13 Hollywood Apes Page 25

  Remington looked at the nameplate on the secretary’s desk. “You’re Lois Morton?”

  The woman nodded.

  “Lois, why don’t you let me worry about what I can or can’t get out of someone. I just need to know where I can find the professor.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply any disrespect of your abilities, Officer,” Lois the secretary said.

  “Detective,” Remington corrected her.

  “I just meant…” Lois tapped her head and lowered her voice. “Alzheimer’s,” she whispered.

  A trip halfway across the country for nothing. Remington cursed inwardly. She herself must have lost her mind. The concussion had forced her into a mistake. She hadn’t made the proper inquiries and had gone off half-cocked.

  Layla visited the old man anyway, at a nursing center on a hill above town. She found him in his comfortable single-room residence, humming along with Sinatra recordings on a small iPod-and-speaker arrangement. There was something tragically ironic about an expert in human psychology falling prey to a disease of the mind.

  Professor Kemp proved grumpy and snappish. He suspected her of being a government agent come to grill him. Which, in fact, she was. She couldn’t get anything out of the man. She spent ten minutes trying, and managed only to stir up the professor’s incipient paranoia.

  As she was leaving, Remington encountered an elderly woman coming into the room with a basket full of fruit.

  “I’m Holly Kemp,” the woman told her. “Jim’s wife.” Her long-suffering expression showed the sad truth of the situation. The professor didn’t recognize his own family.

  When Remington briefly mentioned the purpose of her visit, Holly Kemp’s round, homely face lit up in a smile. “Why, I know Angle. We had him in our household for a few years. Our grandson played with him as a baby.”

  Holly invited Remington back to the Kemp home, a neat white ranch house on the other side of Table Mesa from campus. The woman kept her gray hair curled tightly against her skull. She wore a pea-green pantsuit. Over coffee and cookies, she spoke in solemn tones about the tragedy of dementia.

  Finally, she brought Remington into the study and shared a computer slide show, dozens of digitized pictures chronicling the cross-fostering experiment that her professor husband had conducted with Angle.

  “Well, you know how the name Angle came about, as a mistake,” Holly said, clicking through the slideshow pages. “But somehow it fit exactly right. We could never call him Angel, not after we knew him. He was such a little scamp.”

  Remington saw Angle as a baby, posed in a onesie alongside a human baby, also in a onesie. “That’s Rowan, our grandson. He’s in Philadelphia now with his mother. He was eighteen and a half months old in this picture. Angle was younger, sixteen months.”

  “Did you ever have trouble with, I don’t know, aggression?”

  Holly Kemp looked evenly at Remington. Her eyes swam behind thick-lensed glasses. “Detective, I know what you’re here for,” she said. “That awful business down in L.A. has got everyone wondering. I don’t know anything about what he’s like now, but when he was with us Angle never hurt any of the kids we had him with—my son or the foster-family kids or anyone. He didn’t like dogs, but lots of people don’t like dogs.”

  While she was talking, she kept flipping the pictures. Remington saw a familiar face in one of them.

  “Wait,” she said. She was looking at a shot of Mace Arthur as a psychology grad student, obviously younger but just as shaggy.

  “That’s right,” Holly said. “That’s Mace. I didn’t know him well, but well enough to know that he can’t have done the horrible things he’s been accused of. My goodness, no!”

  Remington asked if she could have a copy of the photo. “I’ll send you the whole batch, if you want them,” Holly said.

  “I’m also interested in where Angle was born, where the university purchased him from—or perhaps he was gifted to your husband somehow. Do you have any documents pertaining to that?”

  “Well, I know it was a purchase from a research facility out East—Georgia, I think.”

  “Yerkes?” Yerkes National Primate Research Center, on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, was the nation’s most prominent chimp research program.

  “No, I don’t think it was that one,” Holly Kemp said. She rose and crossed the study to a closet, returning with an old-fashioned scrapbook this time, stuffed with photographs and documents.

  “Here it is, the bill of sale.” She handed Remington a single-sheet form, dated seven years earlier and spelling out the terms of the transaction. Professor James Kemp and the university were both listed as the buyers, for a price of $25,000. The seller was an entity called ZAN International, with a notation that read, “Semke Breeding Facility.” Georgia charged the buyers $1,225 in sales tax.

  “Oh, I remember now. Jim hadn’t expected the tax, and it was an issue, suddenly having to scramble to raise the money.”

  Among the photos in the scrapbook was one that was labeled “Angle,” showing the chimp as a newborn, his face circled with marker. He appeared surrounded by a gaggle of other newborn chimps, tumbling over one another and over two adult females.

  “Do you know anything about ZAN International? Or Semke?”

  Holly shook her head. “This was at the tail end of all the breeding programs. There were a lot of chimpanzees bred for AIDS and HIV research, but it turned out their viral susceptibility is very different from ours, to the point that they didn’t really serve as very good subjects for testing vaccines.”

  As Remington paged through the scrapbook, she was brought up short by another photo.

  Two infant chimps flat on their backs, their faces staring up at the camera. The two babies looked so similar as to be clones.

  “Is one of them Angle?” asked Remington.

  Holly shrugged. Gazing down at the picture, she gave an inward, nostalgic smile, a mother recalling the youth of her children.

  “They have white tufts on their behinds when they’re babies,” she said. “But that disappears after they hit five or six years.”

  Her face cleared, and she looked up. “Take whatever you want, Detective. God knows my husband doesn’t have use for any of it anymore.”

  She looked off, contemplative. “You know, with Jim and his Alzheimer’s I’ve come to be of two minds about animal research. I used to think, after all the horrors of those AIDS-vaccine programs that wound up not doing a bit of good, well, these animals simply should not be used at all. Now I’m not sure. If it could help someone like my husband…I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.”

  Remington accepted a thumb drive from Holly Kemp, with the computer slide show transferred onto it. When Remington left, she also took along copies of the bill of sale and some of the older nondigital photos.

  Washington State’s landscape divided itself east and west: the dry high desert of the mountains and the lush jungle of the coast. Remington eased the rental car toward Seattle, preoccupied with her thoughts. She compared the competing images of her suspect. Angle the killer chompanzee of the tabloids. Baby Angle posed in a onesie alongside the Kemps’s grandson, Rowan. The two portraits didn’t jibe. They seemed a world away from each other.

  On an impulse, she took the I-405 cutoff and made for Sea-Tac Airport. She put in a call to her father.

  “How’s the weather up there?” Gene asked before she could say anything.

  “Rainy.”

  “Really? It rains up there in Seattle?”

  “I’m not coming home right away.”

  “Then I can rent out your room?”

  “I’m flying to Atlanta,” she said, ignoring his teasing.

  “What’s up? I mean, besides your flight.”

  “You’re in fine form today,” Layla said. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”

  “Lots of people are looking for you. The usual media scoundrels, but also your colleagues in the policing game. And the TV folks
aren’t quite camping out in front of your Los Feliz place, but almost. A few of them nose around here occasionally. You have become a ‘get’—you know that term?”

  “Yeah,” Layla said.

  “Plus, you received something from that nice Sedgewick woman,” Gene said.

  “I did?”

  “She dropped it off herself. The woman is a knockout. Down-to-earth, too. I offered a white wine, and she asked for a beer instead.”

  “You had her inside the condo?”

  “Sure I did, honey,” her father said. “At my age, I make it a practice always to accommodate a pretty woman. You never know what can happen.”

  “She’s playing for the other side, Dad,” Layla warned.

  “We talked a lot about you,” Gene said. “She likes you. She respects your expertise as a detective.”

  “What she dropped off, it wasn’t a subpoena, was it?”

  “Well, it was a packet of legal papers. Sealed. I tried to steam it open, take a look for you, but those newfangled glues they have nowadays defeated me.”

  “Right,” Layla said, not believing that last part but wondering what business Sedgewick had with her. The lawyer was playing with fire, whatever it was. Direct contact with an investigator by a defense attorney just wasn’t kosher.

  “I’ll call you when I know what’s what,” she said.

  “You knowing what’s what—I’ve been waiting for that day for a long time,” her father said, not wanting to let her off the phone.

  “Goodbye, Dad,” she said.

  “Atlanta, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Going to see a man about a dog?”

  “You know,” Layla said, “I never knew what that phrase meant.”

  “It means you have to go someplace but you don’t want to say what you’re really up to,” Gene said. “I’ve heard it said about a horse, too.”

  “Right,” Layla said.

  “Only you’d probably be saying it about an ape.”

  “Goodbye, Dad,” she said again, and this time she really did hang up.

  Layla showed her gold badge and managed to get on a red-eye nonstop to Atlanta. She slept only fitfully. The encounter with the aged and irascible Professor James Kemp broke into her dreams. She woke to find herself thinking about her mother.

  Mona Seeger Remington. Death and grief had elevated the woman to sainthood, but maybe she really had been a saint. Some people just are, wasn’t that so? Layla’s mom wasn’t a memory to her so much as a sort of rosy glow. She had only a few bits and pieces to remember: Mona dancing by herself, a warm mom embrace once when Layla had hurt herself with a fall, Mona at the stove, cooking.

  Yes, Remington got tired of telling people who asked, she really was named after the song. Her mother’s all-time favorite. Even though she married a police clerk, Mona had something of the hippy-dippy about her, or so Gene said.

  There was a time in Layla’s teens when the tune made her too sad. She couldn’t stand hearing the damned thing, which meant that she had to avoid classic-rock radio altogether. By now she had made her peace with it. The folk guitarist John Fahey did an instrumental cover that she liked. Clapton’s unplugged version was pretty awful, but the original remained the gold standard.

  She fell back asleep. Her dreams were haunted by the whisper of jet engines, the pant-hooting of apes, the voice of her mother, and that soaring piano solo at the end of rock and roll’s greatest love song.

  —

  “You sure he has the money for this?” the real-estate agent Karen Frost asked.

  “Yes, indeed he does,” Frost’s colleague Andy Wheeland answered. “And he’s about to come into a lot more. Hundreds, plural.”

  They spoke on cells, both real-estate agents at house visits. When Wheeland said “hundreds,” he meant hundreds of millions. Wealth, in the rarified levels of Los Angeles that Karen Frost dealt in, was figured in the number of “hundreds” that a client possessed. As in, “Oh, she has six,” or, “That guy, he has nine.” No one needed to say more.

  “I don’t even want to take a call from the guy if it’s going to be a goof,” Frost said. “You know the crazies have been coming out of the woodwork for this property.”

  “I bet,” Wheeland said.

  “Cookie just needs to get out from under the place, doesn’t wish to have anything to do with it.”

  “Right,” Wheeland said.

  “Not even a public transfer of the lease,” Frost said.

  “I know, I know—that’s what this guy is all about,” Wheeland said. “Look, I told you, he’s old Hollywood money. She’s going to be real comfortable with him.”

  “Well, I hope Mr. Dorian understands that he’s never even going to be in the same room with Cookie Cantero. This deal is all going to be done with several layers of personal management between him and the principal.”

  “The guy isn’t a star-fucker, I tell you,” Wheeland said. “He’s been around celebrity all his life. He knows how to handle himself.”

  “I’m serious, Wheels—nothing in the press, not one word,” Frost said.

  “What do I have to do? Sign in blood?”

  “Okay,” Frost said. “Have his barracuda talk to our barracuda.”

  A grieving Cookie Cantero wanted to unload the lease on the Mulholland Drive compound where her lover, Donald Coll, was murdered by her ex, Ross Murphy. The place—or, at least, its wrought-iron front gate—had become a prominent stop on stargazing bus tours. Japanese tourists posed for photos in front of it, even though you couldn’t see a damned thing, just a curving driveway disappearing into the landscaped grounds.

  In the realm of real estate, in the world of brokers like Karen Frost and Andrew Wheeland, such properties were termed “stigmatized,” meaning that a murder, a suicide, or some other messy event had occurred there. California and a number of other states required full disclosure in any real-estate transaction. Usually, a stigmatized notation on the disclosure papers meant a break in the price.

  The Mulholland Drive compound was a special case. It was the center of white-hot interest on the part of the media and the public. Helicopters still routinely buzzed it, gathering film footage for the Ro-Co-Co documentaries that would be proliferating in the months before Ross Murphy’s trial. Given its ghoulish attraction, the property actually had become more valuable, not less. But Cookie Cantero wasn’t concerned about money.

  Karen Frost decided that she had to trust Andy Wheeland in order to move forward with the deal. A couple of days after the initial call, Frost found herself at the Mulholland Drive compound greeting the prospective client.

  Wheeland introduced a scarecrow of a guy weighed down by a Rolex that looked heavier than he was. “Karen, this is Russell Dorian.”

  “Hello, Russell,” Frost said, trying for just the right mix of warmth and crispness.

  “ ’Lo,” mumbled the scarecrow. With him were a lawyer and a fat slob of a guy whom he introduced as his security chief.

  Client, brokers, attorneys, and their attendants walked the grounds together. Frost and her assistants showed off the compound’s four residences—the two bungalows, the guest cottage, and the massive main mansion, sixteen bedrooms all told. When the group passed through the living room of the big house, everyone pointedly refrained from making references to what had happened there. No one would ever be so impolite as to stare down at a certain spot on the floor, repaired now to erase even the memory of bullet pockmarks.

  “These valances are antique Toulouse silk,” Frost said. With a theatrical touch of a control button, she opened the soaring curtains. “And, of course, the views—the whole Los Angeles Basin, Palos Verdes, Long Beach, even farther south. You can almost see the swallows returning to Capistrano.”

  After the tour the group gathered on the expansive lawn, taking in the smog-filtered sunshine of a Southern California afternoon. Frost finally got Andy Wheeland’s attention and dragged him off to one side.

  “Jesus, Wheels,” she h
issed. “Is he…?”

  “High as apple pie in the sky, yeah,” Wheeland said, looking over to where Russell Dorian stood, irises the size of Frisbees visible even from a distance.

  “I wanted discretion and you show up with some druggie,” Frost said, shaking her head.

  “Hey, this place had a history long before Ro-Co-Co, you know,” Wheeland said. “The drugs that flowed through here back in the day—they could have run a pipeline direct from Colombia.”

  He had a point. Ro-Co-Co was actually the second murder to go down at the compound. A decade or so back, in one of the bungalows dotting the grounds, the son of the movie-star owner killed the boyfriend of the movie star’s daughter, the son’s half sister. So there had been blood on the tracks before. Probably, if you delved far enough back in Hollywood history, the place had seen any number of untoward acts at any number of out-of-control parties, drunken assaults, and heinous rapes. A stigmatized property, to be sure.

  Still, good Lord! Frost thought, gazing at Russell Dorian. The guy looked—well, he looked as if he had burned his share of brain cells in his day, maybe a few more than his share. He had a finger missing, for Chrissakes—if that wasn’t a sign of ultimate sketchiness, she didn’t know what was. Frost wouldn’t bet against a hat-trick murder happening in the Mulholland Drive compound, not with this degenerate tweaker taking it over.

  Cookie Cantero wouldn’t like Mister Nine Fingers, not at all. But Frost hoped it wouldn’t matter. The two leaseholders would never meet. Dorian had the money to do the deal. He had put down a fifty-thousand-dollar surety bond just to be able to get a viewing of the place. It would all be accomplished precisely as Ms. Cantero had requested—no public notice, a private transfer, one person’s name in place of another on some legal documents in an attorney’s wall safe somewhere. That was it.

  Simple as a dimple, as Frost’s Iowa grandmother used to say.

  24

  At first, Remington’s visit to Georgia went pretty much the way her sojourn in Washington State did. ZAN International and Semke Research proved impossible to pin down. As corporate entities, both were defunct. In the archives of the secretary of state, she found the spore of ZAN, a research-based company with ties to Big Pharma.