13 Hollywood Apes Read online

  “We’re not going to hear anything on any subject apart from Ro-Co-Co for a long time,” Gene Remington said.

  He had the sound off on the TV, but, yes, Layla could see that there was indeed wall-to-wall news coverage about the celebrity murder. Her father had left discarded pages of the L.A. Times all over the floor. He usually read it that way, dropping each section as he got done with it. Over Layla’s objections, Gene had gotten a second subscription for her when she dropped by, so that they could each have their own copy.

  “You believe this woman?” her father asked.

  “Which one?”

  “This ex-nanny of theirs. Says that Ross Murphy might need consoling right now, since he lost his best friend,” Gene said. “He needs to be consoled.”

  Layla gave her father the setup for the old joke. “That’s like the kid who kills his parents—”

  “And then throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.” Gene Remington laughed. Then he cocked an eye at his daughter. “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Layla countered.

  “What do you mean, ‘what’? Consoling a brokenhearted Ross Murphy. There’s your opening, princess.”

  —

  The converted school bus that was Ian Terry’s only home survived the Lost Hills wildfire. He had moved it out of harm’s way, away from the sanctuary, parking it at night on a Calabasas backstreet. It wasn’t really a bus, more the size of a van, but the vehicle’s familiar yellow color betrayed its origins. The words big bear transportation and bear valley unified school district could be read on its side, painted over but still legible.

  Inside, the vehicle resembled an exploded suitcase. Ian Terry was not the world’s most careful housekeeper. He missed his real home, his real place in the world: the green hills of Rwanda. His wife and family had remained behind in the village of Nyamyumba, outside Goma, on the shores of beautiful Lac Kivu. Waking or sleeping, how Terry dreamed of those waters! This life he was living in California was temporary. He felt like a ghost here, a half man, a fake man, as they called the apes in Bantu. The bread of exile tasted bitter.

  So he slept in the school van, and didn’t pick it up or neaten it the way his wife, Empafania, would do in their home in Rwanda, just curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag at night amid the mess and the clutter of his sad life. At times Terry felt that he related better to apes than to his fellow humans. In California, everyone seemed to be engaged in meaningless pursuits that served only to render them unhappy. He disdained the miserable plywood shack assigned to him at the Odalon Sanctuary. The fact that his school-van home was mobile gave him a comforting feeling of impermanence. Soon he would return to Africa.

  That night, the second one after the apes that he cared for were killed, he parked his van on a deserted stretch of canyon road ten miles to the south of Westlake. Farther south, through a slot in the foothills, the Pacific Ocean glimmered in the light of a silver moon. He ate out of a can, as he usually did, and imagined that the far-off water was the lake of his home, the lake of his youth.

  Why ever did you wander, oh misbegotten son of Africa? So asks the poet.

  Ian Terry’s main occupation in America, apart from performing nursemaid duties to apes, was feeling sorry for himself. He was an expert in this respect, developing and savoring the numerous shadings of homesickness. He felt nostalgia for the grasshoppers of home, for their crunchy taste during the eating season and for their presence in the fields, for the fat green fields themselves and even for the cow pies in those fields. In California the land was so dry, so unloved by God, that it was no wonder it burned.

  Weary, he tossed his gravy-stained can aside and dropped into a fitful doze. Even in sleep his worries dogged him. Where would the money come from? The sanctuary people owed him many paychecks—he thought five or maybe six—but now the sanctuary was gone. Did people ever starve in America? He thought not, but in his dreams he could not fight his way out of the endless maze of poverty and loneliness.

  He must eventually have entered a much deeper sleep, since he didn’t hear the creak of the school bus’s accordion door as it folded open and then slid shut. Terry had often been shooed off when he parked on the canyon roads above Malibu. Sheriff’s deputies or park rangers thought he was a hippie. There were squatters in the hills, for sure, but Terry had a real job at a real place of employment. He never thought to argue with the police. His childhood in Rwanda had trained out of him any resistance to authority.

  The bus door opened and closed, but Ian Terry didn’t wake. When he did, only seconds later, he felt a queasy uncertainty. Was he still dreaming? He was alone with the chimp Angle in the bus. He knew that it was Angle by the particular smell, and by the outline of the ape’s form against the cobalt-blue night sky outside the window.

  His voice croaky from sleep, Terry pant-hooted a welcome. It was the last sound he would ever make outside of a shriek. The chimp attacked, barreling across the closed interior of the school van. Screaming and barking, the beast tore into the bewildered human. This could not really be Angle, the victim thought briefly, not gentle, loving Angle, his friend. Yet it was he. Terry recognized Angle, gone mad now, possessed by the Devil.

  The ape pounded away at him with long, gangly arms, breaking ribs with every blow. A few times in the wilds of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, where he first helped naturalists study chimpanzees, Terry had seen ape gangs attack one another. Now the beast on top of him employed the same bullying strategies.

  One by one, the animal ripped off three of his fingers, from hands raised in a defensive posture against the assault. Biting into Terry’s face with its fearsome inch-long canines, punching at Terry’s windpipe with one fist, the chimp reached with the other hand for the man’s crotch. It gripped the victim’s penis and scrotum and tore the whole shebang off his body as though it were a flower uprooted by the stem.

  From pain, from a crushed skull, and from loss of blood, the human soon enough dropped out of consciousness. But the ape wasn’t done. It flung the African’s rag-doll body around the tight quarters of the van until the interior walls were painted red. Then, crouching over the broken form and screaming a terrible yowl of triumph, the chimp drank the blood coursing down Ian Terry’s face as though the dark, salty rivulets were a well-deserved prize of victory.

  9

  Like a lot of those who style themselves great men, Birmingham School of Law dean Harley Bassoff hated being second-guessed. He had already refused to meet the young woman once, delegating her to one of his underlings, Assistant Dean Gwen Goulet, always a safe bet for unimportant overflow appointments. So Dean Bassoff found himself irritated upon seeing the name Patricia Sedgewick on his appointment calendar once again.

  He buzzed his assistant. “Reggie?”

  Reggie Kane informed him that he had penciled the Sedgewick woman in at the request of the president of the law school himself, Laurant Reins.

  “I left you a note about it,” Reggie said.

  Dean Bassoff considered himself an extremely busy person—a dynamo, in fact—and secretly relished that status. His man Reggie wasn’t the lone sentry guarding his gates. As dean, Bassoff had a staff of guardians, deflectors, and door slammers. In the imposing travertine-marble administration building, his private inner-sanctum realm lay buffered behind not one but two outer offices.

  He did not often stray into the real world. Once in the past half decade he had lowered himself to teach a class in constitutional law. It hadn’t gone well. A bit of scrawled doggerel in the basement bathroom of the law school’s Alabama Hall told the story: “Dean Harley Bassoff/Had students he couldn’t make a class of/He said ‘My teaching’s so awful/It should be unlawful/But it’s me that I’m making an ass of.’ ”

  Normally, the surname Sedgewick would cause any academic administrator or fund-raiser to snap to full attention, bespeaking, as it did, old money and deep connections. Bassoff himself had felt his interest piqued when she initially requested an audience. />
  But this Patricia woman hadn’t checked out. She was evidently not one of those Sedgewicks. At twenty-nine, she hadn’t even graduated from an accredited law school. Instead, she joined the tribe the old-fashioned way, reading for law before passing the bar in Georgia. Did some time at the Southern Poverty Law Center with Morris Dees and Joe Levin.

  Not exactly a pedigree that would interest Bassoff. The dean searched his mind but decided that their paths had never crossed. Her ties to Birmingham School of Law were tenuous at best, a single semester as an adjunct two years ago. Then she had dropped out of sight.

  Yet here she was again. As Bassoff planned it, he would not to deign to rise but would greet Patricia Sedgewick from behind his desk. That changed the instant the woman entered his office. He reflexively shot to his feet. She was extremely good-looking, for one thing. Although even at sixty the dean was not immune to beauty, her presence impressed itself upon him in a different and—for his professional purposes—more important way.

  Money.

  As dean, one of Bassoff’s roles—his primary one, really—was that of a rainmaker. His success rode on a single seven-figure number, which represented the dollar amount of the law school’s endowment.

  “When they call Harley well-endowed”—his wife’s little joke—“it’s always about his financials.”

  “Mizz Sedgewick,” he said, intentionally slurring the honorific so that it could fit all political persuasions. Coming out from behind his desk with his best smile, Bassoff seized the woman’s right hand with the two of his.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “Hello!” Bassoff always crowed loudly when he met people. He considered that it was the best way to impress himself upon their minds.

  A Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, boy hard-scrabbling to the top by way of CUNY and Harvard Law, Dean Bassoff had become a connoisseur of the nuances of the wealthy. Early on in his career, he had had to resist the urge to bite their pearls to see if they were real. He eventually learned not be overly distracted by surface, by display, by clothing. The most recognized reliable marker, shoes, had betrayed him more than once, in a notable instance where shabby, run-over pumps almost lost him a million-dollar touch, an obscure heiress of an oil family down in Mobile.

  No, it was bearing and manner. Bassoff fancied that he could tell a wealthy person even if he or she had exchanged clothes with a homeless street bum. The truth went beyond presentation and attitude toward an assumption of grace. This could be faked, too, of course, but not as easily as a Rolex or a Prada handbag.

  “It is so good to see you again,” Bassoff said.

  “We haven’t met,” Patricia Sedgewick said.

  “No? I was sure…During your time as an adjunct?”

  “My office was in the basement of Davis Hall,” she said. “I’m not sure you get down there all that often.”

  “Well, we all have to start somewhere. What can I do for you?”

  He braced himself for a tenure-position pitch, or perhaps a plea for his name on some foundation letterhead.

  “How many law centers do you have here at BLC?”

  Bassoff was surprised by the question.

  “Depending on your definition of a law center,” he said, “we have either three or four. Dag Robberstad’s Maritime Law Center, the Center for Tax Law—that’s run by our distinguished twin law professors, Joel and Ethan Baum—and Jay Zukolow’s Center for Justice, Civil Rights and Law. Sherry Baldwin is ramping up one for family law, but she is having some personal difficulties right now, so the inauguration has been postponed.”

  The Sedgewick woman nodded, allowing the luxury of her blond hair to drape over her face in a particularly fetching way. “Cancer of the uterus, is that right? Ironic in a family-law professor. Fate can be cold.”

  Bassoff winced. He knew Sherry Baldwin well. This little position-grubbing upstart sitting in front of him had no right to speak about her that way….

  But he held himself back. A thought occurred to Bassoff that somehow Patricia Sedgewick was very well connected. Professor Baldwin’s illness was a secret held closely within her family, known in the administration only to him and the school’s president.

  “What did you say?” he asked Sedgewick, a thin edge to his voice.

  “I wonder if there is room for another.”

  “Another…?”

  “Law center,” Sedgewick said, a please-keep-up tone to her voice.

  “Professor Baldwin shows every indication of weathering this storm. She is widely recognized as one of the topflight family-law theorists, not just in the country but in the world. We do not have ‘room for another one,’ as you say, because there is not another one like her.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Patricia Sedgewick said. “I meant, in your considered opinion does Birmingham School of Law have room for another law center?”

  Dean Bassoff was beginning actively to dislike her. “I am not sure what you mean.”

  “Simple question.”

  “Do you wish to volunteer at one of our law centers? Because if you do, I’m afraid the waiting list is long and the selection process harrowing. We do have a clinic that always needs help—”

  “Not as a volunteer, no, not an existing center. I want to create one.”

  “You want to create a new law center?”

  “Yes?”

  “Here at Birmingham?”

  “Yes.”

  Bassoff finally had a handle on it now. The young woman sitting before him was quite mad. Visions of grandeur afflicted her. Clinical studies had shown that this was so often the precise age range—mid- to late twenties—when mental illness kicked in.

  “Miss Sedgewick—” Bassoff began.

  “Trish,” Patricia Sedgewick interrupted.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Sedgewick,” Bassoff persisted. “What you suggest is so…outlandish, I guess is the word, preposterous, it has me wondering if you are in complete possession of your faculties.”

  “Well, if I founded a law center here I would indeed need to be in possession of a faculty.”

  She smiled. Dean Bassoff looked grim.

  “The creation of a university-level law center is a massive logistical, administrative, and, most pertinently, financial undertaking. Not to be embarked upon lightly, and certainly not by a self-schooled, not fully fledged, erratically employed high school graduate such as yourself.”

  Sedgewick still retained her amused smile. “Unless…” she said.

  “Unless…?” Dean Bassoff said, rising to his feet. “I am quite busy this afternoon.”

  “Unless…” Trish Sedgewick said again.

  “I am not playing games!” Bassoff exclaimed.

  The young woman looked up at the bow tie looming over her. A casual, perhaps a shade insolent, expression played across her face.

  “A self-schooled, not fully fledged, erratically employed high school graduate such as myself,” she said, “could never conceivably establish a center of law anywhere, especially at some prestigious institution of higher learning, certainly not this one—unless, of course, she had a three-hundred-thirty-million-dollar inheritance and a willingness to spend a healthy percentage of that amount on the creation of said law center.”

  Dean Bassoff sat back down. He was robbed of speech. The woman in front of him was not.

  “What would you say that percentage might be, Dean Bassoff? Ten percent? A quarter? What do you think it would take?”

  The question must have been rhetorical, because Bassoff made no move to answer it. He was too busy with the math.

  “You are correct in a few of your assumptions,” Trish Sedgewick continued. “I am young—not yet thirty—and my C.V. displays none of the customary sterling stopovers for an ambitious student of the law. But I have a few allies.”

  Bassoff’s bow tie bobbed up and down, up and down, as he struggled to swallow his pride. It didn’t go down easy. How had he missed her?

  “There are so many things I want to do….” Trish said, her voice trai
ling off wistfully. Then she snapped her eyes back on Bassoff, her gaze made newly powerful by the weight of—what ridiculous amount had she mentioned, a third of a billion dollars?—by the weight of a ton of money behind it.

  “I’ve decided that what I want to do most of all is something that you may be able to help me with.”

  “What? What is that?” Dean Bassoff said weakly.

  “I want to make law.”

  —

  “Where is the animal now?”

  Harry Cornell, standing at the plaintiff’s table: “He’s been placed in a fine environment on the Spencer Graham estate, Judge, very secure, with plenty of—”

  Judge Barry Clifford interrupted. “Just the legal address, please.”

  “A domicile at 538 Sweet Oaks Road, Encino.”

  “And is it a licensed animal-care facility?”

  “The structure where the ape is now housed actually lies within the borders of the community of Tarzana,” Cornell replied. “It’s legal in Tarzana to keep chimpanzees as pets, an ordinance grandfathered in since the days of Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

  “That’s convenient,” Judge Clifford said sourly.

  Remington didn’t have to show up in court that morning. She could have let the county lawyers take care of it. Barry Clifford was a no-nonsense district judge who refused to suffer fools in a courtroom that was, more often than not, stuffed chock-full of them.

  The courtroom in question, No. 2 in the Santa Monica Courthouse, was empty this early morning. Bailiff, clerk, Judge Clifford. Then there was Santa Monica ADA Paula Winnig, for the county, appearing distracted, and on the other side, Attorney Cornell and the scruffy, charismatic Mace Arthur. Plus Remington, sitting in the gallery.

  “I guess I’m not getting this,” Judge Clifford said. “You want injunctive relief to prevent the government from enforcing its property laws?”

  “We seek to preserve the status quo, with the individual Angle in a stable setting,” Cornell said. “Until we can sort out the ownership issues.”

  “Are there ownership issues? According to the incident report—I see young Detective Investigator Remington is with us today—this chimpanzee was removed from a veterinary hospital by Mr. Arthur, who in so doing disobeyed a lawful order by a peace officer.”