13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  “A concussion is a terrible thing to waste,” Layla said, smiling wanly.

  Stills laughed. “I’ve missed you, Remington.”

  Not “I’ve missed you, Layla.” To Remington’s utter surprise, she burst out with a half-stifled sob. She had been leaning back against Stills’s desk, with him perched on the seat back of an office chair. She immediately whirled around so that she wasn’t facing him.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, coming up behind her and putting one hand on her shoulder. Like a brother consoling his sister.

  Remington turned around, wiping the rogue tears from her face and smiling ruefully. “Head trauma…disrupts…emotional affect…” she stammered.

  “Right, right,” Stills agreed. “That’s okay. You all right? You want, I don’t know, a glass of water or something?”

  You screwy idiot. She didn’t know if her thoughts referred to Rick Stills or to herself.

  She sat down. He went around to the other side of his desk and took a seat in his own chair, so that a safe four feet separated them. Ever since sexual harassment became a dominant workplace issue, all sorts of firewalls had been thrown up regarding a superior touching a subordinate.

  “I’m going to take a week,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah,” Stills said, his head bobbing vigorously. “As much as you need.”

  “I’ve got friends in Washington State,” Remington said.

  “Isn’t it a little dreary up there this time of year? I mean, all times of year?”

  “You were thinking I should do something more like Cabo, like that might be your own first choice.”

  “Well, Cabo San Lucas—yeah, sun, beach, chill,” Stills said. “You’ll be back in time for the Mace Arthur prelim, right?”

  “I wouldn’t be leaving the office high and dry on that, am I?”

  “No, no, we’re good.”

  Lingering in the air between them was their fundamental disagreement about the proceedings. Rick Stills didn’t yet know that a random murder outside an abandoned theme park in Palos Verdes was somehow linked to the Odalon case. She would let the Gregg Hickler news hit him whichever way it would.

  The truth was the ADA had ceased to demonstrate much interest in the original ape massacre at the sanctuary. He had moved on to prosecuting the attacks on Terry, Tamas, and Liebstein. Homicide versus…what would the original ape massacre be termed? Panicide? It was no contest. Stills had cast himself in the role of the heroic district attorney. He would lead the charge of his own species to prosecute assault from another. Some sort of career lust had taken Stills over. Visions of sugarplum headlines danced in his head.

  But hadn’t Remington cast herself in a role also? A crusader for truth? Defender of Angle? In any D.A.’s office anywhere in the country, opposing an accepted version of events amounted to career suicide. Any challenge to prosecutorial bias would be rooted out and quashed. It was the way things always were.

  She knew this, and she also knew that she didn’t know a soul in Washington State. Her real agenda for visiting the Northwest was one that she was forced to hide from Rick Stills, from her father, and almost from herself.

  —

  Layla got in barely under the wire. The Griffith Park zoo stopped selling entry tickets an hour before the gates closed at five o’clock. It was five to four when she approached the ticket office. The woman behind the glass tried to talk her out of spending the eighteen-dollar admission charge, warning her that the place was closing and many of the attractions would be empty. Remington persisted. She shoved her twenty through the slot and passed through the turnstile.

  Remington knew that a zoo visit was a risky move on her part. Her photo had appeared in the Times. She was a surviving victim of an attack by that fearsome tabloid creation, the chompanzee. Her name had been bruited about on local TV news reports. How would it look for the detective-victim to be visiting her ape attacker? The press would love to know about it.

  But Remington wanted to try something, just for her own satisfaction. She thought that if she wore a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses no one would recognize who the hell she was. Just another tourist.

  Everyone else was heading the other way, for the exits. She liked the semi-deserted feel of the walkways and the seating areas. She moved incognito through the streaming crowd, past Reggie the alligator alone in his pool, past the zoo administration building, deeper into the grounds. The farther she went the less populated it became. Past her fellow primates in the gorilla compound, the pseudo-jungle for the orangutan, the sprawling world-class chimpanzee exhibit—all emptied out for closing time.

  Remington took a left at a yard featuring some sort of deerlike animals called the black duiker—which were, as far as she could see from the two examples staring dumbly back at her, not black at all. Then past the do not enter/prohibido el paso service road to a chain-link fence and a gate left negligently ajar. She slipped through and was in the zoo’s nonpublic rear precincts.

  The one person she did want to meet up with was Paul Kennedy, the zoo’s security chieftain, who had helped accommodate her so many times. A few staffers transited the area on foot, but they didn’t acknowledge her. Probably recognizing Remington from her past visits to Angle, a woman in glasses driving a small Cushman cart actually waved and gave a big Texas “Howdy” as she passed by. Mostly, though, the zoo staff was busy elsewhere, putting the animals in their quarters for the night.

  She moved on to Building 14, the dun-colored concrete block structure where Angle was housed.

  So it could be done, she decided.

  She had tested her surmise and proved that a casual visitor could easily penetrate the zoo’s perimeter and get to the ape’s cage. More difficult to imagine was how someone could take Angle out of the zoo, employ him to attack her and Cindy Iracane, then get the animal back inside with no one the wiser.

  LAPD investigators and detectives from the county sheriff’s department had, of course, checked up on Angle in the wake of the Iracane killing. The zoo administration, including its security detail, had discounted the whole idea that Angle could be anywhere other than where he had been, caged and secure in Building 14.

  It seemed to her that zoo security depended more on an assumption of safety than on any real strategy for defeating intruders. Who but a drunk or a crazy person would want to break into a zoo anyway? From experience, Remington knew that there were plenty of examples of both drunks and crazies abroad and up to mischief in the Greater Los Angeles area.

  Remaining unchallenged, Remington entered Building 14 through an unlocked door.

  “Hello, Detective,” said a female voice.

  Trish Sedgewick stood next to the wire mesh of Angle’s cage. Behind her were two other neatly dressed figures, a young man and a young woman, whom Remington pegged as the lawyer’s assistants.

  “You know,” Sedgewick said, “it’s traditional for a law-enforcement officer to notify me when they wish to visit one of my clients.”

  Remington glanced into the enclosure to where Angle moped. The chimp leaned against the concrete blocks of his cage wall as though their coolness gave him relief.

  “Is he?” Remington asked.

  “Is he what? Oh, yes, he’s my client. Well, not quite yet. The papers haven’t been signed. But I am purchasing the beast from Hollywood Animal Rescue.”

  Though it was clearly a struggle, Sedgewick attempted to put a sympathetic look on her face. “How are you feeling? I heard you had a nasty blow.”

  “How much?” Remington asked, ignoring the question. “What does a chimpanzee go for nowadays?”

  Sedgewick turned to her assistants and gave a dismissive wave. “Leave us,” she said. The attorney was her usual well-coiffed, fashionable self. She wore red-soled Louboutin shoes to visit an ape.

  “I know what I’m doing here,” Sedgewick told her. “But I wonder about you.”

  “I wonder if you wonder,” Remington said, repeating an old movie line from one of her dad’s beloved noir
films.

  “I would guess that you’re visiting your magical attacker, the ape who can be two places at once: here in the zoo and, at the same time, rampaging in the rain at an apartment building on West Adams.”

  Remington understood very well how dangerous it was for her to be conversing with Tricia Sedgewick. All intercourse between defense and prosecution was as strictly formalized as any Renaissance dueling ritual. Every exchange between the two sides should properly be conducted before a judge, either in court or in chambers. Certainly not in an ape-scented corridor on the back lot of a zoo.

  Evidently, Sedgewick was thinking along the same lines. “Does Rick Stills know you’re here?” she asked.

  “I’m off the clock,” Remington said, cursing herself as she said it. What business is it of yours?

  “Rick probably wouldn’t want you consorting with the enemy,” Sedgewick said.

  “I doubt that he sees you that way.”

  “Oh, I meant Angle.” The lawyer gestured toward the ape.

  Both women gazed into the open, childlike eyes of the captive chimp. Angle now lolled upside down on a tattered cargo net. He hadn’t come over to greet Remington as he usually did.

  “They’re going to kill him,” Sedgewick said softly. “You know that’s how this is going to play out.”

  Remington didn’t respond.

  “I can’t believe your boss is bulling forward. All evidence to the contrary.”

  “Rick Stills can take care of himself,” Remington said.

  “But he’s opening up Pandora’s box,” Sedgewick said. “You’ve been convalescing—maybe you don’t know what’s happening. The animal-rights people are out in force, but we expected that.”

  Your people, Remington thought.

  “The group of Hollywood actors who worked with chimpanzees—they’re pretty visible. But you know who else? The anti-choice folks.”

  Anti-abortion loonies? That gave Remington pause. “But this doesn’t have anything to do with that,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Sedgewick said. “But pro-life has been pushing for years to have human fetuses designated as legal persons. They consider our cause, Jus Animalium’s friend-of-the-court fight in the Odalon case, as a parallel battle. We’re attempting to establish legal personhood for this primate here. So that means the nuts are going to fall from the trees. Creationists will come out, Bible-thumpers, anti-evolution people, everybody.”

  Sedgewick laid her hand on Remington’s arm. “When you were on patrol, were you ever detailed to woman’s-clinic protection? This whole thing could get real ugly real quick.”

  “It already is,” Remington said. She had seen some of the headlines. “MONKEY TRIAL TAKE TWO!” read one in the LA Daily News.

  “Listen, depending if Jus Animalium gets standing, the court could frown on the two of us meeting at all. I don’t want any lectures from a sitting judge, and I’m sure you don’t want to be spanked by Rick Stills.”

  “Officially, I’m not here,” Remington said quickly, letting the faint smirk on Sedgewick’s face slide by.

  “I’m just saying perhaps we could allow the door to remain cracked open a little bit, permit ourselves some private back-and-forth.”

  Remington couldn’t grasp what the attorney was proposing. A back-alley arrangement? Did she want Remington to act as a conduit for the defense? The detective saw her policing career suddenly nosedive out of the sky, crashing to earth in flames.

  What am I doing? she thought. Speaking to Trish Sedgewick wasn’t even the issue. Remington stopping by to see Angle was sufficient trespass. Rick Stills would hit the roof if he knew.

  She was about to flee Building 14, depart the presence of the lawyer, leave the zoo and never return before she got into more trouble than she was already in. She had been gripping the mesh of the cage with one hand. Now she felt a warm, leathery finger wrap around hers.

  Angle.

  “He’s reaching out,” Sedgewick said. “Will you deny him, Layla?”

  23

  In the eyes of the court, apes weren’t people. They were things. The only way a chimpanzee could pry his way into a law court was if two owners were squabbling over property rights. The streams of ancient Mesopotamian law, Old Testament law, Roman law, and English law all flowed the same way, combining to make a mighty river. American law floated right along. Trish Sedgewick proposed swimming against the prevailing current. Worse, she wanted to channel it in the opposite direction.

  Remington felt good to be leaving town. On the Coast Starlight to Seattle, she paged through Jus Animalium’s website. Using her computer browser on the train was something of a catch-as-catch-can endeavor, since Amtrak’s Wi-Fi service was spotty. She kept getting frustrated by dropped signals. Plus, parts of the website were listed as “under construction.” But there was enough content that Remington could get some idea of the battle that Trish Sedgewick had girded her loins to fight.

  The lawyer’s attempt to pry open the jaws of justice and admit animal rights as a factor in the Odalon case remained, as far as Remington was concerned, a forlorn hope. Sedgewick could personally adopt Angle or not. She could prove that she was the ape’s damned biological mother or not. It didn’t matter. Since time immemorial, common-law judges had sternly ruled against allowing any nonhuman creature to assume legal personhood. Again and again. Never once had common law wavered in its defense of the dividing line between the species.

  The Jus Animalium Law Center was a newly minted creation, only months old, based out of a law school in Birmingham, Alabama. Its website was bare-bones. There was a spate of recent re-postings of the chompanzee coverage in the media. Otherwise, Jus Animalium didn’t seem to have much else going on. Odalon looked to be the law center’s first big case, and its only one. Sedgewick hadn’t been able get any traction with it. Judge Etha Keris had slapped her down once already, ruling against the lawyer’s attempt to gain custody of Angle.

  The rest of the Jus Animalium website was taken up by re-postings about animal rights in general. Remington skimmed a long tract about the history of animal law from ancient times all the way up to contemporary court rulings. It was like reading a repetitive story where all that happened was that a bunch of well-meaning folks beat their heads against a brick wall, over and over.

  Animal-rights advocates loved to hold up as a model the movement to abolish human slavery. Three thousand years ago, no one ever thought to question one person’s right to own another. Three hundred years ago, the issue had not yet even entered the arena of common law. But today, apart from some stubborn holdouts in sub-Saharan Africa and the persistence of sexual enslavement, the practice of slavery had pretty much been eradicated from the globe. Activists like Trish Sedgewick were seeking the same sort of revolution in the realm of animal law.

  Actually, Remington wasn’t entirely sure about Sedgewick. She didn’t know how deep the attorney’s commitment to the movement went. The scent of opportunism competed with the Rive Gauche perfume the lawyer wore. Remington suspected that if some other area of law presented a better level of opportunity—the fight to save independent bookstores, say, or the battle against teens allowing their pants to sag and display their underwear—the Jus Animalium law center that Sedgewick had founded and financed would have a different name and a different agenda.

  Ranging around the Internet, Remington read an account of the ASPCA, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Henry Bergh, who founded the group in 1866, used to haunt the streets of New York City, intervening when drovers beat their horses, turning over sea turtles that vendors had stored upside down to keep them from escaping. Bergh made a dramatic court appearance with a nine-year-old girl who had been chained and beaten, highlighting her as an example of animal abuse. That victim had won people’s sympathy where whipped mules and dogs had failed to do the trick.

  Law changed when principle demanded it. If some torchbearer like Bergh could convince the public that there w
as a moral principle involved in an issue, if some Harriet Beecher Stowe could write an Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then maybe, just maybe, legal rulings might begin to reject the old and embrace the new. The battleship of justice could be forced upon a new course. Even then, the fight was bound to become incredibly nasty. Precedent resisted principle. The battle of what has been against what should be was always close and bloody.

  Remington herself felt the impulse to resist any change in the law. She had enough problems policing her own species. Now the animal-rights folks wanted to enlarge her mandate to include a couple of other species? Where would it stop? Once Remington found herself reading the Miranda warning to a pit bull, she’d have to turn in her shield.

  In Los Angeles right at the present moment, the effort to stem the tide of violence on the streets was touch and go as it was. In some L.A. neighborhoods, you could sit on your porch of an evening, begin tallying the sound of gunshots, and run out of fingers to count on before the night was through. In Chicago, the situation was even more precarious. No, no, thank you, no added responsibilities for the police, if you please.

  Yet, as she headed up to the Northwest, Remington traveled in the service of the rights of beasts—or, at least, in the service of the rights of one beast in particular. She rented a car when she arrived at the King Street Amtrak station in Seattle and drove across the mountains to the college town of Table Mesa, Washington. At the University of the Greater Northwest, she inquired as to the whereabouts of a faculty member named James Kemp.

  “Professor Kemp is emeritus,” the secretary at the front desk of the Psychology Department informed her.

  “I called and was told that he kept an office here.”

  “You were misinformed,” the secretary said. “Well, yes, he does have an office, technically, but it’s like a mausoleum. He never goes there.”

  Remington hated to do it, but she hauled out her badge wallet and displayed her police ID. She was up from Los Angeles working a case, she explained.

  The gold detective’s shield didn’t have the magic-wand effect it sometimes did. The secretary was sorry the detective had come all this way for nothing. “You won’t be able to get anything out of Professor Kemp,” she insisted.