13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  He led Remington out of the clinic’s deserted reception area toward the fluorescence of the hallway, into a heavy funk of dogs. When they got into the light, Osi turned and asked to see her ID.

  Remington untucked an identification card from behind a flap in her badge wallet.

  “Sorry,” Osi said. “I get a little nervous here at night. Then the chimp shooting—I’m, like, totally freaked.” He examined the ID and handed it back.

  Guided by Osi, Remington passed through the darkened lobby and into a corridor. The kennels in the back of the building generated a steady sound track of barks and yowls. Twenty feet down the hall, a bank of windows gave out into the clinic’s OR, a large square space with two separate operating-table setups. The lights were dazzling in the room, which still managed to look a little shabby and smelled unclean.

  A tired-looking woman wearing sweatpants parked herself on one of the stainless-steel operating tables. On the other sat a chimpanzee. The chimp had one arm in a sling fashioned out of white hospital gauze. A chain ran from the collar on the animal’s neck a short way down to one of the table legs. With his good hand, the chimpanzee paged listlessly through a glossy magazine.

  “Could you just wait here?” Osi said to Remington. “We don’t want to startle him.”

  More yapping from the kennels in back. As Osi slipped into the OR, Remington heard the injured chimp emit a low, panting hoot. Osi spoke to the woman in sweats, and she came out to join Remington in the hallway.

  “Detective Remington? I’m Cindy Iracane.” She had limp blond hair and was pretty, in a junior college sort of way.

  Remington nodded toward the OR. “That would be…”

  “That’s Angle,” she said. “He’s a little mopey because he’s still coming out of anesthesia.”

  “He going to be okay?”

  “We think. It was pretty traumatic, as you can imagine. Listen, Detective, can we talk away from here somewhere? New people spook him.”

  “Sure,” Remington said. She followed the veterinarian back down the hall toward the lobby. The pale gleam of the aquarium played shadows of swimming fish on the walls.

  “They told me he was supposed to be named Angel,” Cindy said. “But when he was born the temp worker who marked his cage couldn’t spell, so she wrote down Angle. This name suits him way better—he’s an imp of a chimp, you know? Always, like, looking for the angle.”

  “You were out at the sanctuary last night?”

  “I live there,” Cindy answered. “The two caretakers and me all have apartments, or we should have, but Ian lives in his van. Ian Terry phoned on my cell and told me I should call in to the sheriff’s office—you know, talk to Property Crimes? But I haven’t had the chance yet.”

  “That’s okay,” Remington said. “I’m just trying to understand what happened out at the sanctuary. Did you hear gunshots?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was still awake, monitoring the fire reports. Chimpanzees, when they get excited, they raise holy hell. We can hear them at night if there’s a coyote, something like that bothering them. But we aren’t close enough to hear, like, the ordinary shrieks and whoops.”

  To Remington’s astonishment, Iracane let out an openmouthed howl. It didn’t sound like anything an animal might make, but after a beat she heard Angle answer it from inside the OR. Layla laughed.

  “You should hear Ian,” Cindy said. “He’s African, so he, like, naturally knows apes, and he can, you know, talk to the animals, like Doctor Dolittle?” She lowered her voice. “He’s ‘do-little’ in more ways than one—you know what I mean? I wind up doing all the work around that place.”

  “You think, because you were up the hill and couldn’t hear, the commotion might have started before?”

  “That’s intentional, us living so far away from the yard. If we were right next to them, we’d never get any sleep.”

  Again, she lowered her voice. “I wasn’t wild about being out in the middle of nowhere with just a couple African boys as my next-door neighbors. Like they was setting me up to be their love buddy or something, you know? But Ian’s okay. You think he could be the one who set this whole thing up?”

  “What do you mean?

  “Never mind. I was just crazy-talking.”

  “So you’re in your quarters, and you hear the gunshots and the animals screaming. What time do you think that was?”

  “I know I should have looked at the clock, but I didn’t. It all happened, like, in a late-night jumble. What I was mainly worried about was the comms—our cellphones had been in and out all evening, and the landline was down. I was thinking things could get ugly real quick, with the wildfire and no communications.”

  “I’m still trying to get clear on the time,” Remington said.

  “We were in emergency mode, trying to arrange the evacuation. When I went to my apartment for the truck keys to bring Angle over here, it was a couple minutes after midnight. I had been up at the yard with Ian for, like, an hour by then.”

  “So, maybe eleven p.m. when you first went down to the yard?”

  “Yeah, about that. The animals were nervous all night from the fire, but this was something else. I heard loud, loud screaming, and I’m thinking, Mountain lion in the compound—that happened one time—or could be one of the damn chimps tangling with a skunk. But then the gunshots.”

  Cindy clapped her hands. “Bang—big pause—bang! I wasn’t quite sure how many shots. We’re over the hill and down on a slope in the middle of a bunch of eucalyptus, so the sound echoed in the canyon. The whole business took maybe five minutes to quiet down—no more screams, no more shots. Then I run over and Ian’s awake, too, and together we get our flashlights and head over the hill to the yard.”

  “Eleven fifteen, around then?”

  “Probably more toward eleven thirty. Late at night, I don’t move none too fast.”

  A fish shadow from the aquarium swam across Cindy’s face and disappeared.

  “So you went down at eleven thirty to check on the animals,” Remington said.

  “We find ’em all dead as dust. Ian’s freaking—he keeps saying, ‘Where’s Angle?’ And then the little guy pulls himself out of the ditch in the northwest corner, all bloodied up.”

  “You hear anything, someone moving? A vehicle? Anything?”

  “No way. I’m totally scared now, you know? I figure whoever’s doing the shooting is still out there, drawing a bead on us. I hide with Angle in the shed for five, ten minutes while Ian looks around.”

  “Did Ian leave the yard? When he was looking around to make sure the shooter wasn’t still there?”

  “I don’t think so.” Cindy frowned. “I don’t recall. Pretty soon after that the fire came down, and we had to run. I mean really, literally, run the hell out of there, Ian carrying Angle, me worried the little guy was going to bleed out.”

  “So you ended up here at the clinic?”

  Cindy nodded. “It turned out to look worse than it was. Angle just got dinged in the shoulder. Nothing hit a bone, just muscle. An inch or so farther in, Dr. Heppo said, there’d be all fourteen of them dead.”

  “Dr. Heppo is the vet here?”

  “That’s right, a Middle Eastern guy, Jewish I think, but he’s real good with animals. They contracted him to come out to the sanctuary once a week.”

  “Who’s ‘they’? Who runs Odalon?”

  “A foundation called HAR, Hollywood Animal Rescue,” Cindy said. “I don’t know much about them; I’ve only been on this job three months. Back in July they had a personnel massacre—like, the whole staff fired and replaced. That’s when I hired on. They don’t pay on time—that’s one issue I have with them.”

  “Who do you deal with there?”

  “At the foundation, HAR? Nobody. There’s supposed to be a director appointed here sometime soon. I get emails from an attorney lady, the Odalon lawyer, Pia Liebstein. She sounds Jewish, too, but she’s not.”

  Ms. Cindy Iracane, thought Remington, seemed mightily co
ncerned about who was what ethnicity.

  “I’ll need her contact information,” Remington said.

  “She’s over in Century City, like all the lawyers are.” Cindy looked mournful. “I guess now I’m going to have to find a new job.”

  “You were hired to take care of fourteen chimpanzees?”

  “I’m a para-veterinarian,” Cindy said. “It’s a vocational program, did it down at MiraCosta College in San Diego. Odalon hired me right out of school. I felt really lucky. Thing about taking care of chimps, it’s all about feeding them the right mix—lots of fruits and vegetables—and making sure you don’t get attacked.”

  “They can get violent?”

  “The big males are a bunch of wife-beaters, I can tell you that for sure. Chow-Chow was always whaling on Tamara. If Booth and Mister Jeepers were in a surly mood, I’d just leave their food for them and stay out of the way. They come sniffing around when I’m menstruating, and they got a punch like the kick of a horse.”

  Earlier that afternoon, Remington had done some Internet research. An adult chimpanzee was much stronger than even the most highly conditioned human athlete, able to pull a thousand-pound weight with one arm.

  “Not this guy in there, though, right?” Remington asked Cindy. “Not Angle. He’s gentle enough, no?”

  “He’s young yet. First five or ten years, you can work with them. They pretend you’re their mom.”

  She pointed her thumb toward the OR. “You want to meet him? If I take you in, I think it’ll be okay. He’s still gooned from the pain drugs.”

  They went back down the hall, Cindy leading the way. She opened the door to the OR.

  “It’ll help if we hold hands,” she said. Her palm felt sweaty as she grabbed Remington’s. The detective allowed the para-vet to lead her into the brightly lit room.

  “Don’t stare him straight in the eye,” Cindy whispered.

  Angle looked up at their approach, hooting quietly. Osi sat in an orange plastic chair near the second operating table.

  “He’s fine,” Osi told them. “He hates dogs, so this is not a great place for him to be.”

  “Angle?” Cindy said. “This is a friend. Friend, Angle.”

  In a smooth, effortless movement, Angle pulled his legs up underneath him. Keeping her gaze averted, Remington looked over at the animal out of the corner of her eye. The chimp had slipped his right arm out of the sling. A square of taped-down gauze marked the wound on his upper right shoulder, where the coarse black hair had been shaved away to reveal pink-orange skin.

  In spite of herself, she and the ape locked eyes. Remington felt a small shiver of recognition in Angle’s gaze. She remembered when she and her dad had been down at the zoo in San Diego, famous worldwide for its primate work. The baboons, gibbons, marmosets, and other monkeys had never impressed her.

  But the apes had. The half-dozen orangutans the zoo kept were the old men of the jungle—jowly, massive, and Buddha-like. There were bonobos, too, one of the world’s largest captive populations of the least well known of the great apes. Whenever you caught the gaze of the creatures, they displayed an uncanny sense of having something there, some inner life, intelligent and deep.

  That’s what her father had said: “Something there.”

  Layla hadn’t said anything.

  “Soul,” Eugene Remington had added.

  Remington now felt her dad’s “Something there” in the eyes of Angle the survivor ape.

  The chimpanzee suddenly reared upright on the table, let out an earsplitting whoop, and charged at Remington. The neck chain ran out its length and revealed itself to be entirely useless, unattached to the table leg or anything else. It clattered across the tiled floor as Angle ran at her, canines bared.

  In front of Remington, Cindy abandoned ship, stumbling sideways out of the path of the rampaging chimp. Osi grabbed at the chain as the animal ran past him, but missed.

  Remington braced herself.

  7

  The ape covered the fifteen feet between them on all fours, in a series of effortless, bounding leaps. Remington wore her sidearm in a shoulder holster, but she had no time to draw it.

  Then Angle blew past Remington in a whooshing cloud of stale ape smell. Still whooping, the chimp jumped into the arms of a bearded, sandy-haired young man who stood in the open OR doorway. The animal curled into his arms and hooted contentedly.

  Curly, shaggy sideburns and a blond chin-strap beard. Pale gray eyes. The stranger wore pegged pants, black-and-white striped, and a blousy white shirt worthy of an English rock star. In fact, the whole package looked vaguely European, hipper than thou.

  The newcomer hooted softly down at Angle, his face inches from the chimp’s. The two gazed into each other’s eyes, making a perfect man-beast family portrait.

  Remington’s heart was pumping fast.

  “That wasn’t an aggressive whoop he was giving,” the rock star said. “That was an excited whoop.”

  “Who’s this?” Cindy Iracane asked, straightening up from where she had cowered away from the chimp’s charge.

  “I’m sorry,” Osi said to Remington, edging forward until his foot stood on the loose end of Angle’s chain. “I really thought I had it fastened.”

  “That’s okay,” the rock star said. He unclipped the chimp’s collar and let it fall to the floor. Then he turned on his heel and, still carrying Angle, walked out the door, passed into the hall, and disappeared.

  For a beat, nobody moved. “What the hell? Who was that?” Cindy said.

  “He work here?” Remington asked Osi, and the vet’s assistant shook his head.

  Cindy lurched toward the doorway of the OR. Remington pushed past her and made it into the darkened reception area first, in time to see man and ape leave by the front door. Cindy and Osi followed after.

  “You left the door unlocked?” Cindy chided her assistant.

  “Hold up,” Remington called.

  The nighttime traffic on the PCH lit the clinic’s façade with strobelike flashes. The rock star guy in the striped pants kept walking, even though Remington was telling him to stop.

  “He doesn’t like dogs,” he called back to them. “A kennel is the worst place for him.”

  “Hello? Excuse me?” Cindy shouted, trying to get the guy’s attention.

  But the shaggy rock star crossed the clinic’s parking lot and made it to a black Ford van. He opened the sliding side door and allowed Angle to climb complacently out of his arms into the interior.

  “Hold up, sir, will you? Did you hear me?” Remington caught up with him, holding her shield out.

  “Sure, I heard you. But this individual’s welfare outweighs any other concern.”

  Cindy Iracane steamed up to them, with Osi behind her. “What do you think you’re doing? That chimp—”

  Remington put her hand up, and Iracane went quiet. When she turned back to ask Rock Star his name, she saw something that momentarily stopped her. Angle, sitting in the vehicle’s middle seat, reached out and calmly buckled himself in with the seat belt.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Mace Arthur,” said the rock star, giving Remington a rock star’s name. “I really have to focus on getting this guy out of here. I have a much better place for him.”

  “That’s my chimp,” Cindy protested.

  “Please,” Remington said, silencing her again.

  “He’s not yours, and he’s not mine.” Mace slid shut the side door of the van. “He belongs wholly to himself. He’s no one’s property.”

  “Hold on,” Remington said. “Just don’t do anything.”

  “He wants to go with me.”

  Cindy snorted. “You can read his little mind?”

  Mace Arthur gave her a withering look. “I asked him, and he told me,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Cindy said.

  “Just wait a second,” Remington said.

  The detective recalled a touch-and-go moment during a traffic stop, back when she was
on patrol. The driver had a burned-out headlight and his truck fit the profile on a stolen-vehicle alert sheet, so Remington had pulled him over. She approached the truck and asked the driver to keep his hands on the wheel. But the guy kept rooting around behind the bench seat of the truck. No matter what Remington said or shouted at him, he kept doing it. Remington finally drew down on him, but that still didn’t help.

  Finally, just a few fraught seconds before Remington was going flip the safety off her pistol, the guy comes up with a driver’s license from a duffel bag in back of the seat.

  It was like that now. Remington felt as if she had entered a strange world where words came out of her mouth, journeyed into darkness, and vanished down a deep well. She wasn’t getting through.

  “Could you step back from the vehicle, sir?”

  “Feel free to follow me,” Mace Arthur said.

  “Stop,” Remington said.

  “Detective, is it?” Arthur asked. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in. “But that badge is for an investigator from the D.A.’s, right?”

  “We can talk here or over at the sheriff’s department,” Remington told him.

  “Neither, I think,” Arthur said.

  He continued, speaking carefully, as if he were talking to a child. “I’m rescuing a wounded individual from cruel conditions, and I have the training and familiarity with the individual to do it. I am driving to an address in Encino. I’ll be using the Pacific Coast Highway to the 10 and then the 405, passing right by the sheriff’s substation in Pacific Palisades. So if you want to put the hue and cry out on me, your attack dogs and sirens and flashing lights, you can do it then.”

  He started the van’s engine, giving low, calming pant-hoots to Angle as he did so.

  “Sir, sir—!”

  Mace Arthur raised his voice, cutting Remington off. “Our main concern has got to be our wounded victim, don’t you think, Deputy?”

  “Turn off the engine,” Remington said, using her best command-and-control tone. “Sir, do not leave the scene.”

  “Or what? You’ll shoot?” Mace Arthur tossed a business card out the van window in Remington’s general direction. It fluttered to the asphalt of the All-Pets parking lot. “That’s the address where I’m headed, and my contact information—cellphone, everything.”