13 Hollywood Apes Page 27

  Among the papers was the original 1958 bill of sale for the thousand-acre Odalon property. The movie producer Norman Dorian, acting as the Trappe Ranch Corp., purchased the huge Malibu canyons tract for a pittance, even by the standards of the day. Two years later, Trappe Ranch Corp. leased the land to Hollywood Animal Rescue for the nominal price of a dollar a year. HAR, in turn, contracted with the newly created Odalon Animal Sanctuary to operate the private habitat for retired movie chimps.

  Business as usual, Layla supposed, frowning at the copied documents. Norman Dorian was by these various legal shell companies buffered from any personal liability that might be incurred by running an animal sanctuary. But things turned stranger and more interesting within the past year, when Dorian died—passing like the showman he was, late in the day on the Fourth of July.

  Written into Dorian’s will was a clause that entailed the property “for the natural lifetimes of all animals presently sheltered at the Odalon Animal Sanctuary.” Control of Trappe Ranch Corp. passed to Norman Dorian Trusts, a legal entity administered by a board of directors. But the control passed with the entailment intact. Which meant, as far as Layla could make out, that the thousand-acre tract could not be sold, transferred, or subdivided while the Odalon apes still lived.

  Of course. Follow the money. The unalterable rule of human interaction and one of the fundamentals of detective work. The money, in this case, was represented by a prime chunk of Malibu canyon land. Up top, from the ridgelines above Odalon, there were glorious views of the Pacific. Just a few miles across the foothills were the upscale residential estates of Calabasas, Agoura Hills, and Thousand Oaks.

  How had Trish Sedgewick gotten her hands on documents held so tightly by the law firm of Buffum, Buffum, Oatman & Stanfill? The back-end legalities of the Odalon Sanctuary case had never been ferreted out by anyone in the media. Remington’s own investigations had run up against a brick wall named Pia Liebstein.

  “A thousand-acre property in the hills above Malibu,” Layla mused out loud to her father. “What might that be worth, do you think? What kind of money are we talking about?”

  But Gene was intent on watching Sam Spade peel the topcoat off Wilmer Cook, trapping a pair of hand cannons in the punk’s own pockets. Layla got on her smartphone and looked up some random prices of comparable Malibu real estate. She was shocked. Acre lots were going for half a million dollars.

  The Odalon property was worth not just millions but hundreds of millions.

  The Maltese Falcon, Layla knew, was a prime example of what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a “MacGuffin movie.” MacGuffin referred to an item at the center of the plot, the thing that motivated the human activity and generated all the drama. It didn’t much matter what the MacGuffin was. It could be a jewel-encrusted bird statue, it could be a dot of microfilm, a thumb drive, or a suitcase full of money. All that was required was an item that a lot of people wanted and for which they were willing to kill.

  With the legal clause entailing the Odalon property until the deaths of the sanctuary animals, Remington had discovered her MacGuffin. To house a chimpanzee properly cost somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars annually. To be responsible for fourteen of the creatures represented a huge nut for someone to pay, more than a quarter of a million dollars, year in and year out. But, given Norman Dorian’s wealth and his devotion to the comfortable retirement of former show chimps, Remington had discounted it as a factor in the case.

  But this was different. No one could afford to ignore a possible windfall of two or three hundred million dollars. The fourteen apes living at Odalon had to die because they were holding up somebody’s payday.

  But whose?

  Among all the trust documents and probate papers, Remington was unable to trace where the property went after the death of the sanctuary animals and satisfaction of the entailment. With all the apes gone, a thousand-acre spread of priceless real estate would suddenly become free and clear.

  With all the apes gone…And they were, indeed, all gone, except for Angle.

  The terms of the entail specified that the land could not be sold or transferred, but neither could the chimpanzees themselves. Remington had read horror stories about apes raised in warm family environments being sold into the research gulags, to be poked and prodded and experimented on wholly at the whim of white lab coats. Chimpanzees with multihundred-word ASL vocabularies found themselves with bolts being drilled into their brains.

  Norman Dorian had wanted to prevent such a monstrosity from happening to his animals. Thus the entail.

  Where formerly there were fourteen sanctuary primates preventing a Malibu-canyon land rush, now there was only one. Angle represented the last remaining roadblock for anyone maneuvering toward a multimillion-dollar Trappe Ranch payday. It could not be a coincidence that this specific problem animal had been implicated in a horrendous series of killer-ape attacks. If the preliminary hearing went as Rick Stills planned, Angle would be euthanized. Problem solved.

  The entail put a whole new spin on the Odalon case. Sitting there on her dad’s couch with a classic bit of black-and-white noir blaring on the TV in the background, Remington felt overwhelmed. There were forces at work that she could only dimly perceive, unstoppable forces capable of ramming right through whatever obstacles, human or otherwise, prevented them from attaining their goal.

  Thirteen dead apes—well, they were too insignificant even to list on the casualty report. A couple of dead Africans? What was that when compared with untold wealth? Some community-college graduate acting as a para-vet? Not worth mentioning. A Century City lawyer? A pity, but still. The ends (millions) justified the means (murder).

  On the TV, the crack gumshoe Sam Spade was telling the mysterious Kaspar Gutman that it was time to talk turkey.

  “Mr. Spade,” responded Gutman, “have you any conception of how much money can be got for that black bird?”

  —

  Layla was gold-shield-less, a detective who was not allowed to detect. She had no professional standing. Of her limited range of choices, she could remain on Gene Remington’s couch, watching old movies, trading wan witticisms with her dear progenitor, and going quickly insane. Or she could cocoon herself in her own apartment and likewise go quickly insane.

  Remington chose a third course. She had the feeling that she was in possession of more pieces of the puzzle than anyone else, more than Trish Sedgewick even, and certainly more than the L.A. County D.A.’s office. She felt stuffed full of information. She was like a jack-in-the-box with Rick Stills sitting on its lid.

  But Remington knew that she still lacked a vital piece, one that would allow all the other puzzle pieces to make sense. She rooted around on the Web, sifting through the LexisNexis law database—the D.A.’s office hadn’t yet gotten around to pulling her access. She hit the animal-rights sites, the save-the-apes sites. Chimpalooza.com had a huge CLOSED FOREVER banner emblazoned above its home page. She tried to delve further into Semke Research, ZAN International, and the Norman Dorian Trusts but scraped bottom each time.

  Both Rick Stills and Trish Sedgewick were very much in the news. Sedgewick was pictured on a much-talked-about cover of LA Weekly, posed in the embrace of a grinning chimpanzee. “STATUTORY APE” was the headline, with a tagline question added underneath: “Can chimp champion Patricia Sedgewick of Jus Animalium Law Center pull Odalon out of the fire?”

  Finally, Remington had to get out on the streets or explode. She had read another article, this one part of the extensive Huffington Post chompanzee coverage. The reporter interviewed a C-movie actress, Arlene Honeywell, who had served as the cherchez la femme in a straight-to-video number called Savage Breast. On a whim, she tracked down the woman’s contact information. It wasn’t difficult: Honeywell had a fan website.

  Lacking the U-boat, Remington was forced to borrow Gene’s F-150 pickup for the drive down to the Seal Beach retirement community where Honeywell lived.

  When she got there—check
ing in with security as rigorous as anything the Pentagon might throw up—Remington realized that she wasn’t just meeting with Arlene Honeywell. The whole panel of C-movie actors and actresses had assembled in the duplex apartment to which the compound’s guard guided her.

  Honeywell appeared to be the youngest of them. The woman’s pale, perfect complexion and sad, faded eyes gave her the air of a silent-movie star. Remington understood why she had been cast as the frail beauty opposite a chimpanzee’s brutish beast.

  The others in the crew were more boisterous than the modest, reserved Honeywell. They all had the kind of odd, off-kilter features that made faces memorable: a beak nose, a lantern jaw, bulging eyeballs. Remington experienced the uncanny sense of being suddenly marooned on the Planet of the Minor Character Actors. She had seen them before on this or that I Dream of Jeannie rerun, say, but she couldn’t quite link names to faces.

  They weren’t shy about cluing Remington in. Billy Deevers was like a poor man’s version of Mickey Rooney. Vincent Raut had a leading man’s good looks, except for an immense sloping forehead straight off Easter Island. Fran Romano came from the “slutty drunk” subcategory of Central Casting. Honeywell, the ostensible interview subject, was shoved into a supporting role by the others—her inevitable fate as a bit player, it seemed.

  “You all appear together as some sort of a package deal?” Remington asked them.

  “We’re negotiating for a reality show, so we gotta stick together,” Deevers said. The elusive scent of fifteen minutes of fame hung in the air.

  Vincent Raut broke in with a blunt stab of his forefinger. “You ain’t a detective no more. You’re suspended. So we don’t really have to speak to you, do we?”

  “Well, technically I’m on leave,” Remington said. When she had first spoken to Honeywell on the phone, something in the woman’s voice prompted Remington to equip herself with a gift for the trip to Seal Beach. She pulled it out now from her purse: a fifth of Maker’s Mark whiskey.

  “Does anyone have anything we could drink this out of?” she asked.

  “You know,” Billy Deevers observed, “Trish Sedgewick said you were maybe all right.”

  His words triggered a mad scramble of glassware, pouring, and consuming.

  “Do you speak often with Ms. Sedgewick?” Remington asked.

  “She’s our champion,” Fran Romano replied. “She’s going to get our movie deal.”

  “Reality TV show,” Raut corrected. The stern expression on his face was mellowing with every sip he took of the bourbon.

  Remington went around the room and requested that the actors relate their experiences with show chimpanzees. It was difficult to prevent them from all talking at once.

  “That damn little bugger Chow-Chow stole my cigarettes one time,” Fran Romano said. “I chased him around the set, trying to get them back, and he ate them! Then he made sick all over me! Like he had planned to do it all along!”

  “I know, I know!” Raut agreed. “They’re devils!”

  “Half devils, half angels,” Deevers said.

  “I had black-and-blue marks all over my body,” Romano said. “Chow-Chow loved to pinch my nipples.”

  “Just like me!” Deevers exclaimed, grabbing her.

  Everyone laughed. They were off and running. Remington didn’t have to ask many questions, and she couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise if she’d wanted to.

  Raut told of Veronica, one of the dead Odalon apes, who had her own trailer on the set of It’s a Wild, Wild World. “I’d come in, she would give me a hug, go over and fill the teakettle with water from the faucet, turn on the stove, take a couple tea bags out—she knew I liked Irish Breakfast—and make us both a cup.”

  They spoke about their careers, which for some of them stretched back to the sixties. What they didn’t speak about was the three murders and one assault that had been laid at the feet of the chompanzee killer ape.

  “Come the day,” Raut predicted, “they aren’t going to let apes play in movies no more.”

  “They got animatronics and computer-generated technology now,” Deevers said. “Did you see that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes? Not a single primate in the whole thing.”

  “If you don’t count Gary Oldman and Keri Russell as primates,” Fran Romano said.

  Romano’s hootlike call set off the whole room. Soon every actor there was hooting, grunting, and panting, imitating their chimp co-stars. It was the bourbon talking, but Remington had to laugh at the surreal quality of it.

  “Can’t fight crazy,” Deevers said, laughing, too.

  “That fifth is one dead soldier,” Raut declared, upending the bottle so that the last drops went into his glass.

  A philosophical pause followed Raut’s observation. Remington stepped in. “Any of you know Norman Dorian?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure, sure.” Deevers indicated Honeywell. “This one was Mr. Dorian’s mistress for a while.”

  Honeywell blushed scarlet. “We were only friends,” she stammered.

  “Hogswallop,” Deevers said.

  Raut leaned forward. “Me and Billy and Fran tried to go up to the Odalon Animal Sanctuary to visit our guys. They wouldn’t let us in.”

  “Turned us away at the gate,” Deevers added.

  “I don’t think that was right, do you, Detective?” Fran Romano asked. “Some of those animals, they were like children to us.”

  Children who pinched you black and blue, Remington thought. She opened her purse and withdrew a legal folder with some of her Odalon material in it. Clearing a space on the table around which they all sat, she put out the photos of Hickler’s fat-slob associate and the group shot with the fake burn boss. “Any of you recognize these guys?”

  Sets of prescription eyeglasses went up on the noses of the actors. “What is this, like a photo lineup?” Deevers was delighted.

  “You may have seen them around the chimps,” Remington said.

  “Are my eyes going, or are those photos blurry as all get-out?” Raut asked.

  “Don’t know either of them,” Deevers said.

  Arlene Honeywell suddenly leaned in. “Look!” she cried. “Isn’t that the Chimp Wizard?”

  Fran Romano agreed with her, but the two men said no.

  “The Chimp Wizard?” Remington asked.

  “George something. Curious Georgie, we used to call him,” Romano told her. “An animal trainer.”

  “He’s an impresario-like guy who used to come around to shows and conventions where we’d be appearing as C-movie actors,” Deevers said. “I don’t think it’s him.”

  “It doesn’t look like him,” Raut said.

  “It is, too, him,” Honeywell said, suddenly losing her reserve.

  “Was you his mistress, too?” Raut sneered.

  “Shut up!” Honeywell stalked out of the room.

  “I really need to find this guy,” Remington said. “Does anyone know his last name?”

  “Was he involved in Odalon in some way?” Romano wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure,” Remington said. “I’d just like to talk to him.”

  “When detectives say they just want to talk to you, look out, because the handcuffs are coming out!” Deevers brought his stumpy arms forward to be cuffed.

  “Funny thing,” Romano mused. “You know in the children’s book? Curious George wasn’t a monkey at all. He didn’t have a tail, and monkeys have tails.”

  “He was a chimpanzee,” Deevers said.

  Honeywell returned. She tossed a postcard-size flyer onto the table in front of Remington. “George Wold,” she said. “His name was George Wold.”

  On the card was the drawing of a man in a top hat and tails, waving his cane over a chimpanzee who crouched beside him. It was impossible to tell if the face in the highly stylized drawing resembled the one in the photo Remington had obtained from the journalist Emma Lucas.

  “The Chimp Wizard,” read the text, alongside a URL for Chimpwizard.com. Scrawled on the back of the
card was the name George Wold and a phone number.

  Deevers held the card up next to the photo, comparing the two. “I don’t think it’s the same guy,” he said.

  26

  The preliminary hearing in the case State of California v. Mace Damien Arthur convened at the Santa Monica Courthouse on Main Street, District Two Superior Court, Judge Etha Keris presiding. Broadcast and cable reporters were present. Network and local satellite trucks reached their pale electronic hands toward the sky as if in prayer. Print and Web journalists were there, too, from a New York Times stringer down to the lowliest animal-rights blogger.

  The town could have set up bleachers. Prospective audience members lined up early. Many of the spectators mistook themselves for participants, representing this or that point of view. “Free Angle” T-shirts were everywhere. PETA set up a booth. At one point in the morning, a gaggle of frat boys in ape masks careened through the crowd, attempting without success to raise a chant of “Chom-pan-zee! Chom-pan-zee!”

  Both ends of the political spectrum showed. Some sort of creationist group, considering the occasion a golden opportunity to retry 1925’s Scopes Monkey Trial, sent a small contingent with a placard that read, “Evolution Is a Lie.” They tried unsuccessfully to distance themselves from their brethren on the even more extreme right, the Westboro Baptist Church crazies, there to rain down fire-and-brimstone hate on everyone.

  Remington despaired of finding a place for herself in the courtroom. She called Randy Gosch on his cell, avoiding the Malibu office phone line. He said he’d try, but then she hadn’t heard from him.

  She reached out to Ory Ballmer.

  “How about you deputize me a U.S. marshal for the day, so I can get into that courtroom,” Remington suggested.

  “No can do, sweetcakes,” Ory said. He was still upset at how their last phone convo had gone down. Him all worried about his cop career and Layla judging him for it.

  “Just get me into a Marshals Service Windbreaker,” she pleaded.

  “It wouldn’t help anyway,” Ory said bluntly. “It’s a state court, and marshals are federal.”