Part 19 (1/2)

”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 partners.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+on.

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 cus.h.i.+on 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.