13 Hollywood Apes Page 18

  The whole story didn’t jibe with Angle’s image as a killer chimp. When Remington mentioned as much, Gediman had said, “Well, they’re very unpredictable.” So far, though, what Remington had seen of Angle indicated that he was very predictable indeed—predictably peaceful, predictably loving, predictably warm and fuzzy.

  Of course, animals could be goaded into fury in all sorts of ways. Mace Arthur might have administrated an electric cattle prod, or used the kind of cruel bullhooks that were employed to control elephants. Somehow, under some outside influence, Angle had become maddened to the degree that he felt it necessary to chew off a human face.

  The difficulty was that Remington couldn’t imagine Arthur harming Angle in any way. She tried to tell herself that she had seen child-beaters on domestic-violence calls, nuzzling and cooing over the very baby they had just shaken silly in an attempt to stop it from crying. But in the case of Arthur and Angle the gulf between what she had seen and what the evidence showed was a huge one.

  —

  “Here they are! The conquering heroes!”

  Remington saw a “Who is this flake?” look cross the faces of the three attorneys with whom she was sitting. She felt herself blush and hurried to introduce her father. Gene had already snagged a beer on his trip across the crowded bar. Somebody must have bought him one. Whitey’s was Gene Remington’s home joint. He liked the piano player, who went beyond the usual lounge tunes and strayed into a smoky brand of jazz.

  Remington’s colleagues gave polite nods to her old man and went right back to their conversation. In their defense, the bar was getting increasingly noisy and it was difficult to talk across the table.

  “Well, you nailed him,” Gene said to her.

  “We did,” Layla said.

  “Although, actually, he turned himself in. So it wasn’t really police work, now, was it?” Gene thought he was being funny.

  Thanks, Dad, thought Layla.

  “He was feeling the heat!” Stills yelled over from his seat. “He had to surrender. Layla was breathing down his neck!”

  “She’s the best!” Gene yelled back.

  The two female attorneys on either side of Stills gave pinched, painful smiles. Remington felt embarrassed and ashamed of her embarrassment. Everyone returned to the conversations they had been having before Gene arrived.

  It was left to Layla to entertain her father. “How was the movie?” she asked. Boris Karloff Meets the Killa Gorilla.

  “Audiences must have been different back then,” Gene said. “Or else the people who made movies were different. I can’t imagine anyone currently alive thinking something like that would appeal to people.”

  “Lousy, huh?”

  “A whole different order of bad,” her father answered. “Not even genius lousy, like Ed Wood. Poor Karloff.”

  He called across the table, trying to include the others in the exchange. “He was a classically trained actor, you know?”

  “Who?” asked Stills.

  “Boris Karloff. We’re talking about an ape movie, Boris Karloff Meets the Killa Gorilla.”

  Stills pointed to his ears and shook his head, indicating that he couldn’t hear above the roar of the bar. Gene turned back to Layla. “All those guys—Lugosi, Karloff, even Lon Chaney—they all came to curse the day they got involved in horror movies. Their signature roles typecast them. Doomed them to doing variations on the same character over and over.”

  “Well, Bela Lugosi,” Layla said. “That first Dracula movie—you couldn’t do a fiend better than that.”

  Gene Remington nodded. “ ‘Vat iss it now, Von Helsink, more volfbane?’ ” He was clowning, acting out, trying to impress his daughter’s boss. The whole situation had turned awkward.

  “Dad,” Layla muttered to him, trying to calm him down.

  “Hey, Rick! Rick!” Gene called over to Stills. “You know the old riddle, right? Frankenstein murders a villager—they’ve got witnesses who saw it. But when they go to track the monster down they discover it’s been locked away in a dungeon during the time in question. It couldn’t possibly have done the deed. So what happened here, Mr. Assistant District Attorney?”

  Stills shrugged helplessly, not following a word.

  Layla jumped in. “Um, somebody, somewhere stole some body parts and created a second monster who looks just like the first.”

  “Nope,” Gene said.

  “I give up,” Layla said.

  “You give up?” Gene shouted to Stills, who nodded uncertainly.

  “Don’t you see? The setup was ‘Frankenstein murders a villager.’ Everybody thinks Frankenstein is the monster, but Frankenstein is the count, Count Victor Frankenstein….”

  “Right, right,” Layla said. “The guy who makes the monster.”

  Gene smiled gleefully. “So it turns out that it’s Count Frankenstein who murders the villager while the monster is locked up. Do you see? Get it?”

  “That’s cute!” shouted ADA Charles insincerely.

  It went on that way much too long. Cocktails pickled the frontal lobes of the little party in the booth at Whitey’s until everyone was shouting and no one was listening. Layla stepped back from it. She started ordering club sodas with lime.

  Gene Remington brought over a blowsy woman friend to sit with him at the table. The woman, Susie, expressed bug-eyed interest in the chompanzee case. Predictably, she kept referring to Angle as a monkey.

  It was late when they broke it up. In a last indignity, Gene Remington had tried to pay the tab and had his credit card refused for being over the limit. Everyone was very kind. The group staggered through the front doors and stood together in the Whitey’s driveway. The air outside still held the heat of the day. The valet-parking staff ran to and fro fetching vehicles.

  In the tug-of-war over who was going to take Rick Stills home, Trish Sedgewick won the prize. She had the more expensive car. Stills turned to say good night to Remington. Her father had stayed inside with his barfly friends. Gosch staggered away to be sick in the bushes.

  “Don’t drive,” Remington said.

  “I won’t,” Stills said. “Trish said she was…” It came out like Trssh-shed-she-wash. There were too many sibilants for the man’s blood alcohol level to handle.

  “What are you doing?” Stills asked, swaying into her.

  “Oh, going home,” Remington said. “It’s close by.” She didn’t know why she said that.

  Stills peered at her, a sloppy grin on his face.

  “Only…” Remington said.

  “Only…?”

  “Well, I thought I might go down the hill and see Angle.” Remington gestured vaguely toward the dark bulk of Griffith Park, just across the pass from where they stood. The Los Angeles Zoo was down there somewhere. The night was fine. The Golden State Freeway was a broken necklace of ruby brake lights.

  “Angle? Really?”

  “I think so,” Remington said.

  She respected Stills for not asking why in the world she would want to visit a chimpanzee in the middle of the night.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said suddenly. He turned to where Sedgewick was commandeering her Lexus from the valet.

  “Trish!” he called. “We’re going to see the killer!”

  He veered unsteadily across the lot to Remington’s U-boat, bounced gently off it, flung open the door, and crawled inside.

  Remington exchanged a look with Patricia Sedgewick. The lawyer shrugged. “I guess he’s all yours,” she said.

  —

  The night security staff at the zoo didn’t want to let them in.

  “The animals are all settled for the night, sir,” said the head guard, whose jacket tag read “Kennedy.” First name or last, it was hard to tell.

  “We’ll be quiet as a pair of mice,” Stills vowed. “Although that might upset the elephants.”

  They stood before the administrative gate to the zoo, the AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY sign staring them in the face. Remington realized that, gold shi
eld or no, and notwithstanding Rick’s assistant district attorney identification card, the security guard considered them a couple of drunks. More clearheaded than Stills, she took over.

  “Look, officially this guy Angle’s our prisoner,” she said.

  “I didn’t hear anything about any visits,” Kennedy insisted.

  A cream-colored Lexus pulled up behind Remington’s U-boat, and Trish Sedgewick emerged. She was speaking on her cellphone as she approached Stills and Remington. Without a word, she handed the phone off to the guard.

  Kennedy listened for a beat, nodded, then said, “I understand,” three times.

  “Zoo director,” Trish whispered to the two of them.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kennedy said before giving the cellphone back to Sedgewick.

  “Thanks, Polly,” Trish said into the phone, and rang off.

  “I decided I wanted to get in on this,” she told Stills and Remington. “Polly Emory is a dear friend.”

  Kennedy was already hustling to swing the entrance gate wide. “I’ll follow you two,” Sedgewick said, turning back to her car.

  “She knows everybody,” Stills said in a slurred whisper. “Ev-er-y-body.”

  Trailing behind Kennedy in his golf cart, they drove in convoy through the empty, darkened grounds of the zoo.

  “Elephants sleep standing up,” Stills said, apropos of nothing. The elephant yard was invisible behind a high, grass-covered berm. The U-boat’s headlights briefly illuminated the Mahale Mountains exhibit. Chimpanzees huddled in the dark, the jeweled green of their eyes glowing in an eerie, hell-beast sort of way. Remington had a shivering recollection of the yard at Odalon, littered with the dead.

  Angle, when they finally reached him, lounged awake on a low-slung cargo net. His cage was inside a dimly lit concrete bunker called Building 14, located in a nonpublic area of the zoo. A few toys—a rubber ball, a doll made of knotted rope—lay scattered across the floor of the cell. And it was a cell, Remington realized, as heartless and blank as the one Mace Arthur was lodged in at Metro. Kennedy sat in his golf cart, visible in the doorway through which Remington, Stills, and Sedgewick had just entered.

  The creature came readily up to them, standing erect before the diamond-patterned mesh at the front of the cage. Or, rather, Angle approached Remington, softly pant-hooting his hello. The chimp curled a finger through the gaps in the steel. With his other hand, he made frantic, repeated motions.

  “Wow!” Trish Sedgewick said. “He’s bigger than I thought. How old is he?”

  “Just shy of eight,” Remington said. They were both whispering, sharing an odd, hushed sense of caution in the presence of the chimp.

  “Looking into his eyes…” Stills said. His words trailed off.

  “Spooky, isn’t it?” Trish Sedgewick said.

  “It’s like going back,” Remington said. “I’ve always wanted the ability to time-travel most of all. What superpower would I choose to have? There’s no contest.”

  Stills shook his head. “Time travel is not a superpower. It’s a contravention of the laws of physics.” He appeared to be sobering up, able to pronounce four-syllable words without stumbling.

  “There’s one place in the world where you can time-travel,” Remington said impulsively. “In the African forest, with wild apes. That’s us, six million years ago. You step into a time machine, go back six million, step out, you’d see exactly the same scene as now—same forest, same trees, same chimps.”

  Angle pressed his face close to the steel mesh of the cage, his big canines gnawing at the metal. The ape’s eyes were only inches from Remington’s, and she felt as though she might fall right into them. Again and again, Angle made identical motions with his right hand.

  “I’m not sure, but I think…” Sedgewick said slowly. “From what I know of ASL—that’s American Sign Language he’s doing.” She moved closer, concentrating on the chimp’s hand movements.

  Stills looked over at Remington and mouthed, in the same mock whisper as before, “She knows everything.”

  “Yeah?” Remington said. “What’s he saying?”

  “I don’t know that first part,” Sedgewick said, crooking her hand in imitation of the ape.

  “I think that’s ‘Angle’: he’s saying his name,” Remington said. The others looked at her. “I recognize it from the DVD Mace Arthur made me.”

  “Then what he’s signing is something like ‘key, out,’ over and over,” Sedgewick said. “Angle, key, out.”

  “He’s asking us to get him out of here,” Stills said.

  The chimp rocked his head back and forth, nudging it against the steel mesh, not that hard, really, but in a constant rhythm. All the while repeating the key, out hand signals.

  Wanting his freedom.

  18

  Remington always wondered at the people who could pour alcohol down their throats all night and then show up at work the next day looking fresh. She hadn’t guzzled as much as the rest of the crew, but, even so, she still felt a little crisp around the edges when she entered the Malibu office the morning after Whitey’s and the zoo visit. Randy Gosch passed her in the hall, a look of suffering on his face.

  “I can feel my liver,” Gosch announced, pressing a hand to his gut. “It’s making a sound like clinking ice cubes. Really, that can’t be a good sign.” He stumbled off in search of coffee.

  ADA Rick Stills, though—Rick Stills the superman—sat upright at his desk, eyes as sharp as ever. Either he had been up early and had sweated it out or there were prescription pain-relief opiates involved.

  “Your boy Mace has his first court appearance in a couple hours,” Stills told Remington. “You want to go?”

  “That’s just a judge reading the charges, right?”

  “In this case, a magistrate,” Stills said. “But I thought you could, you know, talk to the defendant afterward.”

  “An interview?”

  “I can’t have any direct dealings with the man outside of court, but you can feel him out a little, glean what their strategy might be. I’ve seen Harry Cornell work. He can be diabolical.”

  “Interviewing Arthur means Cornell will be in the room, which means I won’t get anything out of Mace apart from ‘On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to blah-blah-blah.’ ”

  “Yup, that’s right,” Stills said. “Only these guys, or rather this guy, Arthur, I think he’s got an agenda. Guys with agendas like to talk. He wants to tell the world why he did what he did.”

  Remington realized that Stills wasn’t asking her to come along with him down to Metro. It wasn’t so much an invitation as a command.

  “Come on,” Stills said pleasantly. “I’ll drive.”

  Remington decided that there could be worse things than sharing an air-conditioned half hour in close quarters with ADA Rick Stills.

  The evening before had broken up in a comical kind of way. The three of them—Stills, Trish Sedgewick, and Remington—had emerged together from the zoo grounds, the visit with Angle still sitting heavy on everyone’s conscience. But human concerns had slowly risen to overwhelm interspecies ones. Hovering in the air had been the unspoken question of which woman was going to drive the still tipsy assistant district attorney home. As they passed through the zoo’s gate and Kennedy closed it behind them, there had been an awkward beat of hesitation.

  “You want to…?” Sedgewick had said, indicating her Lexus to Stills.

  But a cab had swung into the zoo drive just then, from a car service that, it turned out, Rick Stills had called. He mumbled a goodbye, loaded himself into the taxi, and was gone.

  The two women had exchanged rueful looks. Remington gave a mortified little laugh, more at herself and the absurdity of the situation than at Trish Sedgewick. She walked to her U-boat, and the attorney crossed to her Lexus.

  Sedgewick had stopped as she opened her car door. “He’s a special case,” she said.

  “Yes, he is,” Remington had responded.

  “I meant th
e chimpanzee.”

  “Right,” Remington had said. Then they had both ridden off alone into the night.

  So her drive with Stills, first on the PCH and then toward the downtown jail on the Santa Monica Freeway, was a reprise, a second chance. His Lincoln sedan was a luxe enough ride. The two of them didn’t speak much at first. He kept the radio tuned to a news station. Despite his freshly shaved and showered aspect, Remington thought she could detect, on his breath, the faint acetone smell of a post-binge morning.

  When Stills swept onto the 10 in Santa Monica, they had a little back-and-forth about court procedures. “Cornell called this morning and told me he’ll be waiving time.” Stills meant that Cornell’s client Mace Arthur would forgo his speedy-trial rights under the Constitution. This would give both prosecution and defense more opportunity to prepare their cases.

  “Really,” Remington said.

  “Really,” Stills said. “It makes me wonder, you know, what they’re up to.”

  “What do you think?” Remington knew that men loved to be prompted by women. It was on their list of favorite things.

  “They’ll try to plead it down to manslaughter,” Stills said. “That’s pretty clear. That’s what I’d try.”

  “You don’t think they’re going to contest probable cause?”

  “Are you kidding? That guy is nailed to the wall. The prints from the ape blow them right out of the water on probable cause.”

  At the preliminary hearing, a sort of pretrial trial, the prosecution presents evidence. Stills could call witnesses—Remington herself, Cindy Iracane, Pia Liebstein if she recovered—and put questions to them in court. Hearsay was allowed at prelims, so Remington could report her conversations with the dead man, Ian Terry. Most important, the Angle fingerprint match from the Ian Terry crime scene would be provided to the court.

  If the judge wound up convinced that there was probable cause to indict Mace Arthur for murder, he’d be held over, and the DA’s office (embodied, in court, by ADA Rick Stills) would get to bring the case to trial. Probable cause was a very low bar to clear, so the prosecution almost always won at the preliminary hearing.