless, "You're going to have to keep an open mind." I must understand, he stressed, that I was talking to a man who had always tried to play fair with people.

He castigated Brenda, his first wife, and recalled how that divorce "tore me up." He took much pleasure in his millions because he knew Brenda regretted losing him. He explained that he had been faithful; his second wife, Lori, had been only a friend until he found himself dumped by a "cheating wife."

David was anxious to know if I had talked to Brenda. I nodded. "A little."

"She lied about me, I'll bet."

"No." I told him the truth. "She told me how good you were to her when she was fifteen, how you took care of her, and how much she loved you then."

David was put off by my answers; he had not yet been able to get a fix on me. I could sense David Brown sizing me up. What would work with me? Where were my weaknesses? My vanities? This was a man who enjoyed word games and keeping his opponent off-balance. He tried another tack with me. "You're one of the smartest women I've met in a long time," he commented. "Most of the people in here are grapefruits."

"... Thanks a lot."

Then David Brown wanted to talk about his betrayers. Patti's defection was uppermost in his mind. "I believed her when she said she didn't do it."

"Who did do it?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said impatiently. "I'm not a police detective. Linda was saying, 'It hurtsa"it hurts. Help me. Help me!' Anyone who could do that has to be pretty cold."

David burned with the memory of seeing Newell and Robinson talking to Patti before an early pretrial hearing. "I swear it was an emotional conversation; I couldn't hear what they were saying, but their hands were moving. I swear they were coaching her." Indeed, he insisted that both girls had been coached to say what they did.

David had nothing at all good to say about his own attorneys. "Pohlson didn't put on one-tenth of the defense I, wanted, not one-tenth of the witnesses. He's a spoiled brat, very egotistical. He's the one that wouldn't let me question hima"he'd get real angry, real angry. I fired Pohlson. McCartin wouldn't let me. I still would have been allowed to have a Marsden hearing, but when you hire an attorney* you can fire him."

David was convinced that Jeoff Robinson and Gary Pohlson were such close friends that Pohlson deliberately lost his case. He wished now that he had been allowed to hire C. Thomas McDonald (Randy Craft's attorney) or Milton Grimes.

As for witnesses, Brown thought all of the Baileys should have been called by the defense. His perceptions were fatally flawed. The Baileys had not only voiced their hatred for him, they had shouted it to the media and rejoiced in his conviction, but he skimmed over that. "The Baileys swore by me. We had no problems."

His views of Cinnamon were also skewed. "Cinnamon was a violent and abusive teenager. Patti was unstable; she tended to like a lot of guys. I felt Patti was a little bit infatuated with me."

He gave this information to me confidentially, as if I had not heard Patti's d.a.m.ning testimony on his s.e.xual abuse and the stolen episodes of s.e.xual activity between them whenever Linda's back was turned.

David Brown labored to convince me of Cinnamon's violence. "Cinny was verbally abusive to mea"more than you'd want a teenager to be. Brenda called and said, 'She hit me! My mouth is bleeding. I never want her back!'" Long suffering, he had rescued Brenda, he explained, and had taken the "vicious" teenager into his own home. He allowed that he didn't have to face the brunt of the problems with Cinnamon. "I wasn't around her and Patti; Linda was home with them all day."

David then revealed a new scenario to me about March 19, 1985. "They were both going home to their mothers that daya"Patti and Linda were constantly b.u.t.ting heads, Patti disobeyed Linda, tried to borrow her jewelry and clothes, tried to run the house. . .. Cinnamon had reasons for resentment and being upset. Her mother kept yelling, 'Get out of my housea"I never want to see you again!'"

David sighed as he recalled his decision. "Linda said, 'Either she goes or I go!' It was a horrible thing for me to choosea"since Cinny was nine or ten, she got on my nerves tooa"she was such an unusual kid. She made both Brenda and Linda hate her, and I did too. Can you understand that?"

I didn't answera"because I couldn't understand that.

"They killed her because they were going home that day. Patti had to eliminate Linda to take her place. Cinnamon wanted to be in a loving home. They both had motives. It may sound weird, but I wish to G.o.d Linda was here to testify."

Why would that sound weird.. . ?

I asked, "How do you feel about Cinnamon now?"

"It's rough." He sighed, lighting a cigarette. "Coming to terms. She killed my wife. What's it matter to kill me too? She knew I faced the death penalty at the time she changed her story. Her father could die, and she didn't care. She's cold . . . and evil."

David attributed Cinnamon's treachery to the fact that she was in love with a boy at Ventura School. "She was in a whirlwind of love . . . she was desperate to get out. She's proved what a liar she is."

I asked Brown about the four insurance policies. Just as he had in the interview with Newell and McLean, he tensed up at the mention of insurance. I noted that, when he was hard-pressed for an answer to a difficult question, his eyes slid right while he constructed his response. "I never spent the insurance money. I don't need that money."

"You didn't?"

"I cashed the checks," he answered cagily.

"What did you do with the money?"

"Let's just say it's invested."

"Where?"

"I can't say. I don't want Patti and Cinny to know how that money was invested. I don't want the Baileys to know where it's invested."

Ten minutes before, David had told me he got along fine with the Baileys, and now he denigrated them as criminals, drug users, whose decadence shocked him. He reminded me of his many, many beneficences to the Baileys, all unappreciated. "I'm not guiltya"that family was. Ethel was greedy," David said. "She wanted to sell Patti to Linda for twenty-five hundred dollars, and Linda just told her she was crazy! I think Ethel was planning to put Patti out for prost.i.tution, and she thought she'd lose money if Patti came to live with us. We were willing to go to court to keep Patti."

"But you took Patti back homea"at Linda's insistencea" didn't you?" I asked.

David explained that was true, but that it was he who had decided Patti couldn't live with them any longer. "Frankly, she was coming on to me, and I couldn't have that, so I took her home to Riverside. Then she called up and said that one of her brothers had raped her, so we went to get her. We had her checked at Martin Luther King Hospital, and there was no sign of rape. But we brought her back home."

Once on the subject of the Bailey family, David was reminded of more of their vices. "It's true I didn't like to visit the Baileys," he said. "Ethel would sit there and go through a six-pack in an hour. They did drugs in front of us. I don't believe in drinking or doing drugs or abusing your children," he finished.

David Brown was a fascinating interview. He was expansive and generous with details in areas that had no particular bearing on his case, and cryptically stingy when I probed too close to perilous aspects of the case or asked questions he had no canned answers for.

He described his hardscrabble childhood. He was Horatio Alger reborn, a boy who struggled to survive and now helped others less fortunate. There was the sense that I was hearing a memorized spiel. Many of the anecdotes were familiar. I had heard them on tape, seen him on videotape saying the same words: I asked him if his childhood had been happy, and he quickly reversed the question. "Was yours?. . . What's happy?"

David Brown clearly did not like direct questions. I asked him, just to change the direction of the conversationa"and because I had found it to be a good interviewing technique to relax subjectsa""If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you choose?"

He froze. "Why would you want to know that?"

"No reason. I'm trying to get to know you."

Then I realized that he suspected I was seeking information about some eventual escape destination. I had no doubt at all that, even as we talked in this totally secure jail, the man on the other side of the gla.s.s was devising schemes once again.

When I asked him what was wrong with his heart, David looked wary again. "It's a physical problem," he said shortly.

"I imagined it was. What are your symptoms?"

His eyes slid to the right, and there was a long silence.