13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  The area where the chimp had attacked Liebstein was more circumscribed, more like five meters in circumference than fifteen. But the scene displayed the same evidence of extreme violence. Sedge, needle grass, and seep-willow bushes had been pounded flat. The crusted dirt of the canyon was churned up on the hillside and the trail.

  No blood, or at least, not much. Remington knew that out-of-doors crime scenes tended to become degraded much sooner than anything that happened indoors. A forensic investigator’s advice to prospective criminals would be always to commit murder in the open air, without witnesses. Evidence would prove elusive and likely be corrupted by environmental factors.

  Remington didn’t think there would be fingerprints lifted in Bronson Canyon that day. CAU might glean impression evidence such as footprints, maybe, but even then the scene appeared too chaotic to be of much use.

  If she lived, Liebstein would be able to provide an eyewitness account of the incident, provided brain trauma hadn’t obliterated her short-term memory. The victim’s body itself might display markings that could be used in court to identify her attacker, though human skin was, oddly, a notoriously difficult medium from which to take fingerprints.

  Remington told herself that none of it mattered. She knew very well who the guilty parties were. A gang of two acting together—one human, one ape. The crime scene gave her nothing new. She hiked back down to her vehicle, feeling tired of being a detective and damn well sick of chimpanzees.

  Instead of swinging back home after finishing at Bronson Canyon, Remington drove over to her father’s condo in Glendale, intending to clean herself up before continuing on to the Malibu office. She was starving. The trail climb and the time at the scene had left her hot and sweaty. She felt dirty, physically and spiritually.

  “Look at this!” Gene Remington crowed as soon as his daughter let herself in. He waved a ratty-looking VHS tape at her. “I got it at the library; they had to retrieve it out of storage. Nobody watches VHS anymore. The checkout lady told me they’re in the process of tossing them from their collection.”

  The cardboard casing on the ancient videotape showed years of wear and tear. Boris Karloff Meets the Killa Gorilla read the title. Blood-red type splashed against a drawing of the venerable horror actor. Karloff was posed battling a fearsome-looking ape.

  “That doesn’t look like even a B movie,” Layla said wearily. “That’s sliding down the alphabet toward a Z movie.” She wanted to humor her father, but what she really needed was to be quit of anything that involved primates and head in for a long soak.

  “You know who that is?” Gene asked. He pointed at the ape on the cover of the VHS. “That gent right there is an Odalon ape in his one and only screen appearance. That’s Booth!”

  “You’re kidding,” Layla said, taking the videotape sleeve from him for a closer look. “Booth is a chimpanzee, not a gorilla.”

  “That’s him, all right,” Gene insisted. “He’s listed in the titles as Booth the Ape. At this level of moviemaking, do you think they bothered about distinctions between species? Gorilla, chimpanzee—who the hell cared? Not old Boris K.”

  Reading the small print of the credits, Remington saw “Produced by Norman Dorian.”

  “You want to watch it?” Gene asked. He had an ancient all-in-one unit that accepted both DVDs and VHS tapes.

  “Dad,” Remington said, “I’ve already had a long day, and it’s hardly past noon.” She didn’t have the energy to tell him about the whole Pia Liebstein mess.

  “That’s okay,” her father said. “I’ll watch it for you and make a full report.”

  Every person around Remington seemed to be caught up in collecting odd facts and scientific tidbits about chimpanzees. It was like a fever. Her colleagues in the Malibu D.A.’s office, from Randy Gosch on up to Rick Stills, tried to one-up one another showing off their in-depth knowledge of the subject. Gene Remington was the same way. For the past few days he had been going a little ape with chimp research.

  As she headed in for her bath, Layla heard the showman tones of the announcer on the movie’s trailer, trumpeting Boris Karloff’s appearance in the most riotous horror-comedy ever committed to celluloid.

  16

  “Look who’s back,” Gene said to her when she emerged into the condo’s living room a half hour later.

  Big, square-shouldered Ory Ballmer sat sprawled on Gene’s couch. “Hey, honey,” Ballmer said. He pulled his 240-pound bulk up and crossed to give Layla a hug. She submitted to it.

  “I’m just passing through, down from Tehachapi,” he said.

  A towel-wrapped woman on her way from bath to bedroom doesn’t normally feel publicly presentable. “I’ve got to…” Layla said, and she peeled away from Ballmer and headed off to get herself dressed.

  Orin Ballmer. He and Layla dated, although the word “dated” was dated and didn’t describe the casual nights the two of them spent together. Layla and Ory Ballmer had been going to and fro for so long that he was less a boyfriend now and more resembled an odd piece of furniture she kept around the house. She propped her legs up on Ory’s massive gym-toned thighs when they watched old movies at the Glendale condo with her father.

  As her involvement in police work deepened, Layla’s social life had been left in suspension. Ballmer was about it for her, the only person she saw besides her father. At times she caught herself thinking, Ory Ballmer? Really? Ory Ballmer?

  He asked Layla to marry him one time, and she said, “Uh-hmm.” He told her that it didn’t sound like a yes, and she said “Uh-hmm” again. He got miffed, and they left it at that.

  Ballmer was a California Highway Patrol officer. Lately he had been deputized as a U.S. marshal to serve on the violent-felons warrant squad. The work took him away from L.A. for long stretches. He was a member of a team that roamed all over the state and into Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, knocking on doors.

  Ory told Layla that he went through at least a dozen pairs of zap-strap handcuffs every trip out. “Me, personally,” he said. He claimed that his life would make an awesome reality TV show. Layla told him he ought to aim a little higher, like an HBO series or a Martin Scorsese movie.

  He liked to tell stories. “A Vegas cop asks me, ‘You interested in a dirtball who skipped on a second-degree rape charge?’ He points me to a skell working at a mattress store right next door to police headquarters. Right next door!”

  Remington left Ory and her father at the condo, watching the Boris Karloff ape movie on TV with beers in their hands. Ory hadn’t risen when she left. He waved vaguely, preoccupied.

  She battled traffic on the Ventura Freeway in the U-boat. Movement on the often clogged artery was stop-and-go. She could have popped her bubble-light array atop the U-boat and tried to muscle through the jam, but both freeway shoulders were blocked.

  Her frustration mounted. She imagined, as she often did, all the freeways in L.A. slowly constricting to a standstill, the whole network frozen like a fly in amber. There had been “carmageddon” days when road repair and freeway closures threatened to make it happen. From her work on traffic patrol, Remington knew that the true Los Angeles apocalypse (Los Angelypse?) still loomed in the future. That afternoon, crawling at a snail’s pace through the sweltering, smog-locked Valley, it felt imminent.

  She reminded herself that a succession of local doomsaying prophets had been predicting disaster in L.A. for more than a century. The end had been near ever since the city was founded. What’s that to you, Layla? she asked herself. It was more important to focus on the vital task at hand, which was getting Mace Arthur and Angle locked up.

  Remington knew that the killer ape had been a common fantasy starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, when European explorers in Africa first encountered the gorilla. Chimpanzees and Barbary apes (misnamed, since they were actually tailless monkeys) had been displayed to Europeans long before that, but it was the hulking, heavy-browed Troglodytes gorilla that really inflamed the human imagination.


  A century and a half in the past, sensationalistic reports of the jungle beast had combined with Darwin’s novel theory and “scientific” racial stereotyping. The mix created an almost hysterical public reaction. Soon enough, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young were scaring moviegoers out of their wits.

  Was she, Detective Layla Remington, somehow participating in the long tradition of demonizing apes? She had a nagging inability to reconcile the recent string of attacks with her experience of holding Angle, feeding him a cucumber, and, above all, looking into his eyes and seeing an actual sentient being. The chimp’s bond with Mace Arthur had seemed to Remington to be one of caring and love, not of master and slave. The contradiction troubled her.

  Fingerprints didn’t lie. She tried to wrap her mind around possible alternative theories to absolve Angle of any participation in the murders. An elaborate frame-up, whereby persons unknown had somehow tricked up a way to leave the chimp’s prints at the scene? For what purpose?

  No, Angle was culpable, which meant…She recalled Rick Stills’s chilling words: “You know how this is going to end, don’t you?”

  It was an unalterable rule. Any animal guilty of killing a human being must itself be killed. Tigers in the wild, elephants in zoos, sharks in the ocean, dingoes in the outback—there were no questions asked, no appeals, no mitigating circumstances. The term “man-killer” somehow implied that once a creature tasted human blood it would develop a thirst that could never be quenched. Homo sapiens was the planet’s king species. It refused to tolerate rivals.

  Stalled in South Valley at the intersection of the 101 and the 405, the mountains only a few miles away but totally obscured by a brown curtain of smog, Remington felt equally at a standstill with her investigation. Like the invisible peaks to the northeast, she knew that a link she was searching for existed. The Odalon massacre was connected with the attacks on Ian Terry, Dukundane Tamas, and Pia Liebstein, but she couldn’t quite make out how.

  Her cellphone sounded. “I’m coming in,” she said to Randy Gosch.

  “Good,” Gosch said. “D.A. Baez is going to grace us with her presence and wants to pull together all the personnel on the ‘chompanzee’ case for a meeting.”

  “Don’t call it that,” Remington said.

  “Sorr-eee,” Gosch said. “How’s the Ventura? I see by my traffic cam that things are pretty putrid. Can you make it here by three?”

  Remington was about to answer in the affirmative when her phone buzzed with another call. She didn’t recognize the number.

  “I’ve got incoming,” she told Gosch.

  “Light up your array, sister, and get here or get scolded.”

  Remington clicked off and fielded the other call.

  “Detective,” the voice of Mace Arthur said.

  “Arthur? Where are you?” Juggling the phone, she grabbed her bubble light and slammed it onto the roof of the SUV. She saw a clear space on the median and maneuvered to it. “Where are you?” she demanded again.

  “I am where I am,” Mace Arthur said with maddening calm.

  “If you are not presenting yourself at a sheriff’s substation somewhere, I advise you to get to one immediately.”

  “All in good time.”

  “No!” Remington yelled. “Now!”

  “Calm down, Layla,” Arthur said.

  “I will not calm down, and don’t call me Layla, Mr. Arthur.”

  “And here I thought we were friends.”

  Remington took a breath. “Please, Mr. Arthur, for your own safety and the safety of others, you absolutely must turn yourself in. Is…is…your charge with you?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to call Angle by his name.

  “That’s why I called.”

  “I can’t speak with you unless you promise me that you are going to turn yourself in immediately.”

  “If I do that, I’m wondering what will happen with ‘my charge,’ as you so charmingly call him.”

  Remington thought of putting Arthur on hold, reaching out to Gosch at Malibu and having him initiate a cellphone triangulation to find out where Mace was calling from. She decided there was too much of a risk of losing the connection. Keeping Mace on the phone was the best way to proceed.

  “Layla? I mean, Detective Remington? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” Remington said. “Where are you right now?”

  “Can we talk about what happens to Angle? I have that word ‘euthanize’ dancing in my brain. It breaks down to mean ‘the good death.’ But I don’t see anything good about it, do you?”

  Text Gosch, Remington decided, and keep Mace Arthur talking.

  “I don’t make those decisions,” she said. “The most important fact is that two people have already died, and one is in a coma. This has to stop, Mace, and it has to stop right now.”

  “Aren’t you neglecting another important fact? A mass murder of thirteen individuals in the Malibu canyons?”

  “Is that what this is? Some sort of tit for tat? Revenge for the Odalon killings?”

  “Well, we don’t have to decide what exactly this is, do we? Before we talk about what happens to Angle if I bring him in?”

  “Not if but when.” Switching over to her instant-messaging app, Layla was feverishly typing in a text message to Randy Gosch: “MACE ARTHUR ON CELL NOW. GET 20!”

  “All right, when I bring him in,” Mace Arthur conceded. “What’s the matter, Detective? You sound distracted.”

  “I’m fine,” Remington said.

  “Would you like to talk to him?”

  “What?”

  “Here, say hello,” Arthur said.

  A silence on the other end of the call. Then the sound of breathing and a barely audible hoot.

  “Angle?” Remington said uncertainly. She felt ridiculous.

  But the ape answered her enthusiastically, giving a loud “hello”-style pant-hoot.

  “He’s happy to talk to you,” Arthur said, coming back on the phone.

  Remington suspected that the whole business might have been Arthur imitating Angle’s pant-hooting to play a trick. But, if not, it meant that Angle and Arthur were together. If the location of the call could be traced, then both of them could be picked up at once.

  “That was really him,” Arthur said, as if reading her thoughts.

  “Is he doing all right?” Remington asked, not knowing what else to say and thinking it sounded as if she were asking after a friend’s child. “He’s been a busy little ape,” she added, a little more anger in her voice.

  Mace Arthur let the comment pass. “I am not going to bring Angle in at all if I can’t be assured that you’re not going to jab a needle into his arm with a lethal injection of potassium chloride.”

  “His fingerprints were found at the scene of a homicide,” Remington said.

  “That’s interesting,” Mace Arthur said. “I wonder how you found a comparison print. Did you have something to do with that, Detective? Maybe a bottle of fruit juice you brought for him? I’m disappointed. I thought you were being so kind, but you had an ulterior motive.”

  “IN PROCESS. KEEP ON CALL!” Randy texted her back.

  “Listen,” Remington told Arthur. “If I could assure you that we’ve arranged for safe and secure quarters for Angle, and that nothing is going to happen to him without a thorough judicial review, would you bring the animal in?”

  “ ‘A thorough judicial review.’ That doesn’t exactly set my mind at ease,” he said. “It sounds like something they do before they flip the switch.”

  “It’s the best offer you’re going to get. Do I have to remind you, again, that there are homicides involved here?”

  “Okay,” Arthur said. “These ‘safe and secure quarters’—could you talk about that?”

  “This is above my pay grade, Mace. You’re going to have to take my word. I know we’ve spoken to the Griffith Park zoo.” She was tempted to add, Right over the hill from where Pia Liebstein was attacked, but she bit back the comment.

/>   “I hate zoos, and that one plays shamelessly to the public,” Arthur said. “They could probably quadruple their gate receipts if they advertised having a killer chimp on the premises.”

  “I understand they have a nice, airy holding cell attached to an open yard.” Remington was improvising furiously. “Not in the public area of the zoo, of course. We aren’t interested in causing an uproar any more than you are.”

  “Let me think about it,” Arthur said. He sounded as though he was about to hang up.

  “Wait, wait!” Remington said. “Can I have your promise that you’ll turn yourself in?”

  “Do you think we could get some sort of agreement in writing? I mean, on comfortable quarters for Angle. I’ll have to talk to Harry.”

  “If we get cut off, is this a good number for you? Can I call you back?”

  Remington heard Arthur give a sort of muttering chuckle. “This phone is a burner, Detective. I have a collection of half a dozen right here in front of me. As soon as we ring off, I’m going to drop this one in the drink. Or I might give it to Angle to play with. He loves destroying cellphones. Okay? If I need to, I’ll call you.”

  “Wait! Mace! Mr. Arthur!”

  But Mace Arthur was gone.

  —

  Remington hit the Malibu office at 3:14. She hustled into the conference room in the sheriff’s department part of the complex, where Randy Gosch had told her the meeting was going to be held. It was in progress when she walked in.

  “Here’s Detective Remington,” Stills said.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Remington said. “Traffic was hell.”

  “It’s always hell,” District Attorney Baez said. “That’s why I always leave enough time and use my lighting array if I have to.”