by Gil Reavill
“What’s he doing here?” Jack asked, standing at the shallow end of the pool, seeing Ross talking to himself and looking furtively off into the dark, toward Mulholland. Toward Marlon’s old place next door.
“I think Tolliver brought him,” Jack’s guy told him. “He’s drinking.”
“Get him out,” Jack ordered, and he sank backward into the water. The next time he looked, Ross was gone.
Where Jack’s place met the border of Marlon’s old property, there was a brush-filled draw that led back down toward Coldwater, a small, quarter-mile ravine whose sides topped out at twenty feet.
Running along the bottom of this ravine, obscured by growths of sage and live oak, a rotting set of logs formed a stairway up to the hillside property next door. In the bad-boy days of the seventies, the stairs had been a way for Marlon and Jack to visit each other, borrow a cup of sugar, maybe, like a couple of neighbors on Seinfeld.
But amid the dope haze of those years the old log steps had long since been forgotten, buried under, grown over, and lost. Fearing coyotes, homeowners kept their pets clear of the little weed-choked ravine, and the paparazzi never discovered the log-studded pathway.
It was about to become the most famous set of stairs in the world.
Leaving Jack’s party that night, Ross found himself in a dark wood, or at least a very dark ravine indeed. He ascended the crude ladder of rotted cedar steps to the compound that his ex-wife and former best friend had leased, coming up off the log stairs to confront a fence at the lower end of a wide expanse of lawn.
It should have ended there. Donny and Cookie had enough security personnel to field a football team. But there was a gap in the fence, and a misfiring motion detector had been shut down and forgotten three months before by a previous tenant, so Ross merely scrambled over a boundary berm and proceeded onward.
Donny, not Ross, was always the trigger-happy gun boy, the cylinder-spinner, the hammer-cocker, forever posing, Oswald style, with a firearm brandished. But Ross Murphy was the one who came heavy that night, carrying an ungainly hand cannon that, as the investigation would subsequently show, he had lifted from one of his bodyguards, a .357 Dan Wesson special that had been fitted with a target barrel.
Prepared to dish out death, Ross wound up unsure of where to go to deliver it.
Which house? There were several in the compound. They loomed in front of him as a collection of blocky white shapes marked here and there by dimly lit windows. Which door? Each structure had a variety of entrances.
A few decades before, Charles Manson’s merry band of killers had gotten lost on a dark errand in these selfsame foothills. They’d wound up killing a pregnant movie star who had the bad luck to be in the wrong house at the wrong time.
That was chance and randomness. Ross had malice and intent.
He opened the first door he came to, which happened to be a guest bungalow. There he confronted a human being who was leaving just as he came in. Nance Alonso, one of the star couple’s assistants.
She stared at Ross, wide-eyed.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
Nance shook her head. Ross raised his pistol. Nance stumbled backward, unable to scream.
Then she raised her hand and pointed.
Did she? Had she really? The issue would be endlessly debated. An assistant so disloyal, so feckless as to direct a killer to his victims. Nance swore that she hadn’t, but she had.
Ross faded back into the dark of the compound, and Nance dialed 911. But the killer planned on beating any police response.
Following Nance’s direction, he crossed the lawn. Then he climbed a set of steps to the expansive balcony and entered a room where Donny Coll lay sprawled on a couch, watching a Giants–Panthers football game.
Six minutes before halftime, Ross Murphy ended his friend Donald Coll’s life, love, and acting career with a blistering fusillade of bullets from his peacemaker. The magnum loads tore through the movie star’s torso, four in the first volley, with the other two in the six-shot cylinder going wide, one to be recovered from a window molding and the other—four months later—turned up by a homeowner in her rock garden five hundred yards down the hill.
Coll and Cookie had arranged to spend a romantic evening alone, just the two of them in the big, rambling main house, infant baby and staff exiled. Their security contingent gathered to watch the game at the estate’s gatehouse, a crucial few minutes away from the movie star clients.
America’s sweetheart heard the gunshots and collapsed to her knees in the master-suite bedroom, forty feet from where Coll lay dying. She then heard Ross’s low, cursing voice and instantly grasped what was happening.
“Ross! Don’t do it, don’t do it, Ross!” Cookie screamed.
Ross wasn’t through. He had three speed-loaders in the pocket of his jacket. He switched loads and walked across the living room to stand over his erstwhile best friend. In a memorable description afterward by celebrity chronicler Josh Alan Barr, Ross Murphy “began banging away at Donald Coll’s face.”
Six more shots to the country’s most famous mug. The wounded heart cannot be soothed by the simple act of killing. It needs to obliterate.
Ross allowed Cookie Cantero to live that evening. She was, after all, the mother of his child (if the child was indeed his, he thought bitterly). Minutes before the security staff poured in through the front door, he exited the way he had come, out the back and into the darkened yard, down the steps, and onto a deserted street in Coldwater Canyon.
The interstellar plasma of the Ross-Coll-Cookie murder triangle sucked up every single bit of media oxygen available. Television, radio, newspapers, the Web—it was all Ro-Co-Co, all the time. Nobody wanted anything else.
At the Los Angeles Times, a county-beat reporter in the San Fernando Valley named Dave Jaccoma approached his assignment editor, Allan Houston.
“I’ve got, like, a dozen chimpanzees killed in a wildlife park up past Calabasas somewhere,” Jaccoma said. “You want anything?”
“Chimps?”
“It sounds as if they were all shot. That’s what I’m hearing from my people in the sheriff’s department.”
“You’re giving me dead monkeys?” Houston asked.
“Hey, I think it’s weird, and people like chimpanzees,” Jaccoma insisted.
“Dave, there’s only one story in the world right now,” the assignment editor said. “You got the wrong species, pal. Get me some Valley color on Ro-Co-Co. Some relatives, ex-agents, somebody. Find out what the hell ‘Rosebud’ means.”
Jaccoma shrugged, bowing to the finger-on-the-public-pulse news sense of his superior. And on the local slant to Ro-Co-Co he did a bang-up job. He found two nannies who had previously worked for Cookie, both of them living together right there in Van Nuys.
—
For Rick Stills, the constant drumbeat of Ro-Co-Co in the news felt as though it were playing directly on his skull.
“Could we just please watch something else?” he asked his on-again, off-again girlfriend, fellow ADA Sheila Hightower.
“There is nothing else,” Hightower said. Stills noticed that Sheila’s ardor for him had cooled somewhat since he had been demoted from Major Crimes to the Malibu satellite office. They were, all of them, every single one of the thousand attorneys employed by Los Angeles County, in constant, jostling competition. Which meant that he and Hightower were rivals as well as lovers. Normally, that rivalry served to spice the relationship. Their lovemaking sessions resembled singles tennis matches, with lots of volleys, cross-court returns, and ninety-mile-an-hour serves.
Tonight, together at her Marina del Rey condo, Sheila couldn’t tear herself away from the twenty-four-hour news channels, toggling between them, dipping into the networks for their Ro-Co-Co specials, on the move constantly, a restless lioness in search of prey. Normally, Rick would have been right there beside her, fighting over the remote. Now every segment seemed like sandpaper on his nerves.
With an undertone of gle
e that Stills considered uncharitable, Sheila had informed him that Janiece Baez, the L.A. County district attorney, was already putting together a team of prosecutors and investigators to deal with whatever criminal case would emerge from the Ro-Co-Co mess. Ross Murphy was in hiding somewhere in Los Angeles, but his attorney promised that he would surrender in the morning. The media cluster assembled for that event would be visible from space.
“This culture really is sick, you know?” Stills said.
“Hmm,” Sheila said, not bothering to look away from the TV screen.
Stills moved to the balcony off Shelia’s study, overlooking the soothing rocking of the marina’s boats. He put on some headphones, got on his laptop, dialed up some Mozart woodwind concertos that he thought might fit his mood, and settled in to work. He had to turn off the RSS news feeds on his computer in order to remain undistracted by Ro-Co-Co.
He didn’t intend that evening’s research to wind up where it did. He started out looking in a couple of legal databases, Westlaw and LexisNexis, to get a handle on eminent-domain issues in a beach-access case that was already on his docket.
As far as he could tell, beach access was the only cloud in the otherwise clear blue sky of the Malibu community. Life would be perfection itself if the authorities would just keep the pristine shores of the ’Bu clear of riffraff interlopers. A billionaire casino mogul had erected a locked gate on a beachfront lane. Parties unknown had vandalized it. One surfer dude in particular had been arrested in the process of trying to tear the gate down using an acetylene torch and a bolt cutter. Criminal trespassing and destruction-of-property charges had been proffered.
Stills would represent the county, not in those misdemeanors but in an action that attempted to determine whether the gate itself had been illegally put in place. He’d be up against the billionaire casino owner’s lawyers, who would ignore the fact that the billionaire casino owner had not, in fact, ever actually taken up residence in his Malibu mansion. The absentee defendant’s lawyers would instead argue that it was the rich man’s prerogative to do whatever he damned well pleased. The government was overbearing in its pursuit of the case. Liberty itself was at stake.
Stills felt his thoughts wandering. The sagging, hairless head of a dead chimpanzee crossed his mind again and again. He typed “Odalon” into a search engine, which asked him if he might have intended to query Odelay, the fourth studio album by the alternative musician Beck. He tried adding “animal sanctuary” to the search but came up with nothing.
Whatever the wildlife place was, up there in the Malibu hills, it was both literally and figuratively off the grid. This seemed improbable to Stills. The Web was a voracious place. To remain uncited was nearly unachievable. Unless, he thought, you intended to remain anonymous.
When he moved slantwise and searched “chimpanzee,” he fell down a rabbit hole. The sheer volume of data was staggering. Among his discoveries was a website that called itself the Third Chimp.
There were three distinct species of chimpanzee, or so the website informed him. One was the common or robust chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, the one everyone knows, the one that was called a “mockman” by its Bantu neighbors. The second was a little more obscure, the bonobo, originally called the pygmy chimp, Pan paniscus—known as the “love chimp” for its freewheeling sexual habits. But then there was a third species, by far the most troublesome, deadly, and problematic chimpanzee.
Ah, yes, Stills thought. The third chimp. Homo sapiens. Human beings.
—
Ian Terry said that he was anxious to know if Remington had seen the chimp Angle, and whether he was all right.
“His shoulder wound wasn’t serious and looks to be healing,” Remington said. “He’s up at an estate in Encino, being well cared for. I’m sure you could visit him if you’d like.”
“The man Mace Arthur was the one who took him?”
“Do you know Mr. Arthur?”
“We hear of him, yeah. He was Angle’s baba, his first father.”
Remington encountered Terry when she returned to the Odalon Sanctuary the next day. She had the Rwandan caretaker meet her in the sanctuary lot off Trappe Ranch Road. Terry looked lost, as if he didn’t know where he should go, now that his place of work was burned out.
“I wanted to speak with you some more about your job, and about what happened that night,” Remington told him. “I know it might bring up bad memories, but it’s important that we figure out what happened.”
“Okay,” Terry said.
“When did you first realize the animals had been shot?”
“We had no warning. In my country we have a saying, ‘Death does not sound a trumpet.’ It was like that here.”
“Perhaps there was something, some detail that didn’t seem important at the time but, looking back, it could be significant. Was there anyone there at the sanctuary who could have shot the animals?”
“No, no, everyone had gone because of the wildfire coming down,” Terry insisted. “We were up at the residences when we heard the shots, Cindy and me.”
“That was at the sanctuary offices?”
“Yes, and the residences were over the hill, maybe a kilometer from the yard, but we could hear the shots.” He made a plosive sound with his lips, repeating it a half-dozen times, puffing out his cheeks.
“Thirteen shots?”
“Maybe more,” Terry said. “I didn’t think to count until it was all over. I went out to Cindy, who was standing outside her cabin. ‘Did you hear that?’ I ask her, and we try to figure what was going on.”
“One thing I am unclear about—why was the sanctuary’s rifle found down near the yard?”
“That I do not know.”
“Can you speculate? Where was that gun usually kept?”
Terry gestured vaguely up toward the little dirt track. “In the toolshed of the barn. It had a trigger lock on it, but we usually kept the key right in the lock. Anyone could have taken it and used it.”
“You kept the key in the lock?”
“It’s stupid, I know, but that’s the way it was. Nobody came up there, so we didn’t think much about security.”
“You say that nobody ever came to the sanctuary, but is that true? I would think that people would like to come and see the animals.”
“The animal doctor, Mr. Heppo, he came, maybe a couple times a week,” Terry said. “We weren’t open to the public, we weren’t set up for that. I had my hands full taking care of the chimps. I don’t think we could have managed being like a zoo. We didn’t have the staff.”
“Anybody else? Any outsiders come by in the past few weeks? Volunteers, or maybe somebody from the Hollywood Rescue group?”
“We didn’t have any volunteers,” Terry said. Remington caught a whiff of evasiveness in his reply.
The Odalon Animal Sanctuary, she was coming to understand, had lately been stripped down to a bare-bones operation. Three full-time live-in workers, plus a visiting vet, to take care of fourteen animals. She wondered how that level of personnel would compare with other chimp havens around the country, and made a mental note to check.
“Tamas, he had a buyer come out,” Terry said abruptly.
“Thomas?”
“Dukundane Tamas—he’s the other caretaker. Cindy called him Thomas.” Terry spelled the name for Remington and said that the man was also an African immigrant.
“A Congolese,” Terry said. “He was out there the night of the fire, but he left early, with the others.”
“And you said Thomas had a visitor out here to the sanctuary?”
Terry nodded. “Two or three times, a couple weeks ago.”
“A buyer, you said? Do you have a name?”
Terry shrugged. “I don’t know.” He had suddenly become less talkative. Remington had a sense of increasing nervousness on the part of the African. It could have been simply discussing the subject of the massacre. The two of them gazed up at the charred hills that rose above the sanctuary, sunshine bathing the
m in a honey-colored light.
“Can you tell me anything about this visitor? It was a man, right?”
“A man, yes, an American,” Terry said. He had shown up at the sanctuary, Terry explained, wanting to buy chimpanzees for use in medical experiments.
The trade in animals for research, Remington knew, was fraught with regulatory tangles and pressure from animal-rights activists. Was Terry’s reticence on the subject really about the idea of buying chimps for research, or was something else in play?
“Ian, I need to hear whatever you can tell me about this guy,” she said.
“I don’t know,” Terry said.
“But there’s more to it than what you’re saying, isn’t there?”
The man dropped his eyes and shrugged. “I think Tamas knew him somehow,” he said. “Anyway, that’s who the buyer dealt with, Tamas. Cindy didn’t like that he was up here. And Tamas told me not to tell anyone. He said they didn’t want PETA getting involved. You know, the animal-rights people.”
“I know what PETA is,” Remington said.
—
When Layla dropped by her father’s condo at the end of her watch, Gene skipped directly to the subject of the day.
“Now they’re saying that Cookie shot him, gave him the coup de grâce. He begged her. Donny Coll, lying there pumping blood onto the carpet, pleading to be put out of his misery.”
“Who says this?” Layla called in from the condo’s kitchenette, where she was fetching herself a glass of wine.
“Everybody. E! and The Insider.”
“Don’t trust any show that puts an exclamation point after its name. That’s like laughing at one of your own jokes.”
Gene Remington hummed a little chuckle.
“Did you see anything on the TV news about the chimp thing?” Layla gestured with her wineglass toward the flat-screen.
“Not a peep,” Gene said. “Any of those chimpanzees out there ever act in a sitcom or in the movies? That’s what you need these days to make a headline, a movie credit.”
“Normal news cycle, this would have been huge,” Layla told her father. “It could have gone national, easy.”