13 Hollywood Apes Page 6

  He put the van into gear, hopped it over a concrete curb, crossed the grassy strip of the boulevard, and used his blinker to pull out into the traffic on West Sunset, heading down toward the PCH.

  “Oh, hell no,” Cindy muttered, watching the van recede into the night.

  Remington noted the plate number. She bent to pick up Mace Arthur’s business card from the pavement.

  “I guess I should have tied that little sucker down a bit better,” Osi said.

  —

  The address in Encino, in the hills up near the reservoir, turned out to be a commune.

  Or something. Remington couldn’t figure out quite what.

  She followed the rock star’s van through an impressive if decayed front gate, with a colonnaded 1930s mansion set back on a curving drive. The grounds were anything but elegant, dotted with a collection of shacks, tents, and improvised structures. Three buses, minus their wheels, were pulled up in a U-shaped formation, representing the domicile of someone, or several someones.

  The old sixties term “crash pad” came to Remington’s mind. The whole arrangement resembled what Max Yasgur’s farm must have looked like the day before Woodstock. Or, more to the point here, the gracious estate of old L.A. money that had become infested by squatters.

  Fitting place to take a chimp, Remington thought. According to her GPS, the estate straddled the borderline between Encino and Tarzana, the Valley community right next door. Tarzana was originally founded on the sprawling ranch property of Tarzan of the Apes novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  Still following the black van, she took a driveway that forked off from the grand house. Across the lawn, Druidic figures gathered around a bonfire. Pickups and battered compacts were parked haphazardly, but then a modern, gleaming RV loomed out of the darkness. An untethered goat. A sign nailed to a utility pole: no dogs allowed. Below that, another sign, this one hand-lettered: No butterfly stompers.

  Remington was in direct violation of official procedure. She had not called in her movements to the sheriff’s department, hadn’t said anything to anyone since early evening, when she informed dispatch that she was going to check out Cynthia Iracane at the veterinary hospital. The truth was she felt a little embarrassed at the turn of events. She wasn’t about to radio in that she was in low-speed pursuit of a stolen chimpanzee. She could hear the shop laughter all too clearly.

  She had left Cindy behind at All-Pets, informing her that Angle’s whereabouts were a police matter now. Iracane was upset, but she didn’t put up too much of a fight. Remington got the idea that beneath the young woman’s bluster she was relieved to be relieved of Angle. Remington was just as relieved to be relieved of Cindy “Is-he-Jewish?” Iracane.

  She did call her father, using her hands-free. “I won’t be home for a little while.”

  “You at a bar?” Eugene Remington asked.

  “No, no, on the job.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “As usual. Nobody wants to work with you. Why are you so unpopular?”

  “Dad—”

  “Are you getting into trouble?”

  “I don’t know. No. I hope not.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “A knuckleball,” Layla said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “I’ll be up,” her father said. “It’s Steve McQueen night on TCM. The Getaway and Papillon. Two of my favorites.”

  “The Peckinpah is good. So is the other one,” Remington said, and she hung up.

  Ahead of her, the black van turned off the compound’s endless driveway. It pulled into a gravel lot in front of a one-story outbuilding.

  The carriage-house-style garage featured three big bays. Its exterior picked up the style of green-and-white trim from the estate’s main house. But since no structure on the grounds could be left uncustomized, some genius had added a small geodesic feature, a dome built of hammered-flat automobile hoods, attached to the garage’s back side like some sort of countercultural tumor.

  A single skunk light provided illumination for the area. Its beam failed to penetrate the parklike setting behind the building. A lot of acreage, Remington thought, checking out the silhouettes of trees fading far back into the dark, toward the wild slopes of the foothills.

  The black van pulled up next to the dome. Remington maneuvered the U-boat so that it partially blocked the other vehicle’s exit. Mace Arthur emerged carrying a sleeping Angle. By the time Remington approached, the chimp had awakened and Arthur had opened what looked like a hatch inside the dome.

  “Mr. Arthur,” Remington called.

  Favoring his wounded arm, Angle swung easily into the dome and up into a cargo net strung across the forty-foot radius of the circular structure.

  A smiling Mace turned to Remington. He held out his hands, wrists together, as if for cuffs. “Please, call me Mace,” he said.

  “You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” Remington said.

  “Ah, but then you don’t know my worth, do you?” Again, impish.

  He gestured toward Angle, happily lolling in the netting. “You see? We don’t allow dogs here. If you knew his history, you’d know what a torture it was for him to be within smelling distance of a kennel. A constant reminder of trauma.”

  “There’s a concept in law, obviam lex,” Remington said. “My Latin’s a little rusty, but I think that’s right. It means just because an illegal act accomplishes good doesn’t render it legal.”

  “Let me guess,” Mace said. “Law school in the evenings. An ambitious detective.”

  “Let me guess,” Remington retorted. “A chimp-stealing kidnapper.”

  “Just to make you feel better, I’d like to give you a touché on that, but no.”

  “I’m trying to figure your interest here. I mean, before I arrest you.”

  “No one can really steal a person. It would have to be kidnapping, but that’s not the case if the individual in question comes along willingly.”

  “He’s an ape.”

  “My psych professor used to call statements like that ‘a blinding glimpse of the obvious.’ I asked Angle if he wanted to come with me, he said yes, so we went.”

  “You asked him.”

  “Yeah,” Mace said.

  Headlights. A sedan swung up the drive and pulled in beside the garage, blocking Remington’s SUV.

  “This might be the doctor with your medications,” Remington said.

  “Hello, Harry,” Mace said to the bronzed, gray-haired gent who climbed out of the sedan carrying a sheaf of papers. He wore khakis and a pink polo shirt.

  “Harry Cornell,” the gent said, introducing himself to the detective. “Mr. Arthur’s lawyer.”

  “Detective Layla Remington, Mr. Arthur’s arresting officer.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Cornell said, peeling off a single sheet from the sheaf and presenting it to Remington. “An order on motion for injunctive relief signed by Judge Barry Clifford, Superior Court. It restrains you, first of all, from removing the juvenile individual known as Angle from these present environs, and, second, preserves the status quo regarding Mr. Arthur and Angle until a hearing.”

  “You work fast,” Remington said to Mace.

  “Well, my lawyer does,” Mace responded.

  Cornell smiled. “Detective Remington?”

  “Deputy Detective Investigator Layla Remington, if you please,” Mace corrected Cornell. “I think she’s dabbling in law school, Harry. Maybe you could take her on as an intern or something.”

  “If you have no further business here, Detective Investigator, I suggest we reconvene at ten a.m. Thursday morning in superior court, downtown Santa Monica,” Cornell said. “I’ll follow you out.”

  Remington shrugged. It annoyed her, but what did she care, really? She was surprised with herself as it was, out on a night call that wasn’t even, technically speaking, a call at all. She still had the option of doing nothing, of letting the ASPCA or someone else handle the w
hole business.

  Mace Arthur stood watching as she turned and headed out. She and Cornell both returned to their vehicles. The last thing Remington heard before she slammed shut the U-boat door was Mace Arthur and Angle, hoot-calling each other, sounding as if they were laughing.

  —

  Layla’s father had waited up. He was sitting in his chair in the media room, smiling and sharp-eyed, when Layla came in.

  “He made it,” Gene Remington said. “On a raft of coconuts.”

  Layla gave him McQueen’s last line in Papillon: “ ‘I’m still here, you bastards!’ ”

  “He should have gotten an Oscar. Dustin Hoffman, too. The other one, The Getaway, that was the movie where McQueen and Ali MacGraw hooked up. On the set, I mean, she dumped her husband and then they were a couple for a long time. No babies, though.”

  Layla got a glass of white wine from the supply Gene kept for her in the fridge. She and her father went out and sat on the little terrace of the Glendale condo. Gene idly shelled pistachios from a bowl he had on his lap. Off to the north, they could see a nighttime slice of the San Gabriels, though the backyard orange trees and a pair of multistory apartment houses cluttered the view.

  “You get to watch the news tonight?” Gene asked. “They’re saturating the Hollywood Hills murder.”

  Layla actually didn’t mind that the Odalon massacre turned out to be virtually heatless for the sensation-seeking missiles of the media. The incident in the tinderland canyons of Malibu had been almost wholly eclipsed by a celebrity murder. That was okay. She preferred laboring in obscurity.

  She and Gene talked over her day, the sad scene at the sanctuary, the bizarre meeting with the surviving chimpanzee.

  “The animal was reading a magazine?” Gene said, after Layla finished.

  “Well, I don’t know about reading, but he was sort of leafing through it.”

  “As he was sitting on the exam table in the veterinary hospital’s OR,” Gene said. “Looking at some glossy. What was it, The Economist?”

  “They’re pretty smart,” Layla said.

  “Only, how would you feel, your whole monkey clan gets massacred in the middle of a forest fire? Would you be reading a magazine?”

  “Okay, Dad, there are four species of great ape: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, and chimpanzees. None of them are monkeys.”

  “So a chimp is an ape.”

  “Yes,” Layla said.

  “Right, right,” Gene said. “What I’m wondering is if you knew all that before this case came down. I’m guessing no—you had to look it up like everyone else.”

  “They’re all saying I should drop it,” Layla said. “Velske just about came out and called me a moron.”

  “Johnny Velske—that’s the kettle calling the pot,” Gene Remington said. Her dad had spent his entire working life as a police clerk at the Parker Center. He knew Deputy Velske from way back.

  “You always tell me you’re tired of B-and-E’s, 429s, destruction-of-property raps,” Gene said. “That’s the bread and butter of police, you know, property crime. But you wanted flesh and blood. Be careful what you wish for, right?”

  “You didn’t see the dead laid out in that yard,” Remington said softly. “Mothers and babies. The whole family. It was pretty hard to take.”

  Remington was all too aware that her father lived vicariously through her. He had ambitions for Layla that she didn’t necessarily envision for herself.

  Homicide. Ranking it as the top job was a screamingly old-fashioned view of policing. There were a lot sexier, a lot better-funded details nowadays—white collar, computer, terrorism, even antigang. None of that would do. Gene thought “walking the chalk” was the be-all and end-all, the summit of a cop’s career. Never mind that no one outlined bodies in chalk on murder investigations anymore. They took digital photographs.

  The problem was that her father had somehow infected Remington with the same virus. At least, she knew she didn’t want to field Malibu burglary reports for the rest of her career. The homeowners always asking, “Don’t you want to dust for fingerprints?” Their flat-screen TVs, the center of their lives, ripped from the wall and taken away, the jagged hole in the living-room drywall all that was left.

  “How are you feeling tonight?” her father asked. Ever since her mom died, when Layla was four years old, Gene had gone all maternal on her, trying to compensate.

  She told him she felt fine.

  “You know, this chimp thing could be a good test case for you,” he said, cracking open a pistachio.

  “That’s what I thought,” Layla said.

  “Andy Acretti say anything to you?” Commander Andrew Acretti headed up the Law Enforcement Bureau of the sheriff’s department, administering Remington’s Malibu detail.

  “Jesus, no,” Remington said. “Are you kidding? Acretti hardly knows I exist.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, princess,” Gene said. “You’re the hot cop up from patrol, and the brass are all watching you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so,” Gene said.

  When his daughter got her name in the newspapers during an incident the previous year—a stalled-out home invasion of the Republican county committee chairman’s residence, a firefight with then deputy Layla Remington somehow right in the middle of it—Gene concluded he had a prodigy on his hands.

  “No doubt this whole thing will amount to nothing,” Layla said. “Probably somebody at the sanctuary saw the wildfire coming down and just mercy-killed them all.”

  “No doubt?”

  “Well, no, not zero doubt, I guess.”

  “Give me a theory of the crime,” her dad suggested.

  “I don’t have one. I’m still concentrating on the staff.”

  “Any murder, look close first.”

  “Right,” Layla said. “But if not close, then what?”

  She had thought about it, searching in vain for some reason an outsider might be interested in killing chimpanzees. A crazed “sportsman,” out to employ his night-vision toys, not up to massacring humans, too much law-enforcement blowback from that? Thrill-killing chimps was the next best thing. But someone would have to be really crazed, certifiably crazed, to be in those canyons with the Lost Hills wildfire raging right next door.

  “Canvass local outlets, track down recent night-vision sales,” Layla said, almost to herself. Yeah, and Internet sources. Jesus, there couldn’t be more than, what? Two or three hundred of those? It seemed impossible.

  “Emergency services,” her dad said. “They might have a log of everybody coming and going back in the hills around that time.”

  Not bad, Layla thought. She’d reach out to Dale Chezar, the public-safety lieutenant she had worked with when she was detailed for traffic control during the wildfire. There had been roadblocks and security checkpoints all over the area. Maybe someone saw somebody, jotted down a license plate.

  Gene continued to crack open the pistachios, beginning to get on his daughter’s nerves with it. She finished her wine, gave her father a buss on his grizzled cheek, and left for her own apartment in Los Feliz.

  When she went, Layla took along an image of a wildlife sanctuary littered with bodies. She thought it possible that she might be the only soul who cared. The rest of the world was obsessed with another, very different crime scene.

  8

  The shooting deaths of thirteen animal-sanctuary chimpanzees had all the hallmarks of a perfect human-interest story. A tragedy to pluck the heartstrings of news broadcast viewers, something for a network slot, or even a viral craze on the Internet.

  But events conspired to shove Odalon off the front pages altogether, bury it deep within news reports of any kind, rendering it invisible in broadsheet, broadcast, or broadband. Dead humans trumped dead apes. Dead celebrities—well, dead celebrities trumped everything else this side of an alien space invasion. And even then…

  That fall two movie stars had moved in together, leasing a compou
nd off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Even though the male of the couple had three other homes in the area, they had taken up residence in the new place along with their retinue of assistants, bodyguards, and maids.

  The two stars liked the Mulholland compound because its layout kept the photographers at bay. They also liked that it was Marlon’s old place.

  Over the past half decade, Donny Coll had evolved into an action-comedy-drama all-purpose film superstar. Six movies, all grossing north of $300 million. But that wasn’t the only achievement that made him into catnip to the tabloids.

  As it always did in a voyeuristic culture, the personal underscored the professional. Donald Coll stole America’s cinematic sweetheart Cookie Cantero away from his former costar and best buddy, Ross Murphy. The drama played out at watering holes and clubs across L.A., culminating all the way across the country during a memorable night at a boutique hotel in Manhattan. As the love triangulated into a public spectacle, the media heat peaked from the merely volcanic and soared into something that resembled a radiant, interstellar plasma.

  Ross Murphy, Donny Coll, Cookie Cantero. Ro-Co-Co. Nobody made it through a supermarket checkout line without confronting at least one of their faces, and usually had to put up with all three.

  Their loves, their heartbreak. He said, she said—even if none of them had said anything. Cookie was dumping Donny and running back to Ross. Ross was threatening Donny with physical violence. Donny and Ross were both dumping Cookie and shacking up together as lovers.

  It was easy to forget that there were very real, very caustic human emotions bubbling somewhere underneath all the tabloid blather. At least, easy to forget until a hot autumn night in mid-October. To the west, wildfires roared through the canyons above Malibu, but the Hollywood Hills lay dark, lit only by the reflected gleam of the Los Angeles Basin below.

  Jack had never liked Ross Murphy mooning around the place after his bust-up with Cookie. Had him over a couple of times when he was hot from his TV show, but now…well, the guy was a buzzkill.