13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  But not every time.

  Remington could foresee problems. Harry Cornell might go hard at the whole idea of chimpanzee fingerprints. Academics enjoyed inventing five-dollar words for fingerprint technology, such as “dactyloscopy” and “ridgeology.” It all stemmed from an evolutionary quirk that humans had inherited from their tree-clinging ancestors. Primates have fingerprints for the same reason tires have treads. The better to grip you with, my dear.

  The forensic science behind using human prints for identification had been well established. But chimp prints? You’d have to go pretty deep into the library to find a research-journal entry about that. Remington wondered if the concept had ever been formally tested in court. She didn’t want to tell Rick Stills his business, so she didn’t ask whether he had dug up a legal precedent somewhere.

  “We can place the ape at the scene, all right,” Remington said. “But what about Mace? He told me that all sorts of people can alibi him for the Terry murder.”

  “That chimpanzee didn’t drive himself up to Trappe Ranch Road in the middle of the night,” Stills said. “And who are these alibis of Mace Arthur? A bunch of commune chicas? I don’t think I’ll have too much problem, not at a probable-cause hearing.”

  What about at the trial? Remington thought, but again, she didn’t ask the question.

  They drove in silence.

  “That thing last night, at the zoo…” Stills said.

  “With Angle?” Remington asked, wanting to make sure he wasn’t referring to the awkward ride-home coda at the end of the evening.

  “Why is it such a high and mighty compliment to be compared to us?” Stills asked. “Like what they say about chimps, that they’re ‘almost human.’ They—we—always assume it’s some kind of high praise.”

  Being compared to you, maybe, that’d be high praise. I don’t know about me. Again, she didn’t speak her thoughts out loud. Rick Stills was busy articulating his.

  “Let’s take the moderate view and say our species is a hundred and thirty thousand years old. But, really, I’d mark our development into full-on human status only with the advent of art, like, with the cave paintings. I’ve been thinking about this. That’s when we would recognize ourselves enough to sit down and have a beer with each other.”

  “Or a mead,” Remington said.

  “Whatever they drank back then,” Stills said. “So we’ve really arrived, as us, as fully human, only in the last, say, thirty-five thousand years. Homo sapiens sapiens is a pretty recent newcomer.”

  Remington nodded. “With a terribly tenuous toehold, as the alliteratist has it.”

  “Right,” Stills said. “So what do we have to boast about?”

  The smog-burnished skyscrapers of downtown L.A. appeared ahead of them, a decidedly non-Emerald City at the end of a freeway brick road. “You know what my first job was in the D.A.’s office?” Stills asked. The question was rhetorical, so Remington didn’t bother guessing.

  “Right down there,” Stills said, indicating the complex of city buildings grouped next to the freeway interchange, near the jail where they were heading. “I did gross misdemeanors at night court, one after another. Jesus, what a depressing parade of humanity. Shills, skells, pimps, and cons. Jimmy Beats was my fellow ADA. Do you know him? James Betkowski? He’s in private practice now, making seven figures. Beats used to tell me that at night court we were dealing with the mad, the bad, and the sad. Homo homini lupus, you know?”

  “Man is a wolf to man,” Remington said, summoning up a translation for the Latin.

  “He sure is,” Stills said.

  “Only in this case it’s more like ‘Man is an ape to man,’ ” Remington said. “Apes have been around longer than we have. And maybe they’ll still be here when we’re gone.”

  “Well, if chimpanzees are the ones that will inherit the earth, I’ll say one thing—they aren’t exactly the meek.”

  “One of the first Jane Goodall chimps was named Satan,” Remington said.

  “That’s a whole other conversation,” Stills said.

  —

  “I’ve been in here, what, not even twenty-four hours?” Mace Arthur said. “I’ve already made quite a few friends.”

  “He’s signed up for the prisoner’s grievance committee,” Harry Cornell said.

  Remington sat in a cramped attorney’s interview room at Metro Correctional. A huge rectangular window took up one wall, the mesh wire embedded in the glass clearly visible. The window looked out onto a fully staffed correctional officer’s station, where inmates in shackled groups occasionally filed past. What a heart-sinking place, Remington thought.

  Mace Arthur, though, seemed positively cheery. It made Remington uneasy. It was as if Mace knew something she didn’t, as if he was in control of the other shoe that was about to drop.

  Remington was accustomed to incarceration knocking the edges off people, or at least making them thoughtful. Mace Arthur was chatty and carefree: “I used to tell a gay friend of mine who was misbehaving that he was going to wind up in here at Metro, getting assaulted by gangs of large men with shaved heads and tattoos. He asked me if there was any downside to the place.”

  Arthur laughed at his own joke. He had been arraigned earlier that morning before a magistrate, with Stills standing for the state and reporters jammed into the gallery.

  Also present and spectating: a small lineup of aging character actors and a group of their fans. Billy Deevers, Vincent Raut, Fran Romano sat shoulder to shoulder in the second row, ancient but still eerily recognizable from the movies and TV shows of Remington’s youth, materializing like ghosts in court. They called themselves “C-movie” actors, short for “chimp movie,” because all of them had appeared on celluloid with chimpanzees.

  The arraignment hearing was a brief procedure. Barely fifty words were spoken. Afterward, Remington and the accused had settled in for a jailhouse interview.

  “Do you have questions for my client, Detective Remington?” Cornell asked.

  “None that you’ll allow him to answer.”

  “Then…this is just a courtesy visit? You had a need to feast your eyes upon Mr. Arthur’s handsome face?”

  “I wonder if you could talk about when you first met Angle,” Remington said, addressing Arthur, not his lawyer.

  “He can’t speak to you about anything with the slightest connection to the case. So, no, he can’t talk about when he first met the individual in question.”

  “That’s okay, Harry.” Mace gazed at Remington with a puckish expression on his face. “I’m sure it will be all right. Detective Remington is just personally curious, that’s all. Is that right…Layla?”

  “You were in school,” Remington said, prompting him. “The University of the Greater Northwest.”

  “Studying for an English degree, of all the useless things in the world.” Arthur smiled ruefully. “I didn’t have a thought about apes, probably wouldn’t have known, if someone asked me, that a chimpanzee wasn’t a monkey. Then I got a work-study job for a psychology professor, James Kemp, who was cross-fostering a chimp as part of a language experiment.”

  “Angle.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what does this cross-fostering consist of?”

  “It’s the practice of acculturating an animal, in this case a common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, in a learning-enriched human environment. Angle was raised alongside a human child named Rowan.”

  “You were his babysitter, essentially.” Remington had an urge to goad Arthur a little, puncture his stubborn serenity.

  “Angle came to us as an infant,” Arthur said. “The first time I saw him he was still in diapers, only months old. You know, with research animals—lab apes—no one had any thought about keeping families together, keeping babies with mothers. It was like—it always reminded me of what they did to the families of enslaved African-Americans. Broke them up and parceled them off like it was nothing.”

  “Did that enrage you, Mr. Arthur?
When you first realized the practice was going on?”

  Harry Cornell broke in. “Now, you see, Mace? See what she’s doing? This is all discovery—all of this is going to show up in court.”

  “We don’t have to worry about court, do we, Harry?” Arthur said to his lawyer, all the while keeping his eyes on Remington. He wore the same infuriating expression of arrogant calm she recognized from previous encounters with the man. She thought of it as his “I’ve got a secret” face.

  “So, yeah, Detective, the whole situation made me angry—well, scratch that, what it did was make me think. As it would any feeling person.”

  “How long were you with Angle?”

  “Three years,” Arthur said. “My job was to feed him, diaper him, work with him on assigned tasks.”

  “He was a janitor, a housekeeper, an assistant—nothing more than that,” Harry Cornell put in.

  Trying to spin it, Remington thought.

  “Did you do American Sign Language?” she asked Arthur.

  “No one was allowed to speak to Angle, not one word—he was never to hear spoken English at all,” Arthur said. “Professor Kemp and his team were very strict about that. Everything was ASL. That’s why I got the work-study gig. I knew sign language pretty well because I have a deaf sister.”

  “So the two of you formed a bond,” Remington said. “You and Angle.”

  “All right, I’m really going to have to stop this,” Cornell said. “Get yourself another hobby horse to ride, Detective. If you want to build a case against an innocent man, you’re going to have to do it without the help of my client.”

  The attorney got up from his seat and extended his arm as if ushering Remington out of the interview room. Smiling smoothly, a gentleman right down to his well-manicured fingertips.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry,” Arthur said, nodding and glancing up at the slow-crawling jailhouse clock, its face caged in wire mesh. “I should really move along if I’m going to make it in time for the gospel study group.”

  Remington stood. “Gospel? Are you a religious man, Mr. Arthur?”

  “Oh, no, God no,” Arthur said, laughing at his own witticism. “I just like meeting all sorts of different kinds of people.” He rose to his feet also.

  “This is good for me, being in here,” he said. “It gives me a taste of what Angle might be experiencing, locked up in a concrete cage. Love your fate—isn’t that how Nietzsche puts it?”

  Remington shook her head. “You wanted to free Angle, like the T-shirt says. Now you’re both in a cell, and you’ve got twin murders and an assault on your conscience. You’ve botched the whole thing, Mace.”

  —

  “Well?” Rick Stills asked Remington, wanting to know the blow-by-blow of the Mace Arthur interview. They were driving back to the Malibu office in heavy traffic, news radio on low and the AC on high.

  Remington’s cell buzzed. “Give me a sec,” she told Stills. “Hello, Ms. Iracane.”

  Cindy Iracane had been peppering Remington with phone calls ever since they pulled her protection, when Angle was taken in.

  “How can I get a deputy posted outside my apartment again?” Iracane sounded frazzled.

  “Well, we made the determination that the threat to you was no longer immediate,” Remington said. “The suspects are in custody. In fact, I just visited one of them in the Metropolitan Detention Center, and the other one I saw in a cage at the Griffith Park zoo last night.”

  “What if the danger is still there?” Cindy asked. “Those guys could have friends, you know? Angle—man, he was a good chimp, but one of them gets riled up they can tear the holy hell out of you.”

  “I understand your worry,” Remington replied. “But the department has only limited resources it can devote to this. Do you have any specific concerns?”

  “Yeah, my specific concern is keeping my face from getting torn off.”

  “I meant is there anything you’ve seen recently that might indicate a direct threat? Any phone calls or other contact with the accused?”

  Remington could almost see Cindy Iracane chewing her lip and thinking. “There’s a guy with a white van that’s been around here.”

  Right. The legendary “guy with a white van.” He was a well-known cliché in police circles. For some reason, he always cropped up when appeals went out seeking information on a particular crime or crime scene. Tip lines knew him well. He was like “the dark-skinned guy with a beard” and other boogeymen that haunted the public imagination.

  “I’ll make sure a deputy drives by your place,” Remington promised.

  “Anything happens, it’s on you,” Iracane warned. “I really liked that one deputy, that white guy Carswell, you know?”

  “I understand.” Remington had to make nice with Iracane, however much a pain in the butt the woman was. They were going to need her testimony in court as one of the sole surviving Odalon staffers. “Everything else okay?”

  “Well, you mean apart from the fact that I don’t have a job? I wonder, maybe you could loan me some money?”

  It caught Remington off guard. She didn’t know how to respond to that.

  “JK,” Iracane said, using her generation’s shorthand for “just kidding.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Remington said. “How about I stop by your place some night and take you out to dinner? I’d like to go over the testimony you might give if this ever makes it to trial.”

  “I’ve got to go to court?” Iracane asked.

  “Only very general questions,” Remington said. She firmed up the time for her visit and rang off.

  Meanwhile, Rick Stills had gotten on his own hands-free. He was muttering expressions of disbelief into the headset. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He was rolling his eyes. “No friggin’ way!” He rang off with an angry punch to the control button.

  “What?” Remington asked.

  “You are not going to believe this.” Tight-lipped and grim.

  Remington realized that she was seeing Rick Stills angry. “What?” she said again.

  “Trish Sedgewick and Jus Animalium filed with Judge Etha Keris in superior court, asking to be appointed attorney of record for ‘the individual known as Angle.’ ”

  Remington didn’t want to rub salt in his wound, but the words just popped out. “I could have told you that the Sedgewick woman wasn’t a friend of ours.”

  “She’s a snake!”

  Remington felt a guilty stab of satisfaction at the turn of events.

  “Get this,” Stills raged. “Sedgewick is asking for a swearability hearing.”

  “Tell me what that is again?”

  “They use it for young kids, so a judge can ascertain if they have mature enough mental acuity to be sworn in court.”

  “She wants to put Angle on the stand.”

  “Jesus!” Stills slammed the steering wheel with his hand. At peril to life and limb, he swung the Lincoln into the shoulder lane and roared past a jam of traffic.

  “The individual known as Angle,” he muttered. “Like that’s just his slave name, you know? The animal-rights folks are going to come out of the woodwork! This is going to turn into a goddamn circus. You saw that already at the arraignment this morning. A dozen media people there for a five-second hearing.”

  Underneath his irritation, Remington caught a sense of rising excitement in the ADA’s tone.

  She could almost see the spill of logic running through the mind of Rick Stills at that moment. A three-ring circus of a case. Not the center ring, maybe—that was reserved for Ro-Co-Co. But it’d be in the big top, for sure. And a circus—that meant an audience, live and otherwise, TV, newspapers, the Internet. And an audience, in a court case, was made up of voters. Voters who might be casting ballots in a future election for the district attorney of Los Angeles County. A ballot that just might have Rick Stills running as a candidate.

  It could happen that way. If an ape could testify in court, anything was possible.

  19

  LAC
DA Janiece Baez withdrew the extra troops she had posted to the Malibu satellite office. Remington was on her own again. Rick Stills seemed actually to resist her delving deeper into the Odalon case. He felt that they could stand pat where they were.

  There were a few tasks that remained to be done, however. Remington ordered up a new set of prints to be taken from Angle for comparison with those lifted from the Ian Terry crime scene. Through repeated calls to the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, she managed to get the sheriff’s department there to forward whatever evidence had been taken at the Moreno Valley homicide.

  When considering a crime scene, Remington always liked to take a giant step back and first consider the widest possible perspective. She paged through the documents, searching out a schematic diagram of the scene. The violence sketched out there rivaled the Ian Terry homicide. “High-velocity-impact stains,” “copious passive blood pools,” “projectile brain matter,” read the notes.

  Normally, such an intense level of aggression indicated that the perpetrator knew the victim, that there was some kind of extreme emotion involved—that of a spurned lover, perhaps, or an estranged husband. In this case, there were two clear transfer-pattern bloodstains documented in the report, featuring the distinctive handprint of an ape.

  Included in the San Bernardino material was the coroner’s report on Dukundane Tamas. On the basis of both the Ian Terry and the Dukundane Tamas postmortems, Remington could theorize that Angle had a beef with the victims. Maybe the Odalon caretakers abused the animals in some way. The vicious assaults might be a form of payback for cattle-prod electroshocks, say, or another kind of physical or psychological mistreatment.

  Private zoos, Remington knew, could be chambers of horrors. Out of sight of the public or of regulators, all sorts of sadism and viciousness went on unchecked.

  But what about the human agent behind the attacks? Where was the emotional fury there? If she considered the ape merely as a tool to get the job done—the same as a baseball bat, an ice pick, or a shotgun—then the person wielding it against Terry and Tamas had to be one angry son of a bitch.