13 Hollywood Apes Page 13

  “Suit yourself,” Gladney said.

  Remington wanted another look at the Odalon victims. The air of the refrigerator truck did indeed smell strongly of wood smoke. The bodies in the cargo bay lay in wood-framed racks, stacked two or three together.

  She lifted the cloud-colored plastic sheeting on one after another. The epidermis on a few of them was fully alligatored. Others displayed the half-baked markings of a cadaver exposed to fire: top side blistered and singed into a hairless char, bottom half, whatever surface was in proximity to the ground, still relatively intact.

  On one of the chimps—a juvenile female—the hair had been completely singed off. What lay there on the bodyboard resembled, to all intents and purposes, an ill-featured adolescent human, pink-skinned and fresh. A spooky, unsettling effect.

  Rick Stills had taken to promoting the “humans as third chimp” idea. The PETA folks were always going on about what close cousins humans are of chimpanzees. But these creatures were on the other side of a gulf from people, as far as Remington was concerned. It didn’t matter if a chimp’s hair was burned off and it resembled a high school sophomore. It wasn’t human. And there was no reason chimps should be considered human. The point was, Remington thought, that even if they are different from people—and they were—it wasn’t cause to treat apes as though they were firing-range targets. In research labs back in the fifties, she knew that the skulls of chimps had sometimes been sawed round and pried off, their brains left exposed so that neuroscientists could have easy access for electrodes.

  Even in recent years, dozens of the creatures had lived out their lives in steel cages not much bigger than coffins. They went mad. All that business was changing now. The government had recently placed even laboratory chimpanzees on the endangered-species list, which severely limited the kinds of mischief that could be done to them.

  What were apes to her? Carnival acts? Blood relatives? What responsibility did she have toward them? Remington knew that she wasn’t prepared to go as far as some of the animal-rights loonies. But she had an image in her mind of the Odalon Animal Sanctuary before the shooting rampage and the wildfire—a happy little chimp paradise, an enclave, a refuge from the rampant exploitation of the species. She liked that idea.

  The evening before, as they were talking over chimpanzee-human dynamics, her father had told Remington about a scene in an old movie that he once saw. He couldn’t remember the name of the film, but he thought the actor might have been Jimmy Stewart.

  “So Stewart’s talking about how he was walking along the beach one day,” Eugene Remington had said. “He looks up ahead, and he sees what he thinks is a big rock jutting up out of the sand. Only he gets a little closer and sees that it’s some kind of animal, he thinks maybe a dog. He gets closer and realizes it’s a human being after all, some stranger who’s standing there. Finally, he goes right up to the guy and realizes that it’s actually a friend of his, somebody he dearly loves and hasn’t seen in a long time.”

  “The point is?” Layla asked.

  “I’m ashamed to have to explain it to you, princess. It’s about empathy. Rock to dog to stranger to friend. You see? We treat people like they’re nothing, like they might as well be inanimate rocks. But when we open up our hearts we see them as fellow creatures, then as humans, and finally as friends.”

  “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” Layla said.

  “You’re a hopeless cynic,” Gene grumbled. “That’s what police work does to you.”

  —

  “I have to talk to you,” Rick Stills told Remington when she returned to the Malibu office from the coroner’s.

  “Me, too, you,” she said, following him into his inner sanctum.

  “I feel like things are stacking up. We have to—I have to get a handle on work flow around here. Are you free for lunch?”

  “Right now?”

  Randy Gosch stepped into the office. “You’ve got a call,” he said to Stills. “Someone named Patricia Sedgewick.”

  “Randy—”

  “I know, I know, I should take a message. But she’s kind of a noodge.”

  “Who is she?” Stills asked.

  Gosch referred to a Post-it stuck to the back of his hand. “A Ms. Patricia Sedgewick from the Jus Animalium Law Center, Birmingham School of Law.”

  “She wants—what does she want?”

  “You should take it,” Remington said. “You know what ‘Jus Animalium’ means?”

  She could see Stills translating the Latin in his head. “Animal law?”

  “Sometimes rendered as ‘the rights of beasts,’ ” Remington said. “They must’ve heard about Odalon.”

  “Animal rights,” Gosch said.

  Stills groaned. “I don’t have time for this.”

  Remington’s cellphone vibrated with an incoming call: the forensics lab at the Santa Monica office of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. She fielded the call, listened for a moment, then rang off.

  “They’ve got a positive hit,” she said to Stills, trying not to crow out the news like some rookie. “A print lifted off the Ian Terry school van matched Angle’s.”

  Rick Stills practically levitated. “Yes!” he shouted, performing a truncated fist pump.

  “What? What?” Randy Gosch said, not up to speed on developments.

  “Arrest warrants,” Remington said. “For Mr. Mace ‘Rock Star’ Arthur and—Will a judge issue a warrant for a chimpanzee?”

  “Damn right she will.” Stills grabbed the phone and struggled to punch in the proper numbers, but gave up and turned to his assistant. “Randy, I already have it set up with Maria Nuñoz. It’s not technically an arrest warrant for the ape; it’s an order of confiscation. The warrant and the order are ready to go. All she has to do is sign them and send them over.”

  Remington enjoyed seeing her boss energized. “I’ll scare up some deputies.”

  “Go, go, go!” Stills said, slapping his free hand on the surface of his desk.

  “He’s fun when he’s excited,” Gosch said to Remington as they both crowded out the door of Stills’s office.

  Remington knew that there were deputies in the Encino area she could order dispatched to the Spencer Graham estate, to seal it off and make sure neither Mace Arthur nor his chimpanzee charge went anywhere. But she wanted to go in herself. One part of the operation nagged at her. She imagined Angle abruptly jerked out of his comfortable, familiar dome surroundings. Then she recalled Ian Terry’s ravaged body and thought that she shouldn’t be worrying about the well-being of a creature who had accomplished that deed.

  She arranged for Animal Control to send a truck along with the team of four deputies she had coming with her to serve the warrant. Two patrol cars. That ought to be enough. Remington had specifically vetoed the idea of a SWAT. What she didn’t want to happen was for the beast to go wild and attack either the police personnel or the commune folks. She had just seen the gory aftermath of a chimp attack, and it wasn’t pretty. Briefing her people, she told them to consider the ape a bomb that could explode at any time.

  “So we’ll be needing the bomb squad, then,” Deputy Willie Chan joked nervously. He had been at the crime scene, too, had seen the body and the blood-painted interior of the van, so he knew what they could be getting into.

  Heading to Encino in the U-boat to rendezvous with her team, Remington realized that she had actually been dealing with ape violence for her entire professional career. Every time she went out on a domestic-violence call, every homicide, every assault or rape or splash of blood on the streets was a form of chimp violence—provided you accepted the idea of humans as the “third chimpanzee.”

  Our evolutionary heritage. In her recent sessions of Internet research on the four species of great ape, she had become more and more aware of how familiar were the human crimes she encountered every day. Gorillas were big on infanticide. Orangutans were great rapists. Chimps were wife-beaters extraordinaire. Only bonobos, the celebrated “love ape,” seem
ed to be immune—although, even with that species there was new evidence of aberrant violence.

  Reading over the reports of males abusing females in chimp colonies, Remington had a sense of déjà vu. The long list of beatings that the chimps perpetrated, the black eyes, stompings, gouges, bruises, bites, and punches—oh, yeah, she recognized that stuff real well, from the year and a half she spent on domestic in the Valley Division. Who knew the twisted varieties of violence better than a cop on domestic?

  What human men did to human women merely mirrored what male chimps did to females. So whether humans were the fifth great ape species or the third chimpanzee or whatever, we were merely continuing on with the family business of mayhem and murder.

  “It’s going down right now,” she told her father, calling him on the hands-free for some hand-holding, as it were. Remington didn’t know why she should be nervous. She had participated in raids numerous times before.

  “You think you have it right, girl?” he said after she laid out developments.

  “Well, yeah, Dad. The chimp Angle left a lot of prints behind. Blood is a good transfer medium, you know that. CAU nailed it.”

  “Probably something the Crime Analysis Unit never did before, a match like that.”

  Remington recalled thinking the same thing. “I’m satisfied.”

  “If you’re happy, then I’m happy, princess. Just be careful.”

  That jolted her a little, him breaking his longtime rule like that. One thing she respected about Gene was that he usually didn’t bother with such parental cautions as “be careful.” It must have cost him mightily to refrain from saying it, but he rarely had before. He must be getting old. He was getting old. The call wasn’t helping to calm her down. She rang off.

  Her units were gathered at the assembly point by the time she got there, a couple black-and-whites, the animal team, an EMT van, all marshaled in the empty parking lot of a Catholic high school off the Ventura Freeway. Remington led them through suburban streets up into the hills to the Spencer Graham estate. They drove in a convoy beneath the stately front gate.

  Remington threaded her way on the curving driveway past the big house at the back of the estate, just like the first time she had come on the trail of Mace Arthur, only a few days ago. She knew where she was going. The parade of cruisers and trucks that followed her passed by a collection of half-dressed, openmouthed hippies, the kids staring silently at them.

  The raid went off to perfection, except for one thing. Mace Arthur and Angle weren’t anywhere to be found. As a bust, it was a bust. She had her people fan out and canvass the whole place, talk to every one of the two dozen of those present. Meanwhile, she sat on the hood of the parked U-boat alongside the ape’s dome home and stewed, the six-cylinder engine still giving off heat under her butt.

  She called Stills. “They ran. They must’ve spooked.”

  Remington heard him curse under his breath. “We’ll find them, chief,” she said. “A rock star and his chimp sidekick—it’s like looking for Michael Jackson and Bubbles. How hard can that be?”

  “Don’t call me ‘chief,’ ” Stills snapped, and hung up.

  As soon as he did, her phone buzzed. “Harry Cornell” read the name that the device had matched with the number. Remington blanked for a second before she recalled who that was.

  “Detective Remington,” the cultured voice of Mace Arthur’s lawyer came on the phone. “I wanted to inform you—”

  “Where is your client?” Remington said, interrupting him.

  “This is just a courtesy call—”

  She cut him off again. “Mace Arthur is in violation of a court order, he’s the subject of a homicide investigation. For starters, he’s looking at an obstruction-of-justice charge, and I have to tell you, Counselor, you’re looking at one, too.”

  “My, my,” Cornell said.

  “Don’t jerk me around!” Remington shouted into the phone.

  “If you’ll calm down, I’ll try to refrain from doing so,” Cornell said.

  “Where is he?”

  “In view of recent events, Mr. Arthur thought it prudent to remove his friend to an undisclosed location.”

  “I advise you to tell him to turn himself in immediately,” Remington said.

  “Perhaps in due time,” Cornell said.

  “Forget in due time, now!” Remington answered, shouting again. “I want that chimp off the streets and in custody.”

  “Mr. Arthur also has concern for the individual’s safety,” Cornell said smoothly.

  “I don’t give a damn about Angle’s safety, Cornell. I care about the public’s safety. The creature is a menace.”

  “May I lay out how we see it? Or are you too upset to listen, Detective?”

  Remington let her anger simmer. She looked off over the commune grounds, where sheriff’s deputies were still bracing the residents.

  “Call me back,” she said. “The first words out of your mouth, I want to hear the exact twenty of Mace Arthur and that damned chimp of his, or you and I are going to see each other in front of Judge Clifford in the morning. I’ll enjoy watching him rip you a new one.”

  “My, my,” Cornell said.

  Remington stabbed the touch screen of her phone, wishing that by doing so she could terminate not just the call but the lawyer himself.

  —

  This time around the keeper needed a little intel from the target, so he held the animal in reserve a little, didn’t allow it to go all berserk on the guy right off the bat. The African was properly terrified by just the first few seconds of screaming ape fury.

  The keeper backed the chimp off with the chain and the cattle prod. It hadn’t done much damage, just tore a chunk off the guy’s right arm. Plus, it had gotten in a quick random flailing punch or two. The keeper had come to love the explosion of the crazy ape’s full-throated, balls-out assault. The target soiled himself. He would have told the keeper anything—he would have betrayed the whereabouts of his own mother—he was so blithering scared.

  They had caught the African flat-footed and alone in his shabby Inland Empire apartment. Opened the door like he was expecting a pizza deliveryman or something, and got something else delivered to him instead. For a long time he couldn’t speak, just freaked in wide-eyed terror.

  “Who were you dealing with?” the keeper kept demanding of him, shouting as the chained ape frothed a few feet way. “Who was it? I want a name!” Bellowing right into the guy’s face, trying to impress upon him that the keeper was just as dangerous as his chimpanzee, like those cute signs people put up on their front gates: FORGET THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER.

  Probably a few of the residents in neighboring apartments were already on the phone reporting a domestic disturbance to the police. The apartment house where the guy lived looked to be the sort of place that cops visited with depressing regularity, as if they had the address programmed into their GPS or something. He planned on being gone before any law-enforcement personnel arrived. Budget cuts had stretched 911 response times to where he felt he had five minutes to spare, at least.

  It didn’t take that long. After the African gave up a name, the keeper unleashed the ape and watched as it did its thing.

  14

  Remington was in no mood to field a call from Bettina Brownstein, the sign-language interpreter for the L.A. County courts, to whom she had conveyed a DVD copy of Angle supposedly ID’ing the Odalon shooter. That whole line of inquiry seemed useless, almost quaint, in the wake of recent developments. Mace Arthur and Angle were still at large. But Remington had asked a favor of the woman, so she answered her phone when Brownstein contacted her the morning after the failed raid.

  “Is this chimp business a joke?” the interpreter demanded.

  Remington assured her that it wasn’t. “Could you pick up anything from the video? I know the quality wasn’t that good.”

  “Of course I’ve heard about chimpanzees doing ASL, and I’ve seen some film footage,” Brownstein said, referrin
g to her specialty, American Sign Language. “In the deaf community there’s a lot of opinions about it. In the deaf community there’s opinions about everything.”

  She was just being chatty, but Remington wanted to hear her out and get off the phone. She was in a funk because of the fiasco at the Spencer Graham estate the night before. The whole Malibu office was on edge, about what one would expect when a group of law officers believed that there was a murderer on the loose.

  Brownstein wanted to give Remington the benefit of her expertise. “You have to understand that in ASL hand position, movement, orientation—it all matters, it’s an exact thing. Sure, people have different styles, just like in verbal language, but I tell you, if I showed this footage to my students they’d sneer at it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, the ape is doing something with his hands, gesturing somehow, but it’s not ASL, not really,” Brownstein said. “If this were someone talking, it’d be barely intelligible mumbling.”

  “So it’s no good?”

  “Oh, I can understand it, all right,” Brownstein said. “Yeah, the bad man was as tall as the human interviewer, and he had a dark face—either that or something smeared on his face. But it might as well be nonsense. I mean, the interviewer guy—”

  “Mace Arthur,” Remington said.

  “He probably could understand the signing, because, you know, he had evidently spent a lot of time with the animal.”

  “He babysat when the chimp was an infant.”

  “I thought so,” Brownstein said. “I have a Down syndrome kid who signs. She’s wonderful, but she’s a little sloppy with it, just like this guy. I mean the animal, not the human.”

  “So you would advise ADA Stills against ever showing this footage in court?”

  Brownstein guffawed, a barmaid’s laughter. Remington could imagine her shaking her head in derision at the very idea. “You can never tell how a jury will respond, can you? But any competent judge would blast that DVD out of the air like it was a clay target at the skeet range.”

  They rang off. Remington was left sitting, waiting for Stills in his office, more sour than ever.