13 Hollywood Apes Page 9

  Mace Arthur stood up from his seat beside Cornell. “Your Honor, may I speak?”

  “I wish you would, Mr. Arthur, if it’s to explain yourself. Did you steal the chimp?”

  “Your Honor, Judge—” Cornell broke in.

  “Let him talk, Mr. Cornell,” Clifford said.

  “There was no theft here, Your Honor,” Mace Arthur said. “I simply asked an individual whom I have known since he was an infant if he would like to go with me. He indicated that he would, so I acceded to his wishes.”

  “Your Honor—” Cornell tried again, but Clifford cut him off.

  “You acceded to his wishes? How did you determine what the chimp wished? Do you want the court to take your word on that?”

  “Angle had been through a horrible trauma, Your Honor,” Arthur said. “His whole family killed, his home swept by a wildfire. He needed comfort, security, a familiar face.”

  “You weren’t going to allow a little thing like legality to stand in the way of providing that.”

  “For the first three years of his life, he and I spent every day together. He knew me. I was a safe harbor.”

  “And disobeying the lawful order of a peace officer?” Judge Clifford asked. “Detective Remington?”

  Remington rose to her feet. “Judge?”

  “Was Mr. Arthur disruptive, violent, or threatening? Did he invoke force?”

  “What he was, Your Honor, was gone. I directed him to stop, and he didn’t, just climbed in his van and left. I followed him to the residence in Encino, or Tarzana, or wherever it is, and that’s where I met his attorney.”

  “Did the chimpanzee appear under duress, or unwilling to accompany Mr. Arthur?”

  “To tell you the truth, Judge, they seemed like father and son.”

  “Well, I can recall times in my own childhood being unwilling to accompany my father somewhere, but I get your point.” The judge paused. “Does the county have an opinion here?”

  “We definitely don’t want citizens disobeying lawful orders from our police, Your Honor,” ADA Winnig said.

  “What about chimp-stealing, how do we stand on that?”

  “Any property theft is a serious violation of the law, of course,” Winnig replied. “That said, I am not sure we want to get into a tug-of-war at this juncture, since we’re dealing with a traumatized animal.”

  “One party is missing here,” Judge Clifford pointed out. “Is there anyone from the other side?”

  “Your Honor?” Cornell said.

  “The animal refuge, the place that burned. That’s the owner of record, correct?”

  “An Odalon Animal Sanctuary representative was notified via email, Your Honor,” Cornell said. “I received no response.”

  “Short notice,” Judge Clifford said. He tapped his pen on the bench in a quick, percussive solo. “All right, let’s allow the creature stay where he is—let’s say for a week. I want an animal-control officer or a Humane Society person out there this afternoon at the latest, see to conditions. And I want to hear from someone with proper ownership papers.”

  Clifford picked up his gavel and gave it a sharp, authoritative slam. “Injunctive relief granted for seven days,” he said. “Let’s sort this out, people, and determine what’s in the best interest of the animal.”

  10

  “The wife, the husband, and the lover,” Randy Gosch said to Rick Stills. “Game, set, and match.”

  “Common law is particularly well stocked with love triangles,” Stills agreed. “But there’s a statutory history as well.”

  A female voice broke in. “What in the world could you two possibly be talking about?” said Remington, appearing in the doorway of Stills’s inner office. “I wonder—could it be?—yes, by God, I think it is! A certain celebrity murder! You might be among only, oh, maybe one or two billion other souls on the planet gnawing on that particular bone right at this very moment.”

  “I think one or two billion might be low,” Stills said.

  “He was just giving me the benefit of an informed legal opinion,” Gosch said fussily.

  “Uh-huh,” Remington said. “You see the Times this morning? They’re going into deep-coverage mode. There’s a human-interest piece in the Calendar section on the Rococo period in art and music. Just so everyone has their pop references straight.”

  “Eighteenth century,” Stills said. “Late Baroque.”

  “Very good,” Gosch sang out. It was love.

  Stills turned to Remington. “Dispatch had it that you’ve already been to court this morning.” He couldn’t keep a faint accusatory tone out of his voice, as if he had caught her out in some professional wrongdoing.

  “On the Odalon thing,” Remington said. “The survivor, who goes by the name of Angle—not Angel but Angle—is enjoined by Judge Clifford, pending resolution of ownership issues, to stay right where he is, at the somewhat shambolic home of his former babysitter and friend of the bosom, one Mace Arthur.”

  “Mace Arthur is the chimp?” Gosch asked.

  “Mace is the man, Angle is the ape,” Remington said. “You’d like him, Randy—Mace, I mean. He’s partial to those tight britches of which you are so very fond.”

  “I can’t wear them myself, but I do like to see them worn abroad,” Gosch said.

  “Randy, you are dismissed,” Stills said. “Go about your business, whatever that may be.”

  “My business is your business, Honorable Assistant District Attorney Stills, sir.” Gosch gave a rude flip of his wagger as he left the room.

  “I have a few interviews today on the burglary case up in the canyons,” Remington told Stills. “Then I was going to hop over to the South Valley.”

  “What’s in the South Valley?”

  “The former compound of the late oilman Spencer Graham in Encino, where resides Mr. Mace Arthur, rock star and chimp fancier. Judge Clifford instructed me to keep an eye on the surviving chimpanzee. The animal is going to be held at the Graham place at least for the next week. Then I was going to track down the Odalon people, the lawyer for the nonprofit that runs it. Her office is over in Century City.”

  “I wouldn’t want to interfere with the dictates of a sitting judge,” Stills said. “But I need to have a sit-down and sort out your duties and schedule and all those good things like that.”

  “Okay,” Remington said.

  “It’s Layla, right?”

  Layla nodded, feeling a slight flush creep into her face. She hoped Stills didn’t notice.

  “We might have gotten off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I just don’t see this animal-sanctuary case taking up all the office’s time.”

  “Right,” Remington said.

  “Like I said, it’s something for Property Crime or Animal Welfare,” Stills said.

  “Right,” Remington repeated. She turned to leave.

  “Ah, and I was thinking,” Stills said. “Can you do dinner tonight? We could talk over what’s what around here.”

  Remington tried not to allow a small thrill to assert itself in her mind. It’s just work, girl. But the man was handsome as hell.

  “Sure, sure,” she said, trying to sound offhand. “I’ll call or text you, late afternoon sometime.”

  Stills nodded and returned his attention to his desk, effectively dismissing her. But as she left he called out a question.

  “You know what the three species of chimpanzee are, Remington?”

  —

  The Spencer Graham estate appeared deserted as Remington headed up the long driveway. After facing off against Mace Arthur’s lawyer in court and then stopping at the office, she had driven straight to Encino. It was almost noon. Evidently, the ragtag assembly of hippies occupying the place liked to sleep in.

  Remington had looked into the Encino-Tarzana estate. Spencer Graham was an oilman who had made his money in L.A.’s Signal Hill fields, sold out to Edwin Doheny, and retired to collect butterflies on a promontory overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

  According
to an outdated LA Weekly story that Remington found archived on the Web, the hilltop mansion once hosted something called the People’s Republic of Harmony, a New Age collective organized around a shaman with the improbable name of Captain Snoo. The sheriff’s department log on the property showed only a couple of visits by deputies in the past few years, both of them attempts to track reported runaways.

  Remington pulled up next to the carriage-house garage. The driveway to the geodesic dome around the back was blocked by a haphazardly parked International Harvester tractor. She left the U-boat and proceeded on foot.

  Rounding the carriage house, Remington encountered two women working in a sprawling vegetable garden. Though the fall morning had come in cool, the first was bare-chested and wore a flowing white cotton skirt. The other was completely naked and displayed what looked like menstrual blood running down her leg. Remington hoped it was menses, anyway, and not evidence of a wound.

  The two looked over at her without surprise. They made no move to cover up.

  “Hey,” the bare-chested one said.

  Nature Girl No. 2 saw Remington checking out the red stain on her legs. “It’s good for the soil,” she said. “The ancient Greeks did it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Remington said. She told the women she was looking for Mace Arthur.

  “We don’t know who that is,” said the one in the cotton skirt.

  “We’re just here for the week,” said the other.

  Remington tried to describe Arthur. “Tall, long blond hair, wears whacked-out clothes.”

  “Is he the guy with the monkey?” Nature Girl No. 2 asked.

  “Are you a cop?” said the cotton-skirted one.

  “Why would you ask that?” Remington responded. “Have there been police around here recently?”

  “Just checking,” she said. “You on a warrant?”

  “She’s too young for Five-O,” the other woman said, singing the sentence out in an odd, fey way.

  “I’m a detective investigator from the county district attorney,” Remington said.

  The women crouched back down among their green-stalked vegetables.

  “I’ll just head over to the dome, if you don’t mind,” Remington told them. “Maybe he’s around there.”

  “We don’t mind,” said the cotton-skirted one. “Why don’t you bring him a cucumber for his monkey?”

  “That’s okay,” Remington said.

  “Take one,” she said, and tossed the cuke across the twenty feet separating them.

  “Nice arm,” Remington said.

  “To speak only of her arm,” said Nature Girl No. 2, and the other gave a laugh.

  Remington stuck the cuke into her jacket pocket and headed down the driveway.

  The dome was empty, the area around it deserted. Peering inside, Remington saw the floor of the space cluttered with toys—a large rubber Kong dog chew, a soccer ball, three or four rag dolls. Discarded remains of fruits and vegetables marked the space, too. The cargo net strung across the roof had branches and fronds woven into it, forming a sort of nest.

  Far off across the parklike grounds, Remington saw an adult and a child, playing with what looked like a goat. She headed toward them, realizing, as she approached, that it was Mace Arthur and Angle. The chimpanzee was tearing up a small paperback book and feeding the pages to the white, shaggy-haired goat, one after another.

  “Detective,” Mace Arthur called out as Remington came toward him. He wore a leather vest and the same extravagantly striped pants Remington had seen at All-Pets, the first night she met the man.

  Angle stopped his page-ripping routine and turned to watch Remington. He hooted softly and climbed into Arthur’s arms. Remington heard Mace soothing the chimp, whispering little shushes, vocalizing hoots, and repeating, “It’s okay, a friend, it’s okay, a friend,” over and over.

  The goat took the paperback and ambled away with the half-destroyed book in its mouth.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” Remington said.

  “Oh, yeah, the book,” Mace Arthur said. “It was a stupid little police procedural. I sussed out the whole thing in the first few chapters and lost interest.”

  “How is he?” Remington asked, inclining her chin toward Angle.

  Mace Arthur reacted in an odd way. He peeled Angle from his arms and set the chimp down in front of him. He said, “Angle, look.” Then he performed a series of hand gestures. No response.

  “Angle, look,” he repeated, gesturing with his hands again.

  Angle held out his own hands palms up, as though imitating a Muslim praying, then brought the fingertips of one hand to his lips.

  “Angle says he’s good,” Mace Arthur said.

  The chimp then held both hands at the sides of his face, palms in, before moving them sharply downward.

  “Good, but a little sad,” Mace Arthur said.

  “He signs,” Remington said, surprised. She had heard about chimps using sign language but had never actually seen one in action.

  “Yes, he sure does sign. He’s got a four-hundred-word vocabulary, one of the largest in apedom.”

  Angle moved away from Arthur, using his good arm to swing himself up into the lower branches of the locust tree beneath which they stood. He crouched in a crook of the trunk, gazing impassively down at Remington.

  “I’m wondering if this is a good idea, me talking to you,” Arthur said. “Should I call Harry?”

  “Oh, this is an informal visit,” Remington said. “No need for lawyers, I don’t think.”

  “You were just worried about the little guy,” Arthur said, gently skeptical. He reached up to put his hand into Angle’s.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in finding out who killed the thirteen chimpanzees up in the Malibu canyons.”

  “You think I did it?”

  “Well, no, nothing like that,” Remington said. “But, now that you mention it, where were you the night before last? Say, between the hours of midnight and six a.m.?”

  “Just an informal visit, huh?”

  Remington shrugged. “Your call. You can talk to me now or come out to the Malibu Civic Center and I’ll interview you there.”

  Arthur didn’t reply. He continued petting Angle, in the tree above him.

  The chimpanzee suddenly stood upright and launched himself off the tree, sailing down at Remington in a smooth, effortless leap. Remington had no choice but to catch the beast in her arms.

  An armload of ape. Angle’s smell instantly enveloped her. It was a warm, musky odor, not unpleasant. His face only a few inches from Remington’s, Angle scrunched up his eyes and spread his lips into a huge, teeth-baring grin, resembling nothing so much as the contorted smile of some cartoon madman.

  “Oh, well, he likes you,” Mace Arthur said.

  Remington felt vaguely uncomfortable, as she had been recently when one of her former high school friends, a proud new mama, thrust a gurgling infant into her arms. Angle was a lot more animated than that human baby. The chimp squirmed and snuggled, still wearing the manic grin. Remington tried to imitate the soft, calming pant-hoots of Mace Arthur.

  The ape-child hooted back at her.

  “He’s only a big kid,” Arthur told her. “The other night scared him out of his wits.”

  Remington tried to hand Angle off to Arthur, but the chimp wrapped his long arms around her neck and clung to her. Remington took out the cucumber that the Nature Girls had given her and presented it to Angle.

  The chimp gave a low shriek of delight, grabbed the cuke, and leaped back up into the locust tree. He gnawed eagerly at the vegetable.

  “He was hungry,” Remington said, laughing.

  “Is that a cucumber in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Mace Arthur said, laughing, too. Angle joined in with a series of aak-aak-aak vocalizations.

  It was all a little cracked, Remington thought. But in an agreeable, undeniably comic sort of way. Angle’s winning personality, his intense relationship with Mace Arthur,
and especially the chimp’s signing abilities—it all opened up an intriguing possibility. It had been pitch-black the night of the Odalon massacre, but here was a glimmer of light.

  —

  With Remington carrying her new best friend, Angle, she and Mace Arthur hiked back through the grounds toward the chimp’s dome home. Its morning reading material thoroughly consumed, the goat reappeared and followed docilely along behind them.

  The unclothed women in the garden had vanished, but there were a few more people visible on the estate, most of them far off, gathered around the mansion. Everyone was listless, no one seemingly eager to get on with the day’s work. If there even was any work on the schedule, Remington thought.

  Mace Arthur told her that the People’s Republic of Harmony was long gone, relocated to southern France, and Shaman Snoo gone with it. “He calls himself Gurujim now, ever since the morals charge got dismissed.”

  Remington didn’t want to ask what that was all about. The Spencer Graham estate was once again controlled by the original owner’s heir, Theo Graham, who lived in England. Arthur said that he knew the man well, that they were in discussions to establish an animal-welfare center on the property.

  They arrived back at the dome. Remington watched as Mace Arthur briskly attended to Angle’s morning needs, making sure the chimp’s water and food trays were clean and full, raking out the dirt floor of the dome, gathering the toys into two large bins.

  Meanwhile, Angle made a thorough search of Remington’s pockets, extracting her change, car keys, badge wallet, and cell. Arthur warned her not to let Angle take the phone.

  “He’ll keep it and hide it,” Arthur said. “He collects them.”

  Arthur switched on a flat-screen TV, bolted to one of the dome’s side panels and protected by a mesh screen. Angle immediately left Remington’s arms and swung up to the cargo netting to be next to the TV, which was displaying images of wildlife. The program seemed to be about the wildebeest migration in Africa.

  “He can watch other animals for hours,” Arthur said. “But snakes freak him out.”