13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  “Angle was in…zoo,” Remington said, stammering. “Couldn’t do this.”

  Stills looked at her with pity. “Look, you’re in no shape. We can talk about it later, when you feel better.”

  “No!” Remington said, trying for a shout and falling short. “It couldn’t…been Angle.”

  But it was. One of her tantalizing shreds of memory of the attack was seeing the chimp and, more vividly, smelling him, and knowing it was Angle. The same creature she had just held hands with, like two teenagers, only hours before that rainy horror in the apartment-building courtyard.

  Rick Stills left her. She realized that he remained locked in a version of events that no longer made sense. Nothing made sense. Angle? A person or persons unknown slipping him out of the zoo and siccing him on Cindy Iracane? And why hadn’t the chimp attacked Remington with equal ferocity? Her mind was too confused to sort things out.

  Rick Stills remained aggressively focused on Mace Arthur. Once prosecutors settled on a particular narrative of a particular crime, it was hell to pry them loose from it. The task required high explosives and the threat of public disgrace or dismissal from office.

  Gene Remington was a little more open-minded. He picked up Layla after a second-night stay-over at the hospital, her ribs bandaged and hurting and her head swimming in a pain-pill haze. He brought his daughter not to her own Los Feliz apartment but to his place in Glendale. This was Gene’s dream, anyway, to have them living under the same roof again.

  Her erstwhile boyfriend, Ory Ballmer, finally called her. He was on the road in Northern California, Shasta County. He asked how she was feeling, and she said she was a little fuzzy-headed.

  “This stuff in the news—we’re going to have to cool it, Layla.”

  “What do you mean? I can’t stop them writing what they write.”

  “I’m at a crucial point in my career right now. I’m already getting shit because they know I go out with you.”

  Way to stand tall. “That’s all right. I’m not much in the mood for socializing.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Ory said. “Jesus, Layla, it’s just as if you’d glow in the dark right now. You’re too controversial.”

  Remington sighed. She had a vision of Ory’s spine, limp and sagging. Why be a man when you can be a success? She hung up on him.

  On the third day after the attack, Remington began feeling a little better. The TV and the Internet were ablaze with chompanzee. NPR called the collision of Ro-Co-Co with the killer-ape story “the perfect media storm.” For once, the Middle East was pushed off the front burner.

  What happens when two monster news stories blow up at the same time? There were Ro-Co-Co fanatics who couldn’t understand why people were so interested in a few random homicides that didn’t involve anyone famous. And there were chompanzee partisans who sneered at Ro-Co-Co. The group of ancient C-movie actors were in great demand. Charlie Rose interviewed a whole panel of them.

  “That darned chimp used to pinch me whenever the cameras were off,” Fran Romano said of her time acting with Chow-Chow the chimpanzee. “Then the director would call out, ‘Action,’ and the monkey’d be like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, the little bleep.”

  Mostly, though, Gene turned the TV off, took her iPad away from her, and made her rest. Layla didn’t like this much, since it meant that she was free to think. And she didn’t want to think.

  Her dad sat with her on the afternoon of her third day of convalescence. “You’ve got to turn that frown around,” he said.

  “Angle could not have gotten out,” Layla told him. “And Mace Arthur was in Metro. Tell me that someone could have breezed through zoo security with a chimp who was supposed to be in lockdown.”

  “An accomplice,” Gene said promptly. “Although, from what I hear, sheriff’s detectives are all over that zoo, and they can’t figure it, either. How sure are you it was Angle?”

  “Sure as shit.”

  “It was dark, it was raining….”

  “I had just visited him a few hours before.”

  “Yeah, that practice of yours, visiting Angle at all hours—that’s being made much of in some quarters,” Gene said.

  “In what quarters?”

  “Some people are saying you did it, you smuggled Angle out.”

  Layla snorted in derision. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “They’re saying you’ve gone chimp-simple, like you’re over on the animal-rights side now.”

  “For pity’s sake,” Layla muttered. “What a mess.”

  “So these scientists set up an experiment,” Gene Remington said. “They put a gorilla in a room with four separate ways to get out, all of them concealed in one way or another. Then the white lab coats sit back and record which exit the gorilla would discover, one through four. The scientists watch, and wait, and wait and watch, and what do you think happens?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “The gorilla finds a fifth way out.”

  “That’s pretty good,” said Layla.

  “It’s from Robert Heinlein—do you know him? Science-fiction guy; I read him when I was coming up.”

  Remington knew that he was trying hard to entertain her, or, at least, distract her from her injuries.

  “I’ve got one,” Layla said. “At the Great Ape Trust out in Iowa—you know, it’s one of the best primate facilities going—they put a gorilla, an orangutan, a bonobo, and a chimpanzee in the same room.”

  “All the great-ape species, yeah,” Gene said.

  “A scientist woman goes in and throws each one a ball, one after another. The gorilla smashes it flat, the orangutan keeps it, the bonobo tosses it back, and the chimp balances on top of it. So which is the smartest primate in the room?”

  “Too easy,” her father said. “I would hope it’s the lady scientist.”

  “Okay, so you’re a smart primate, too,” Layla said. “But I’ve got another one.”

  “Let ’er rip,” Gene said.

  “A murder, and there’s ape sign at the scene.”

  “Like what kind of ape sign?”

  “Fingerprints. You know apes have fingerprints, right?”

  “Jesus,” Gene said. “You think I haven’t been paying attention all this time?”

  “But there’s no possible way the chimpanzee ID’d by the prints could be at the scene.”

  “A ‘what if’ scenario, huh?”

  “We’re just talking here,” Layla said.

  “Spitballing.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  Her dad put on an almost comical thoughtful expression, scrunching up his features. “Okay, well, first let’s forget it’s a chimp. Maybe the whole chimp thing distracts from clear thinking. How about we say, hypothetically speaking, that they’re human prints, but there’s no way the guy they ID can be the one? Like, he’s dead or was in Afghanistan when the killing went down.”

  “Right,” Layla said. “What if?”

  “I don’t know.” Gene shook his head. “Something like this has to have happened at some point in the history of the world. Or else, at least, in some noir movie.”

  “Fingerprints at the scene, identifying a perp who couldn’t possibly be there.”

  “Has to be a lab error with the prints. Or contamination somehow. I heard of a guy wrongly convicted once on DNA evidence, but it turned out that his trace DNA had been transferred to a crime scene by EMT guys who had treated him earlier.”

  “The chimpanzee prints have been lifted and retested and verified. Twice.”

  “A twin,” Gene suggested. “I saw it on a Perry Mason rerun.”

  “Chimpanzees don’t have twins, or any kind of multiple births.”

  “Then a frame of some kind,” Gene said.

  “Difficult to transfer prints by artificial means.”

  “Difficult, but not impossible? I hear they’re doing amazing stuff with 3-D printers nowadays.”

  “So they lift a print, replicate it somehow, lay it o
n the scene? To what end?”

  “Implicate an innocent party,” Gene said.

  “Hell of a lot of trouble to go to,” Layla said. “There has to be some kind of big payoff at the end.”

  “Somebody hates the chimp. Or the chimp’s keeper.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been trying that one out. So far, it’s going nowhere. It’s not that Mace Arthur doesn’t have an enemy in the world. He just doesn’t have an enemy that has left any sort of big footprint in his life, somebody who might trick up this kind of thing just to put him away.”

  “You’re stuck, princess,” Gene said. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the theory of the crime as it stands. Maybe there’s something wrong in here.” He reached over and touched his daughter lightly on the forehead.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “You’ve solved the crime. It’s done. You’ve got a preponderance of evidence, and you did some real good police work, by the way. You ought to be commended. So let it go. What do you have against it? Some sort of vague feeling that the perp can’t be the perp?”

  “Cop instinct,” Layla said.

  “Uh-huh, and that never steers anyone wrong,” Gene said, grinning. “I’ll leave you with one more thought, before I get up and bring us back some pie and ice cream.”

  “I’ll go,” Layla said.

  “You will sit,” Gene commanded. “Ann Rule, she’s a true-crime writer, top one in the country, the whole world. She’s volunteering at a suicide-prevention hotline, meets a younger volunteer there, very handsome, a pretty boy named Ted.”

  “I know this story,” Layla said.

  “I’m almost seventy years old—you have got to let me repeat my stories,” Gene said. “Turns out her hotline buddy Ted’s last name is Bundy, and he’s one serial-killing son of a bitch. She’s sitting right next to the guy—where’s her cop instinct then?”

  “Ann Rule wasn’t a cop, she was a police dispatcher.”

  “Just saying. For years, she continued to deny that Ted Bundy was a murderer, even when all the evidence pointed that way.”

  “Then she writes a book about it called The Stranger Beside Me, and it sells, like, a zillion copies.”

  “Know when to fold ’em, yeah, but more important, in my humble opinion, is to know when to hold ’em,” Gene said, quoting his favorite philosopher, Kenny Rogers. “You’ve got your guy, Layla.”

  “And this other thing? This inconvenient truth that there was another attack while the perp and his chimp accomplice were both locked up tighter than a Vatican vault?”

  “That’s gonna sort itself and be explained,” Gene said serenely. “You’ll see. Just stand pat, get better, and let the justice system do its work.”

  She nodded, all the time knowing that she wouldn’t be following her dad’s advice.

  —

  Even though she was off the clock, Layla did manage to do some police work while she was laid up. It just wasn’t the official kind of police work. It was more in the way of tying up a pesky loose end she’d been tripping over.

  First, she called Samantha Ehrlich.

  “Sorry, I’ve been busy,” the fire warden said immediately after coming on the line. “I’ll have someone send over that computer sim from Lost Hills right away.”

  “That’s all right,” Remington said. She told Ehrlich that she had only called to verify that there had been no fire crews from Arizona on the Lost Hills fire.

  “I just wanted to make absolutely sure,” she added.

  Sounding harried and a little miffed to be asked a question she felt she had already answered, Ehrlich said she was sure that she was sure. No crew from Arizona was active in the whole Los Angeles Basin. Not now, not for months past.

  Next, Remington called up a casual friend of hers, Wolf Perez, a police sketch artist under contract with the LAPD. Budget cuts and the use of surveillance video had rendered the profession a dying art. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department had disbanded its Artist Unit years ago. Across the country, fewer and fewer blank-stare, full-face pencil portraits glared out from police flyers. The New York City force still made sketches of suspects at large in every felony investigation, but that was an exception.

  Wolf Perez held on as a freelance police sketch artist. A former poker buddy of Gene Remington’s when they both worked out of the Parker Center, he dropped by once in a while to share a beer with the old man. They enjoyed each other’s company.

  As it happened, Gene was out when Perez showed up at the Glendale condo. It was probably better that way. Layla had work to do with the artist, and Gene would have been a distraction.

  “Did you bring your book?” Layla asked.

  Perez reached into his shoulder pack and retrieved a binder that was full of arrest photographs from the archives. “First thing,” he said. “Race? Age? You think you can peg a weight?”

  Remington was trying to summon up the image she wanted, a depiction of the burn boss she had encountered at the Odalon Sanctuary that first morning after the wildfire. The alleged burn boss, she reminded herself.

  “White,” she said. “Fairly big—like six feet, maybe, two hundred or two ten. Salt-and-pepper hair, cropped very short.”

  “Age?”

  What had she thought at the time? A face like the bottom of a well-worn shoe. “Main thing, his skin was weathered, you know? He’d been out in the sun a lot in his life. The wrinkles were starting to come in big-time. So anywhere from fifty to sixty-five. Sorry I can’t be more exact than that.”

  They went through Perez’s book together, Remington picking out features she thought might look like the man she’d seen in the burned-over desolation of the Odalon yard. The artist went to it, sketching, erasing, adjusting the portrait, humming tunelessly as he did so. Remington always enjoyed the process. It could be traumatic for victims to try to describe their attacker, but for her it was like watching a photograph come up in a darkroom emulsion.

  It took a couple of hours. That’s okay, she thought. I don’t have anything else to do. Her head throbbed. She had to force herself to concentrate, or her mind would wander.

  When Perez had something Remington recognized, she still couldn’t decide why she wanted it. A guy wandering around the Malibu canyons in the aftermath of a wildfire. Most probably a member of some fire team. Fire personnel were out in force all over the area. And had he really said Arizona when Remington asked where he was from? She couldn’t be one-hundred percent sure.

  Ninety-five percent, though. The guy had been there, and it looked as though he had lied when answering an innocent question. One more thing: he had somehow known that the animals had been killed before the fire.

  —

  “Hi, I’m Suzanne Durgess,” said a message on Remington’s voice mail the next morning. “I got this number from Kenny Bedford at the Department of the Coroner. He told me you were laid up, and I heard about what happened to you on the news. I’m sorry for your troubles, and I apologize for reaching out at a difficult time like this. But I wonder if you could give me a call. You might be interested in something I’ve come across. Once again, sorry to disturb you.”

  The woman left a number. Remington couldn’t quite place the name, but if the pathologist had passed on her contact info it had to be work-related. This was the fourth morning of her convalescence, the fourth since the attack, and she was itching to get back into the fray.

  “That’s your bruised brain talking,” her dad said, when Layla told him she’d be going in to work the next day. “The docs told you to rest easy for a week, at least.”

  “I’ll just stop by,” Layla said. “I left a bunch of stuff hanging fire at the office. But I think I’ll tell them that I’m going to take some time off.”

  “Now you’re thinking straight,” Gene said. “I’ll take you up to Monarch Lake.”

  Layla still had brutal headaches, and the pain in her ribs made it hard for her to sleep comfortably. Even so, with Mace Arthur’s preliminary hearing scheduled in just over a week, a
nd with Rick Stills giving every appearance of forging ahead with it, she felt an obligation to try to stop a looming disaster.

  In Remington’s opinion, the ADA was the one who wasn’t thinking straight. She told him as much during a phone call.

  “All Harry Cornell has to do is point out that another ape attack happened during the period when Arthur and Angle were both incarcerated.”

  “I can get around that easy,” Stills told her.

  “How?”

  “Oh, if it comes up, which I doubt it will, I can put forth plenty of theories. A person or persons unknown penetrated the zoo grounds, took charge of the animal, used Angle to conduct the attack on Iracane, then returned the chimp to his cage.”

  The ADA’s tortured reasoning made Remington’s brain throb even more. “Tell me again—which one of us just got conked on the head?”

  “You did, which means as an aggravator there’s a charge of assaulting a peace officer.”

  “It doesn’t wash, Rick.”

  “Or maybe, you know, the attacker is a second chimpanzee. The Iracane assault was tricked up by the allies and coconspirators of Mace Arthur. They want to cast doubt on Arthur’s guilt in the Terry and Tamas killings and the Liebstein attack.”

  “Rick, please…Another killer ape?”

  “You know these animal-rights folks are crazy.”

  “Velske told me that the rains on the evening of the attack made it difficult to collect evidence at the scene. So you don’t have any physical proof to implicate Angle.”

  “None of that matters, Layla. You know your thought process is a little muddled right now. Here’s a rock-solid fact for you: Mace Arthur used Angle on the Tamas and Terry murders. That’s what I’m going to forge ahead on.”

  “The glaring fact that the creature was caged in a secure facility at the Los Angeles Zoo during an identical attack you somehow brush aside as an insignificant quibble.”

  “Whose side are you on, Detective?” His tone indicated that the discussion was over. When you don’t like what you’re hearing, hang up the phone. Which is what Rick Stills did.

  Remington lay on Gene’s couch, her head hurting, finding herself snorting in disgust over her boss’s insistence on staying the course. Damn the evidence, full steam ahead.