13 Hollywood Apes Page 15

  “Listen, I think this could get out of control real quick. Some SWAT bozo with a laser scope on his rifle is going to shoot that ape without stopping to ask questions.”

  “Might not be the worst thing,” Stills remarked.

  “You haven’t met the guy,” Remington insisted. “There’s something sweet about him.”

  “He’s a killer, Remington.”

  “I wonder if an ape is included in that innocent-until-proven-guilty business.”

  “You’re not going all softheaded on me, are you?”

  “All I think is we should secure a place for him beforehand, so when Mace Arthur does bring him in the chimp doesn’t go into a cell at Metro or some other god-awful place.”

  “I never saw you as a coddler of criminals, Detective,” Stills said.

  “I’m trying not to let it get ugly,” Remington responded. “You know, allowing ‘the publicity whirlwind to sweep us all into some sort of shared communal folly.’ ” She was quoting Stills’s Ro-Co-Co email back to him. She could almost hear him wince over the phone.

  “Maybe the Griffith Park zoo could find a place for him,” Stills said.

  “Out of public view, for pity’s sake,” Remington said quickly.

  “Death row,” Stills said. “Because you know how this is going to end, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Remington said. She thought of the ape warmth emanating from Angle as she held him in her arms.

  “We’re going to have to euthanize him.”

  “ ‘Euthanize,’ that’s such a foul little euphemism.”

  “Are you prepared for that?” Stills asked.

  “Maybe we could, you know, bring in that Sedgewick woman as an advocate against capital punishment for apes.” Remington tried to keep the acid out of her voice. “Have her team up with the ACLU and the ASPCA.”

  “The Jus Animalium Law Center could serve as a valuable legal resource for us,” Stills said primly.

  “Right,” Remington said. “I’ve heard women like that called by other names besides valuable legal resources, but whatever.”

  “Good night, Layla,” Stills said, and hung up.

  It sure enough was going to get ugly, Remington thought. She didn’t realize until fresh news broke midmorning the next day just how ugly it could get.

  15

  Pia Liebstein lived in a mini-mansion that was originally owned by Simone Simon, the kittenish thirties film star, lead actress in the 1942 horror movie classic Cat People. In Los Angeles, owning a place with an old Hollywood pedigree bestowed some added cachet. Not that Liebstein needed the boost. But at dinner parties she liked regaling friends with Simone Simon’s practice of making golden keys to the house for her numerous lovers. Then Pia would casually toss one of the antique keys onto the table, to the oohs and aahs of her guests.

  As an added plus, the mansion was located in the Hollywood Hills below the reservoir, lodged right up in the throat of Bronson Canyon. Pia customarily rose early to get in a four-mile run before work. At Stanford back in the day, she had been a cross-country standout. The rugged hill paths up Branson Canyon into Griffith Park were perfect. Every morning Liebstein ran past the original Bat Cave, an old abandoned quarry tunnel featured in the original Batman TV series. That was good coin at dinner parties, too.

  Pia remained unruffled by the recent media stories about the violence at Odalon. She considered herself several contractual layers removed from the sanctuary. What was she, really? One of the many personal lawyers who had represented old man Dorian. Hollywood Animal Rescue was just one of her client’s numerous charitable interests. The law firm of Buffum, Buffum, Oatman & Stanfill handled all the Dorian family’s business, but so what? Whatever had happened or was happening with the Odalon apes, it surely wasn’t going to touch her.

  So Pia Liebstein treated the news of a second Odalon staffer getting slaughtered as something on the order of a curiosity. She went on her morning run. She was a tiger woman, unstoppable. To be sure, the cupboard was a little bare in her home life—she didn’t have time for a home life—but she’d choose a mate sooner or later. Thirty-six wasn’t old. Thirty-six was the new twenty-seven. She charged across Desert Oak Drive into the park. Stretching, she read recently, actually served to weaken muscles. Warm-ups and cooldowns were for wimps.

  On the dirt track past the Bat Cave, Liebstein had a momentary flash of panic when she saw a figure looming at the mouth of the quarry tunnel. The morning light hadn’t come up all the way yet. She laughed at herself when the human form revealed itself to be a squatter. There were always hippies and street people trekking up from their usual haunts along Hollywood Boulevard, finding shelter in the Bronson Canyon caves. There was a long-running war between them and the park rangers. She really should move to Brentwood, Pia thought.

  The vertical section of her run began, and exertion drove all thought from her mind. Her heart-monitor readout started its steady rise into the triple digits. She climbed the rocky trail up the flanks of Cahuenga Peak alone. Few other joggers could manage the steep terrain.

  Reaching a shallow flat, Liebstein saw the big black-haired ape coming at her, down the slope from her left.

  With a choked shout she stumbled backward. The chimpanzee charged through the sparse underbrush of the hillside. It hit the trail and stormed after her, galloping on all fours, teeth bared, long muscular arms alternating with its powerful legs, a terrifying rush. The links of an aluminum chain attached to the animal’s collar trailed after it like a metallic snake. The human female tried to pivot away, but the creature proved too fast. It crashed into her with overpowering force. Pia felt a sharp crack in her spine as she was whiplashed to the ground.

  The ape picked her up, raised her roughly into the air, and slammed her down on the rock-rutted path as if she were nothing. Then it repeated the maneuver again and again, over and over. The world faded away as Liebstein lost consciousness. Even then, the battering continued, until the ape’s keeper came, employed the prod, and jerked the beast back with the collar chain.

  —

  The same morning that Pia Liebstein fell to a chimp attack, Fats Tremont waited in his Lincoln sedan outside Marineland, a shuttered ocean-themed park in Rancho Palos Verdes. The place had been long abandoned and was a favorite with local graffiti artists and vandals. Tremont was there on an errand for his boss, Russell Dorian, still hiding out in New York and unable to take care of such minor tasks himself.

  Dorian felt it absolutely necessary to get back the weapon that was used in the botched extermination of the Odalon chimpanzees. Fats himself had originally thought it a measure of the man’s paranoia—like, who was going to care about a bunch of dead monkeys? But lately he saw the wisdom of the idea, given the way the whole mess was blowing up in the news. Tie up a loose end, make it difficult for some overeager cop to connect the dots. Paranoia—well, sometimes that was just another name for good sense.

  Actually, Fats Tremont didn’t need much of a reason to do any little thing that Russell Dorian asked of him. The rich dude was paying good money for Fats to accomplish his dirty work. The man in possession of the weapon, Gregg Hickler, had made and broken several appointments with Tremont. It was sounding more and more like he wanted to keep the gun himself.

  What finally did the trick was a threatening “Don’t make me come down there” message that Fats left on Hickler’s voice mail. They arranged a meet at the out-of-the-way Marineland site. In his rearview, Tremont saw the man pull up behind him in his tricked-out Hummer. The enormous vehicle was painted in a “coffee stain” camouflage pattern, had M.I.A. flags flying on both whip antennas, and boasted a license plate that read “DSRTSTRM.”

  Not exactly a low-profile ride. Fats groaned as he watched Hickler leave the truck carrying the Odalon weapon uncased, naked for all the world to see.

  “Jee-zus, Hick,” Fats said as the man climbed into the Lincoln’s front seat.

  “What?” Hickler said, all false innocence. “There ain’t nobody
around.”

  The stretch of Palos Verdes Drive South that ran past Marineland was indeed deserted at that precise moment. But there were dozens of big houses built into the slopes rising above them, houses with great expanses of window. “Hello, 911? I just saw a fellow with a big-ass rifle in the old Marineland parking lot!”

  “We’re trying to keep this on the down low,” Fats said.

  “Righto,” Hickler said. “Can you believe all this spin-off media shit? We’re hitting the five o’clock news. Dang! I’m feeling a bonus coming on, dawg. Some increased hazard pay or something.”

  The weapon lay propped between them, its fiberglass stock resting on the floor beside the instrument panel of the Lincoln, its ridiculously extended barrel poking toward the fabric of the roof liner.

  “It loaded?” Fats asked.

  “Sure as shit it’s loaded,” Hickler said.

  The gun looked like a rifle, but it wasn’t. Dorian had it specially fabricated for the Odalon job. Again, Tremont considered the scheme a little extreme. The idea had been to create a ballistics-less weapon.

  “No, no, it’ll be great,” Dorian had said when Fats suggested that he might be going overboard. Once Russell got a fantasy in his head, it was impossible to dislodge. Money being no object.

  So they had a machinist out in the Mojave do it. What was sitting there beside Fats wasn’t really a rifle, because it didn’t have the rifled grooves set into its barrel. The piece was technically a musket. No grooves and no lands meant no striations on the soft lead of the bullet, and thus no ballistics fingerprinting to worry about. But it also meant that the weapon’s accuracy degenerated pretty much to a pre–Civil War level.

  The Mojave machinist tried to compensate by increasing the length of the barrel and pimping out the gun with a laser sight. It was a measure of Gregg Hickler’s lunacy that he had willingly accepted the musket monstrosity for use in his assigned job.

  “Well?” Hickler said now. “You got some cheese for the Hick?” That was supposed to be the deal. When Hickler returned the supermusket to be destroyed, he would get the last half of his ten-K cash payment.

  One of Gregg Hickler’s many enterprises was running Chimpalooza.com. The tremendously strange website catered to dyed-in-the-wool racists, utilizing the brain-damaged conceit of referring to all African-Americans as “chimpanzees.” Black sports stars were called “ape-letes,” black-on-black crime was referred to as “chimp-on-chimp crime,” etc. The fact that the man devoted a lot of time and effort to maintaining Chimpalooza.com was all the more bizarre, since Gregg Hickler was himself African-American.

  Fats had once asked him the obvious question: “And the people who subscribe and post and visit your site—”

  “We call ’em chimpaloozers,” Hickler had said.

  “What do the chimpaloozers think about the webmaster being a black person?”

  “Oh, they don’t know,” Hickler replied. “If they did, they’d probably come with torches, make some bitter fruit outta me. As an avatar, I use the photo of a white buddy of mine who got blown to bits by an IED in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Jerry Jacobs. He looks really racist, even though he had a black wife.”

  “You are one weird dude,” Fats had told him.

  “America is becoming one weird place,” Hickler responded. “Have you seen what’s going on in Congress lately? I’m just aligning myself with the zeitgeist.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Fats, trying to remember what the word meant.

  “I’m synching my own fine self with the national vibe,” Hickler had said, helping him out.

  The Chimpalooza.com website was how Russell Dorian had originally connected with Gregg Hickler. Not that Dorian was a screaming-meemies racist, like the rest of the subscribers. He was simply trolling the Internet looking for resources to get the Odalon job accomplished. Until Fats clued him in, Russell had thought Chimpalooza.com was actually, well, a site about chimpanzees. Tracking the webmaster down, Dorian instantly recognized Hickler as the perfect man for the task.

  “He didn’t look anything like his picture on the website,” Dorian had said to Fats after meeting him.

  “I’ll bet,” Fats said.

  “He told me he was a sniper in Desert Storm,” Dorian said, shock and awe in his voice.

  “There weren’t any snipers in Desert Storm,” Fats said. “The whole shebang was over too quick for them to be deployed.”

  “Like you know everything,” Dorian sneered. He had Hickler take Fats out to a firing range in Antelope Valley, see if he could actually shoot.

  “He can ace out a paper target, all right,” Fats admitted. “But can he hit a monkey with a supermusket?”

  Fats Tremont considered himself a connoisseur of weirdness, so he genuinely came to appreciate Gregg Hickler. Which was all the more reason that he hated to have to kill the guy. He especially didn’t want to do it inside the Lincoln, since his lease came with some pretty hefty penalties for messing up the interior.

  “Gregg,” Fats said now, as the two of them sat parked in front of the abandoned theme park. “Why don’t you get out and stand there in the lot, like with the park in the background? I want to shoot a picture.”

  “I don’t allow no photographs,” Hickler objected. “It’s my black-ops training.”

  “It’s your black something, anyway,” Fats said. “Just go ahead and do it. Russell asked me for one. He wants it for a memento or something.”

  Hickler hefted his two-hundred-and-sixty-pound frame out of the Lincoln and walked across the buckled concrete of the parking lot, positioning himself so that the half-collapsed amusement-park fence was visible behind him. Beyond the big Marineland sign, the ocean flattened out to the horizon, blue with white flecks. Hickler struck a pose and smiled.

  “Here, wait,” Fats said, opening the driver’s-side door of the Lincoln and pulling the supermusket out. “You can hold this.”

  Hickler took a step forward. Too late, he realized that Tremont didn’t have a camera or a cellphone in his hand to take a picture and that the fat man’s hand was trailing down toward the trigger mechanism of the weapon.

  Instead of shooting Gregg Hickler with a camera, Fats Tremont shot him with the supermusket.

  —

  Remington could have walked from her apartment to the crime scene. Bronson Canyon opened up its weed-choked draw less than a mile from her place in Los Feliz. But no one walked in Los Angeles, so after the call came in she wound up taking the U-boat, heading across Hollywood Boulevard and Franklin, a few blocks north into the hills.

  She had a numb feeling the whole way. Mace Arthur had been one step ahead of her all along. His revenge spree took in every Odalon employee, not stopping at the actual sanctuary workers but reaching up into the hierarchies of administration that controlled the nonprofit, all the way to Pia Liebstein. Remington was reduced to playing catch-up. She hadn’t yet created a full list of possible targets, hadn’t yet worked out who, exactly, might be vulnerable.

  Remington drove up on the police cordon at the mouth of the canyon. The LAPD had a major presence in the force assembled where Beechwood Drive dead-ended. With the city cops were sheriff’s department deputies, fire personnel, and a pair of EMT trucks. Also very much in evidence were the media. Displaying her gold shield, Remington maneuvered the U-boat through the crowd and parked on the shoulder of the road.

  As she climbed out, she saw Rick Stills conferring with Janiece Baez, who was standing next to her official car, surrounded by aides. The deaths of a pair of African immigrants, Remington thought, didn’t require a visit from the D.A. But when one of the D.A.’s own tribe got attacked, a well-connected member of the bar and a white woman to boot, well, then it was time to call out the big guns. Baez shook hands with Stills and climbed back into her car. Her people made sure that the cameras recorded the D.A.’s presence at the scene.

  Baez’s motorcade left. Stills saw Remington and ambled over to her. She started to speak, and he held up his hand. “You don’t
even have to say it. We’re doing everything we can to bring Arthur and the chimp in. Cornell swore to me yesterday that he was going to be able to deliver them this morning.”

  “Only they just had a little piece of unfinished business first.” Remington said it bitterly. “What do you hear about Liebstein?”

  “A couple hikers found her,” Stills said. “She’s at the Cedars-Sinai trauma unit. They have her in an induced coma—multiple fractures, might be brain damage.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone processed her.”

  “Crime-scene analysis has a team at the hospital, but, you know, the priority is trying to save her life. It looks bleak.”

  “I hope you’re yanking Harry Cornell’s chain real hard right now.”

  “He’s incommunicado,” Stills said. “I’ve spoken to D.A. Baez about a subpoena for phone records, an arrest warrant, something, anything.”

  “Bring Cornell in and sweat him,” Remington urged. “He’s got to know where Mace Arthur is.”

  Time was of the essence. There had been three attacks, spread across six days. Angle Bundy had been busy.

  “As of yesterday, when I spoke to him on the phone, Cornell didn’t have a clue about his client’s whereabouts.” The only admission the lawyer would make, Stills said, was that he was communicating with Arthur.

  “That could mean anything,” Remington complained.

  “I pushed him on it, but Cornell refused to tell me whether he was speaking to Mace Arthur in person, by cell, or emailing or texting or sending up goddamn smoke signals.”

  “We have to stop this,” Remington said grimly. “It’s a nightmare that it’s still going on.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Stills said.

  “I’m going up there,” Remington said, gesturing toward the canyon trail.

  “I’ve already been. Hope you’re in shape. It’s a climb.”

  They agreed to meet back at the Malibu office.

  When Remington hiked to the ring of fluttering crime-scene ribbons, a fragment from her chimp research bubbled up in her memory. A team of researchers who followed the apes in the wild—“chimpers,” they called themselves—had come upon the site of a chimpanzee gang battle in Uganda’s Kibale Forest. None of the dead had been left behind. Remington recalled a sentence she had read that described the scene: “The trampled vegetation bore witness to a struggle that started upslope and careened downward, sometimes sideways, for fifteen meters or more.”