Cinnamon remembered his "gotcha" from the last time, and Newell grinned as he heard David say only, "Hi," and Cinnamon quickly respond, "I love you too!"
Cinnamon knelt to Krystal's height and said, "Hi! Are you my friend?"
Listening to this family visit inside the reformatory was strange. And a little sad. Children in the background laughed and cried. Krystal wanted a doughnut, then promptly dropped it. It sounded so normal, and yet it was anything but normal.
Cinnamon and her two visitors moved over to a round table, shielded from the sun by a large white umbrella. Twenty feet away, Walt Robbins snapped pictures. David drank Perrier while the girls sipped Cokes.
Much of their transmitted conversation was about mundane things, as if Cinnamon, Patti, and David were hesitant to speak of the real reasons they had finally found themselves all together again. At one point, David looked toward the young women playing on the field nearby.
"Great," Cinnamon teased. "You want to stare at the people on the field, don't you?"
"My daughter knows me," David said with a laugh. "And I like the dark meat myself."
"You like the what?" Cinnamon asked.
"The dark meat." He was referring to the black girls playing ball and vulgarly pointing out their physical attributes.
"You're disgusting," Cinnamon said.
"Yeah," Patti echoed.
There was that same inappropriate behavior. He was the adult, almost thirty-six, and yet Newell realized David interacted with both his daughter and Patti as if they were all the same age. The girls seemed more mature, however, and David only a case of ugly, prejudiced, arrested development. He complained bitterly about the freeway jam-up on the way up.
"They got the freeway up here—five lanes—and you get on this part, you know—"
"No, I don't know," Cinnamon said softly.
"Well, you get out of L.A., you come to five lanes—"
"I guess I miss out on a lot of things."
He was oblivious to her meaning. He rattled on, about traffic, about bills for Cinnamon's stationery. Suddenly, he asked, "Why did they hassle you so much the last time I was here?"
Why was he so wary? Newell wondered. There was no way he could have known that Cinnamon was wired. Not two weeks ago. Not today. She wore the same bulky blue shirt. Not a wire or a bulge showed.
Cinnamon fielded the question smoothly. "'Cause my pass—the staff didn't know I was off the cottage."
"How did you get a pass if they didn't know you were off the cottage?"
Newell held his breath.
"They have shift trade at two o'clock. . . . And when I was up here in between the last—somehow they lost me.
"It was so irritating," David complained to Patti. "We were just sitting there on the grass. That stupid asshole kept coming over and scaring the shit out of us. [Mimicking] 'Are you Cinnamon Brown?' I need to see your pass. This pass is no good.' "
Cinnamon laughed. He wasn't suspicious. He just hated authority figures.
Both David and Patti explained that they had sent Cinnamon their new phone numbers—David's new phone numbers. The letters must have been lost. Newell waited for something he could sink his teeth into, but Cinnamon couldn't seem to steer them away from trivia. And this time, David didn't ask what she was worried about.
Patti explained that she had hired Betsy Stubbs to babysit Heather in the van. It had cost her $20.
"How old is Heather now?" Cinnamon asked suddenly.
". . . She'll be a year next month," Patti answered, biting her lip.
David quickly changed the subject. "Where did you find the doughnuts? Were they under the bed for the last thousand years?"
"Hundred," Patti said.
"Get your digits right—or don't get them at all," Cinnamon said.
"My digit's fine," he said. "Want to see it?"
Newell shook his head. The guy was always thinking about sex; he was steeped in it, and he censored nothing for his daughter.
Cinnamon was persistent. "I wanted to ask you some questions about the baby," she said to Patti. "I never get to talk to you."
Patti said nothing.
"I don't even know what the kid looks like."
"Like a turd," Patti answered.
"Doesn't she look like the father?"
"She doesn't look like anybody; she looks like a baby. All babies look the same."
"Who's the father?" Cinnamon asked.
"She told me she was dating Doug on—" David cut in. Patti said nothing and stared down at the table.
Again, David changed the subject, back to Betsy Stubbs, who "said she was pregnant, but then she said she had a miscarriage. She said she threw up the baby. I told her if that was true, you got a major physical problem. . . . She's that stupid. . . ."
Patti brightened. "Honest to God, I'm beginning to think she's a lesbian!"
"She does," David said. "She follows Patti into the bathroom."
"I'm really scared to undress in front of her—"
"Well, you undressed in front of somebody," Cinnamon shot out. "And I'm curious. This is driving me crazy. Who is the father, Patti?"
Patti refused to discuss Heather's parentage. It was "too upsetting."
David started to chime in with his guess, but Patti stopped him. "Be careful. I don't want you to tell her."
Patti turned away and bent her head near Krystal's as David talked. "He's still living at home with his momma and daddy and he drives a Trans-Am or Firebird," David continued. "I've seen him once and he's about as intelligent as a grapefruit. He's got real, real curly hair, not like anybody I see here. Greek kind of looking."
Heather's hair was red, David said. "And you and her," he said, pointing to Krystal, "you guys have, you know, my color of skin, and this kid you can see almost through to the bone—just like her [indicating Patti]."
Cinnamon knew who the baby's father was. They all knew.
This time, Cinnamon allowed David to change the subject. For the next twenty minutes, they talked aimlessly. Newell waited impatiently. Why was she holding back? He didn't care about records or watches or Betsy Stubbs's latest peccadillo or why David preferred Perrier. David was offering Cinnamon more and more presents. Both he and Patti were being most gracious and generous.
They laughed, and Newell could hear David and Patti relaxing, assured that Cinnamon wasn't going to push this thing after all.
Abruptly, Cinnamon turned to Patti. "So—did Daddy discuss with you what we talked about last visiting?"
Patti stopped in mid-laugh and answered slowly, "And I told him and he told you."
"He did not tell me anything."
"That I'd trade?"
"I want to know what you think about it," Cinnamon said.
Patti was apathetic. "If that's what you want to do."
"We could walk on the Twilight Zone or something," Cinnamon said sharply. The idea was ridiculous, yet both Patti and her father seemed to think you could just shuffle prisoners around willy-nilly.
"The only thing," David pointed out, "you would have to still do what you've always done. You don't remember anything and she'll come forth with her story and clear you."
"But will she tell the truth?"
"She'll tell them whatever she wants to tell them. "
"Are you going to tell them the truth?" Cinnamon asked.
"What's the truth? I'm, I'm—"
David ignored Patti's question and drilled Cinnamon. "The thing is you don't know the truth. You don't know what happened. Stay the way you did from the day you got here. You don't remember—"
"So you're going to tell them the truth?"
David explained that Cinnamon was not to remember, because Patti was the one who knew everything. "She did it. That's how come you don't know."
Patti saw a flaw. "Then they'll ask me why did she take the pills."
"You gave them to her," David instructed.
"She didn't give them to me," Cinnamon argued.
"However you want
to do it, I'll do it," Patti offered.
"Just tell them the truth," Cinnamon repeated for the tenth time.
What was David up to? Newell tried to follow the conversational volleys. David was reconstructing history. And Patti was allowing him to serve her up on a plate. Why? And then the whole plan changed.
"There's nothing to tell them," Patti said.
"None of us remember a whole lot," David agreed.
Cinnamon was incredulous. You could hear it in her voice. "You don't remember a whole lot of what happened that night? Even Grandpa knows. "
Cinnamon began to pepper her father and Patti with questions.
How many gunshots?
Who shot the gun?
You had me write that note. Why?
Both David and Patti were suddenly seized by a hazy kind of amnesia. They were stonewalling Cinnamon. David thought maybe Larry or Alan had broken in. Patti could not remember the tiger tapestry in her room. "I can't think of tapestry—I'm thinking Tupperware. I don't know. . . . Believe me, if I was to remember, I'd come here and talk to you."
Cinnamon stared at her visitors with incomprehension. They had come up to Ventura with their stupid plot to play switcheroo, and now, suddenly, their minds had gone blank. Neither remembered more than their own names.
"You don't remember anything said at the house or when we were in the van or anything?"
"The van?" Patti asked vacantly.
"Oh, now you're going to say, 'What van?' Right?"
It must have seemed so ridiculous to Cinnamon that Newell heard her laugh. It must have seemed like a bad joke to her.
"No, I don't remember," Patti said. "All I remember is stuff that I read in the paper."
". . . You know I'm trying to make sure I'm not crazy," Cinnamon said. "That's what I'm trying to do—review some of this with you so that I—I'm trying to find myself—"
"I understand," David said with a trace of smugness. "And I don't have any problem."
"All the lies and stuff, it makes me go delirious."
"Delirious," Patti agreed. "I hallucinate the way you wouldn't believe."
Cinnamon asked her father if he remembered telling her to get rid of all the rejected suicide notes.
"Probably ... I don't know. I don't remember."
"Are you related to me?" Cinnamon laughed. "Are you clones of the people that I knew out there?"
"Cinny, when my liver went bad," David whined, "it fucked up my whole body. I don't remember a lot about Data Recovery."
"I've been here," Cinnamon answered. "It's fucked up my life."
Newell listened to the mazes of David Brown's reasoning, once again marveling at his fancy conversational footwork. He was suddenly going the sympathy route, trying to convince Cinnamon that she had it a lot better in prison than he did on the outside.
"I know, I know," David said in a tired voice. "I have to rely on Dad—"
"If I can be strong," his daughter argued, "you also can be strong."
"I'm trying. I'm fighting the best I can, but that happened to my body. I've got nothing to do with it. Nobody asked you to care for the dying."
Cinnamon turned to Patti, determined to try again. "I asked Daddy last time why it was that we went through with this, and he told me his opinion. . . . What is your reason why you went through with it?"
"Because they were both after him and you didn't want him to be gone," Patti blurted.
"We're talking about Linda?" Cinnamon asked.
And suddenly Patti backed off. No, she recalled no phone conversation between Linda and Alan, had heard no plots against David. Maybe David had heard about a plot. She remembered nothing about it. "One of us overheard her on the phone. . . ." Patti trailed off.
"Well, eeney, meeney, miney, mo," Cinnamon said sarcastically.
Every time Patti's memory let in the slightest beam of sunlight, David cut her off. He reminded Cinnamon of a "memory" he wanted her to keep firmly in her mind. "I've been shot at before. If someone was going to kill me, let him try. Maybe they'll wound me. Maybe they'll miss, and they'll end up in jail. Let them try. I remember telling you guys that, and that's the last thing I remember telling you when I left the house—'Don't worry about it. I'm going to clear my head. I'm going to the beach. Just leave everything. You guys go to bed. Just. . . forget everything. If it happens, it happens.' You guys said something. I remember this. You guys said that 'Alan might be outside waiting for you. He knows that you go to the beach a lot.' And you guys said, 'Don't go.' "
Cinnamon shook her head, mystified. "I don't remember that. ... I remember you talking to me and Patti. In the living room, saying, 'It has to be done tonight,' and that you were going to leave."
"I don't remember that either," David said earnestly.
Cinnamon laughed. She was hanging in there. Her life depended on this, and yet she seemed to find her father's spotty memory almost comic. Either Cinnamon had made up the story she told Newell and Robinson from whole cloth, or David and Patti were systematically lying to her, deliberately confusing her, keeping her at bay and most of all, away from the authorities.
"Why do you guys make it seem like I was alone in this—you guys had—" she pleaded. "You put all the responsibility on me! I'm the one that's in here." Cinnamon seemed to have forgotten the wire. She was speaking from what sounded like her very gut. "Does it really matter who pulled the trigger?" she asked.
Newell sat up straight. What was she saying now?
"I remember you," Cinnamon said, turning to David, "saying you wouldn't be able—you don't have the stomach or something to stay in the house."
"And I said I didn't have the stomach for anything that happened. . . . When I came home, Cinny, I was in shock." David's memory had shrunk, he said, sometimes to five minutes.
Disgusted, Cinnamon turned again to Patti. "How do you think I feel when I think that the father of your baby is my father—because of what I saw you and my dad doing inside the store that last time?"
"How do I think you feel? Hurt. Upset. Angry. PO'd . . . not understanding."
"Can you explain that to me?"
"I don't know."
"Why did you do it?" Cinnamon asked her father.
"Like in the store? Probably because I felt insecure. I was upset about everything that I've been seeing, experiencing with Linda. I had no idea she was into drugs. ... I just felt like there was something wrong between me and Linda. . . . There are things in a marriage and all that and you need security. Now, you need somebody that'll hold you and all that when you feel like the whole world's going to shit on you any minute now . . . whatever it was that we [he and Patti] were feeling before . . . was very much not real."
"Then why was she still living with you?"
"Because we're all the family we have left. Who's going to help watch her?" He nodded his head toward Krystal, who, at four, was happily running after the birds who hovered nearby to peck at doughnut crumbs. Grandma and Grandpa couldn't care for Krystal, David said.
"Besides," Patti said swiftly, as if she could hold it in no longer. "I still care about him. ... I care and I still love him. I'm not going to leave unless he tells me I have to leave. I want to be there for him the way he's been there for me."
It was a whoops. David had assured Cinnamon that Patti had left his home long before.
Patti watched David's annoyance and gradually changed her story. Yes, she had left—to go up to Oregon and find herself.
Cinnamon still wanted to know about Heather, but they would not answer her.
No, David had no interest—that way—in Patti. "I have seen a lot of women." He listed them, and Patti's face showed raw pain.
"I still love him, and I always will," she said with surprising fervor. "And I don't like it. 'Cause I know that everyone else is just out for whatever he's got, and I honestly love him for what he is—not for what he can give me. I love him for what he is, but see—back then, I mean, I was still an immature little brat like I always was, and I didn't th
ink twice before I did something. ... It hurts, but I mean like—just because that's the way I feel doesn't mean that's the way he feels."
There it was, hidden in among the lies. Newell had little question that Patti Bailey Brown was telling the truth. For whatever unfathomable reason, she truly loved David Brown.
"My love for her," David told Cinnamon about Patti, "is no different than my love for you and my love for Krystal. There's nothing physical there."
"You mean, then, that would be considered as incest then—what I saw you and her do?" Cinnamon asked.
"Kiss?" David asked.
"Right."
"What's incest?" Patti asked.
"It's not incest." David spoke patiently. "A lot of parents kiss their kids on the mouth—"
"Not like that," Cinnamon tossed back.
"Maybe not like that, but it didn't feel right then and it's never felt right since."
"So you must've felt more for her than just a daughter?"
"I think I tried to because of an insecurity at the time. I might have tried to . . . fathers do it with their daughters, I mean, you know. That's not. . . that unusual. As a matter of fact, it's very common. They have sex with their daughters. It doesn't make any difference to them . . . whoever's handy."
Jay Newell turned away. He wasn't surprised at David Brown's philosophy on incest. That didn't keep him from being disgusted.
The kid was doing great. She was asking all the right questions, but the answers were coming back from left field.
Cinnamon asked about the insurance payoff on Linda. This time there was a new answer. "Krystal's got the insurance money," David said. "I don't need the insurance money. You know how much I've earned—since August first? One hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Why do I need insurance money? Cinny, my Data Recovery business account has—I don't even know how much money is in it. My personal account has always been like around seventy thousand dollars. . . . Cinny, I can make a hundred, two hundred thousand dollars a job. I could make three million dollars on one job we just did for the bank."
Cinnamon barely listened, but Newell made a note to recheck all insurance policies on Linda Brown. That one question had shaken David up more than almost all the rest. He didn't want to be connected with insurance payoffs.