13 Hollywood Apes Page 21

  The first time this happened, Layla hadn’t understood. Eventually, she realized that the ape wanted to be groomed. She wasn’t always up for that, but this evening she pulled over a metal folding chair and sat next to him, reaching through the mesh to pet the coarse black hair along the animal’s spine. Angle seemed happy for it. If he were a cat, he would have purred.

  She thought of Jodie Foster visiting Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. From all the evidence, Angle the chimp was a Lecter-level monster, a face-chewing, blood-drinking homicidal maniac. But that wasn’t the Angle Remington encountered at the zoo. He clearly got pleasure from her visits. She had the idea that the chimp was eager for human contact. Because of budget cuts, the zoo was short-staffed. She got to know some of the caretakers. Although there was ample evidence that the ape was well cared for, Angle was always alone when she dropped by.

  A detective visits her criminal prey. Remington felt her mind fumbling with itself, trying to understand. Investigative work was a kind of matching game. Develop an outline of a suspect from the available evidence. Hold that outline up to the light of reason, examine it carefully, then align it with the credible suspects. When the outline matched a suspect, go to court. Remington experienced an almost physical sensation when that happened, a lock when the two came into alignment. Reality fit cleanly with hypothesis. She could almost hear the click.

  With Angle, nothing clicked. She realized that she was being naïve about ape behavior. Remington had made a point of refamiliarizing herself with the story of Travis, the most infamous instance of a pet ape going on a rampage.

  Raised in a middle-class household in Connecticut, Travis became highly socialized and comfortable with human contact. The ape liked ice cream and, it was said, memorized the schedules of the ice-cream trucks visiting his neighborhood. Like many of the Odalon chimps, he was a show-business animal. He appeared in several commercials and made appearances on talk shows. He filmed a TV pilot.

  His “parents” lived in a rural environment and owned a towing company. Travis dressed himself, brushed his own teeth, helped out around the family farm, and ate at the table with the owner’s family. He also often went out in public, going shopping or riding along on tow-truck calls, buckled securely in a safety belt. (Remington thought of Angle buckling himself in Mace Arthur’s van.)

  Then, in a well-publicized attack, Travis tore off the hands, nose, and much of the face of a human victim, causing her severe brain injury in the process. Afterward, he was shot dead by a responding police officer.

  Now, after a five-minute session of back scratching, Layla brought out a People magazine, a prize that Angle seized upon with every appearance of delight. Still sitting close to her near the bars of the cage, he began to hum softly and tore through the pages of the glossy. He stopped and showed Remington a picture of Rob Lowe, then did the same with a bikini-clad model whom Layla didn’t recognize.

  He hooted. She hooted back. She couldn’t help laughing.

  Spending time with Angle, holding his hand, pant-hooting back and forth, Remington wondered if the ape had a Travis hidden somewhere inside him. It didn’t seem possible. She knew that she was guilty of the same error that Travis’s owners had made, mistaking a wild animal for some kind of amiable protohuman pet. But she couldn’t help herself. There was such a sweetness to her zoo stopovers. She enjoyed them as much as Angle seemed to.

  Busy with his magazine, the chimp carefully tore out a People picture of Meryl Streep, slathered the back of it with copious amounts of spittle, and then slapped the page up on the concrete-block wall of the cell. It stuck. Convicts all over the world were doing the same kind of hapless interior decorating in their cells. Remington thought of Tim Robbins and his Rita Hayworth poster in The Shawshank Redemption.

  She rose from her chair, folded it shut, and propped it against the far wall opposite the cell. She had learned the ASL sign for goodbye and used it now. Angle pant-hooted and signed. Two thoughts assailed Remington, two thoughts that always occurred to her whenever she came to Building 14. One, I’ve got to stop coming here, and two, Angle is not Travis.

  After her visit, the fragrant ape stink still on her clothes, Remington drove down to one of her favorite Korean barbecue restaurants, in Pico-Union, to meet Cindy Iracane. True to form, the former Odalon keeper turned out to be the kind of person who ordered a hamburger at a Korean barbecue.

  “I can’t stand ethnic food,” Iracane told her.

  “Oh!” Remington said. “You should have said something.”

  “I’m saying it right now.”

  Okay. Remington tried to chalk the woman’s grumpiness up to the fact that Iracane was out of a job and had lost her former residence to wildfire.

  “I just saw Angle,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Iracane said, supremely uninterested.

  “Can you come in and give a deposition sometime?” Remington asked.

  “What’s a deposition?”

  Remington explained that Iracane would be giving sworn testimony that might be introduced at Mace Arthur’s preliminary hearing. Eventually, she might be asked to repeat the deposed testimony in court if there was a trial in the Odalon case.

  “I don’t get it,” Cindy said. “I don’t ever want to be on the witness stand for this. It’s given me enough grief already. If I tell you once in the deposition thingie, why do I have to say it all over again in court?”

  “That’s the way it works,” Remington said.

  “Do I get paid for this?” Iracane asked. At Remington’s shake of the head, she said, “Expenses, at least?”

  “We can have a deputy pick you up and drop you back off.” Remington didn’t mention the word “subpoena,” but of course if Iracane didn’t come in voluntarily she’d be on the receiving end of some paper.

  Sitting across from each other at a table for two, Remington wrapped her grilled meat in lettuce leaves while Iracane ate her unhappy hamburger. They went through an informal question-and-answer session, going over some of the same ground that might be covered in a deposition: how long Iracane had worked at Odalon, what the conditions there were like, what her duties were, the number and activities of the animals, her arrangements with her employers.

  “Did you ever have outside visitors to the sanctuary?” Remington asked.

  “Why do you want to know that?” Iracane answered, testy. When Remington didn’t respond, the girl shook her head. “Nope—you know, nobody, I mean but nobody, ever came up there. It was bum-fuck out of the way, for one thing, and you saw the condition of that road. Plus, that’s why we had the gate and the fences—to keep outsiders out.”

  “The vet came, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” Iracane said. “But he wasn’t an outsider.” She gazed out at the traffic on Pico Boulevard. The rains of fall had finally begun, and parked cars on the boulevard glittered as if they had been showered with diamonds. Or, this being L.A., zircons.

  “You know those chimp movie fans were always bugging us, mostly about Mister Jeepers,” Iracane said. “But any of our animals that appeared in movies or on TV were, like, celebrities. There are all sorts of losers in the world, you know, and some of them get attached to show apes.”

  “So did the fans visit the sanctuary?”

  “Not really,” Iracane said. “I heard that maybe one or two had made it up to our gate off Trappe Ranch Road, like sightseeing or something, but I never saw them.”

  “No one else?” Remington felt that Iracane was somehow being evasive.

  “Not that I can think of,” she said. “Why is this important? You got your case solved, don’t you, Detective? Because if you’re having doubts I want my protection back, like, stat.”

  “I talked to Ian Terry the morning after the fire,” Remington said. “He said that there had been someone out there, someone he called ‘a buyer.’ That ring any bells for you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Iracane said, looking away. “That guy. That was Tamas’s guy, someone looking to purc
hase baby chimps, you know, and we had Bee Bee and Amy.”

  “Do you recall a name?”

  “No.”

  “Anything about him?”

  “I didn’t see him except for once,” Iracane said. “He was a big fat slob of a guy. Tamas was showing him around.” She pronounced the name not as Ian Terry had, with the emphasis on the second syllable, but as someone would pronounce it in English.

  “If it was so rare to have visitors, why didn’t you show more interest?”

  Cindy shrugged. “Dunno. I guess I was busy.”

  “Would you know this guy if you saw him again?”

  “Look, Detective, this was nothing. It wasn’t as important as you’re trying to make it. The rules of the sanctuary meant we couldn’t sell any of the animals. It was, like, a nonissue. This guy came up, Tamas went around with him, he came back a couple times. That was it.”

  “There were multiple visits?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “How many?”

  “Geez, I don’t know! Can I get another Coke?”

  “How many times did Tamas’s guy come around?”

  “Like I said, I couldn’t say.”

  “Try.”

  “Two or three times, maybe more. A half dozen, tops.”

  “So you’re telling me this gent visited the sanctuary six times, you only laid eyes on him once, you don’t know his name or anything about him other than that he was big.”

  Iracane stared evenly at Remington. “Right, that’s about it.”

  “Okay,” Remington said. “We may want to come back to this.”

  “Well, okay, but that’s all I have to say on the matter.” Officious, as if she were under the impression that she had control of the interview process. “Damn, man,” Iracane said suddenly. “I do remember one thing. Tamas’s guy, the fat slob, he came out with another guy once—a black but an American, not an African. And I do remember his name, because it was so strange.”

  Interviewing Iracane, Remington decided, must necessarily be a slow, painstaking process. Because it went like this: no, no, no, oh, yeah.

  “What was the name, Cindy?”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Iracane said. “Ian and I laughed about it afterward.”

  “Yes?” Jesus, it was like pulling teeth.

  “Hitler.”

  “His name was Hitler?”

  “That’s right, that’s how Tamas introduced him. I almost laughed out loud.”

  “Tamas introduced him, but he never introduced the other guy, the big guy?”

  “Hitler, can you imagine?”

  “Maybe you misheard it,” Remington said.

  “I didn’t,” Iracane said, bristling. “Listen, I’m trying to cooperate, Detective, but all these questions! I mean, can we, like, just eat? I got a lot on my mind other than who was what where.”

  Remington decided to back off and move on. She asked a few more general questions then gestured toward the waiter for the bill. But she felt a spasm of pity for the girl. Poor Cindy was in over her head. Odalon was now a multiple-homicide case. If Remington wanted Iracane to tell what she knew, the woman was damned well going to do it, or risk a contempt citation.

  Maybe Dukundane Tamas’s fat-slob visitor and his Nazi friend would turn out to be nothing. They might have absolutely no bearing on any aspect of the Odalon case. Maybe Remington herself was grasping at straws, tracking down leads in a case that was already solved. But working multiple maybes, wasn’t that the essence of being a detective?

  —

  After their dinner together that night, Remington dropped Iracane off at an apartment building on West Adams, south of the freeway. Since her residence at Odalon burned flat, the para-vet had been camped out on a friend’s couch.

  The place had a well-foliaged inner courtyard, dark by the time Remington pulled up in the U-boat. The light patter of rain still came down.

  “Can you walk me in?” Iracane asked.

  “Cindy, it’s all right,” Remington said. She was a little weary of the woman and wanted to get home herself.

  “Puh-leeze?”

  Reluctantly, Remington got out of the U-boat to perform some perfunctory hand-holding. The two of them headed up the walk into the courtyard. Apartment entry doors lined both sides of the leafy patio.

  “Which one is yours?” Remington asked.

  With a bellowing screech, an ape came bounding out of the darkness behind them.

  There was no time to react. The beast smashed into Remington, flinging her roughly to the ground. She wasn’t so much tackled as bulldozed out of the way. Her head hit the concrete of the walk hard enough that it rebounded.

  Blackness. Seconds later—what she thought of as seconds, but it could have been any stretch of time—Remington floated queasily back to the surface. She saw the chimpanzee only a few feet away, standing atop the thrashing, supine form of Cindy Iracane.

  Reaching down, bracing itself with a foot on the head of its victim, the ape gripped the mouth of the shrieking woman and with a mighty heave tore off her jaw. The bones and flesh ripped loose with the sickening sound of a rubber boot being sucked out of mud.

  The horror of the scene bullied Remington’s mind. She dropped out of touch with reality once more. This time she had to fight her way back to consciousness. Pain knifed into her skull.

  Random shouting came from all over the courtyard, punctuating the screams of the attacking chimpanzee. There were doors opening and lights switching on along the apartment building’s balcony above the courtyard. Human forms, people yelling about calling 911.

  The creature wore a nasty, blood-wet collar. Remington realized that its chain stretched on the ground beside her. She grabbed at it. She thought of pulling the ape away from Cindy Iracane’s brutalized body, which lay, still as death, half on the walk and half splayed into the courtyard’s lush green landscaping.

  But Remington’s fingers wouldn’t work. With rising terror, she realized that the chain was running through her grip, its links tearing at the flesh of her palms. The ape had turned.

  It was coming for her.

  The beast ran over Remington as if she were a mound of dirt. She felt her rib cage snap like a collection of broken twigs. She prepared to be flung into the air and then thrown to the ground, as had happened to Pia Liebstein. Over and over, until she wound up crumpled and ruined just like the lawyer.

  But the beast didn’t stop. It galloped across Remington’s fallen body and kept on going.

  The chain ran out its length as though it were a rope yanked by some unstoppable force. She heard the clattering links as the aluminum fetter trailed back down the walk. The ape disappeared into the rainy darkness of the front yard.

  The late-October rain came down. Remington heard the drops falling on the broad leaves of the landscaped palms. Her mind felt confused. She remembered thinking that the rain would be good for the battle against the wildfires in the hills.

  Nauseated, ignoring the intense pain in her chest and head, Remington elbowed herself over to the broken form of Cindy Iracane. She had a dim awareness of footsteps, movement, of people rushing to their aid. But even before she reached the body, crawling across a steaming slick of blood in order to do so, Remington knew that any help coming for the former Odalon caretaker would arrive too late.

  21

  Officially, Remington was on leave from her duties in order to recover from a pair of bruised ribs and what her doctor termed MTBI, mild traumatic brain injury. It didn’t feel mild to Remington. She had a grade-2 concussion. The headaches were killer, sleep was troubled, and a spotty form of amnesia about the incident at Cindy Iracane’s apartment courtyard dogged her.

  Like bolts that hit her without warning, Remington experienced blazing, elusive snatches of memory…the rainy courtyard…the grimacing fangs of the ape, taking up its whole face…the tinkly sound of a television theme song from some nearby apartment. But most troubling was the sense that some essential fact about th
ose terrifying minutes lay just beyond Remington’s grasp. What was it?

  Her doctors told her to rest. She had to be “the stillness at the center of the storm,” as Randy Gosch solemnly advised Remington when he visited her at the trauma center of the USC Medical Center.

  “You can see the morgue out the window here,” Remington told him.

  “So you don’t have very far to go,” Gosch said merrily. Gallows humor.

  Iracane’s murder had released the law-enforcement and media furies. Deputy Johnny Velske, a detective from the Major Crimes Detail, and another from the LAPD came to her darkened hospital room for a quick preliminary Q & A.

  “Folks are going nuts over this,” Velske said.

  “I would watch the TV news, but any light brighter than a candle kills my eyes,” Remington told him.

  “We’ve got personnel posted outside your room,” the deputy said. “You just concentrate on feeling better.”

  The only other work visitors the nursing staff would allow were ADA Rick Stills and DA Janiece Baez. Baez didn’t stay for more than five minutes. Stills hung on awhile longer. He and Remington sat together in silence for an awkward moment.

  “So,” she said.

  “We don’t have to talk about the case,” Stills said.

  Remington laughed softly. As if there is any other subject in the world.

  “We have to rethink….” she said.

  “I’m pushing ahead with the case against Mace Arthur,” Stills said abruptly. “I don’t see how this changes anything.”

  “It changes everything,” Remington said. Her voice came out too softly for emphasis. It was painful to speak. She felt more than she could say. Her brain pulsed like a metronome.

  “This was, I don’t know, a copycat or something,” Stills said.

  “Kidding, right?”

  “We’ve got Mace Arthur nailed for the Terry and Tamas homicides.”