by Gil Reavill
It was a kill shot, penetrating the house through the open double doors and taking Wold in the throat. He dropped backward, losing his grip on his weapon. The report echoed off the hills.
The booming shot got Manson’s attention. Remington saw the ape’s head swivel toward her. His face streamed with blood. The aluminum collar chain draped downward into a pool of it. His fangs, when he bared them at her, looked as though they had been doing heavy duty that night.
The ape launched himself into the air, smashing through one of the big picture windows and landing on the balcony five feet from Remington.
She fired off another shot, hoping to drop the killer chimp, but at that moment Prince screamed and clutched her shoulder. Her aim was spoiled and the bullet went wide. Another window shattered with a percussive explosion of glass.
Seeing the toddler chimp in Remington’s embrace, Manson halted for a quick beat. An almost quizzical expression crossed his face. Remington squeezed the trigger again.
The Glock jammed, and the chimp charged.
Manson swept by Remington in a feral-smelling rush. It happened in an instant. One second she had Prince in her arms. The next moment she felt the little chimp stolen from her, jerked out of her arms by the stampeding male.
“No!” she shouted as it was happening, but the baby was gone before the word left her lips.
Carrying the smaller chimp roughly but effortlessly, the killer ape galloped across the balcony. Prince struggled and squeaked pathetically. Manson balanced on the deck’s top rail, glancing malevolently back at Remington. Then he leaped off into the darkness.
Remington shouted in despair.
Agonized, she watched the animal’s aluminum chain run out its entire length. The final link caught between the closely set teak boards of the railing. The chain straightened with a snap. The railing shook. A horrible cracking noise came from below. Then an abrupt, awful silence.
Rushing to the edge of the balcony, she saw Manson hanging by the collar, his neck cocked at a sharp angle. The body of the dead ape twisted slowly at the end of the chain. For a heart-stopping moment Remington couldn’t see the little chimp desperately grasping at the blood-matted hair of the bigger animal’s chest.
When Prince glimpsed Remington looking down from above, he whooped and scampered up the dangling aluminum chain into her arms.
“All shall be well,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say, not knowing if he could understand but trusting the sound of her voice to soothe him. “And all manner of thing shall be well.”
29
Two years later…
Eugene Remington drove with his daughter from Glendale toward their destination in Santa Monica. In L.A., the chances of a sunny day were better than three to one, but this particular sunny day was special, with minimal smog and an after-rain sparkle to the air. Gene decided to avoid the freeways and take the long route west. Layla was too absorbed in her thoughts to notice.
They picked up Mulholland Drive off Cahuenga Boulevard. The road straddled the crest of the foothills. Their route would bring them directly past what was formerly the Ro-Co-Co estate. Layla had heard that the place had been taken over by a group of Buddhists. They held purification ceremonies to purge its evil history.
“Everybody’s dead,” Gene Remington said.
Still brooding, Layla didn’t respond.
“That’s what I don’t get,” Gene said, talking almost to himself. “You have Russell Dorian and his blade runners, Hickler and Tremont—they’re all three of them gone.”
“Uh-hmm,” Layla said.
“Everyone who knows what really happened isn’t able to talk,” Gene continued. “You know it reminds me of The Big Sleep, the Bogart and Bacall movie, off the Raymond Chandler novel.”
Accustomed to her father’s movie mania, Layla was willing to play along. She recalled a line of dialogue: “Somebody asks Bogie, ‘How do you like your whiskey?’ ”
“He says, ‘In a glass.’ ” Gene laughed. “What I heard was that the screenwriters are working on the Big Sleep movie script, see, and they can’t figure out a plot point from the novel, it’s so complicated, so they call up Chandler. ‘Who killed Joe Brody?’ they ask. Chandler, the guy that wrote the friggin’ book, tells them he doesn’t know. He doesn’t have any idea!”
“Norris,” Layla said.
“Right, Norris the butler did it,” Gene said. “Here’s how I figure it. Hickler shoots the chimps with that crazy musket gun, then gets shot himself with the same weapon. Tremont is the one who kills Hickler, because why? Because Hickler is putting the arm on the boss, threatening to expose Dorian as the one who ordered the Odalon apes killed in the first place.”
“Yeah.”
“The musket dingus was supposed to be ballistics-proof, but it turned out to be just the opposite. The fact that it didn’t have any traceable ballistics imprint made it stand out like a hooker at a church picnic.”
“What would a hooker be doing at a church picnic?” Layla asked.
“So Russell Dorian thinks he’s home free, only he doesn’t figure on this Chimp Wizard guy,” Gene said.
“George Wold,” Layla said, giving an inner shiver as she pronounced the name.
“The wizard nominated himself as an avenger. They’re all in on it, everyone at Odalon, so Wold figures he’ll pick them off one by one. The caretakers, the para-vet, and the lawyer lady.”
“Not all of them were involved, but Wold thought they were,” Layla said. “He was the kind of animal-rights activist who doesn’t scruple at killing animals, as long as they’re humans.”
“Dorian figures he’s going to get control of a thousand acres of prime Malibu canyon land. Only he can’t inherit while the apes are still alive. So he has them all aced.”
“Except Angle.”
“Right,” Gene said. “Except Angle. And that means the clause in Norman Dorian’s will is still in force. They can’t sell the land while the last chimp remains alive.”
“There’s poetic justice in there somewhere,” Layla said.
“Those damned fingerprints threw you off for a long while,” Gene pointed out.
“They’re not identical in identical twins, but almost,” countered Layla.
“Something like ninety-five percent the same, you said.”
“Even closer with chimpanzee twins—they don’t know why—more like ninety-eight percent. You have to look pretty hard to turn up anomalies.”
“Which the techs down at the forensics lab didn’t do.”
“No, they didn’t.”
They drove without saying much, the road twisting, following the ridgeline, the Valley appearing and falling away on their right, the L.A. Basin doing the same on their left. They both stayed silent as they passed the Ro-Co-Co estate, Marlon’s old place, a prime destination for sightseers and tourists. The new Buddhist owners had woven garlands of flowers into the big wrought-iron gate.
“There it is,” Gene said.
“There it is.” Remington nodded.
“I’m glad you made it out alive,” Gene said. “You and the little mockman.”
—
In the civil action of Angle v. Dorian Trusts, Trish Sedgewick believed the draw of Judge Peter Brattle effectively ended her chances of winning a judgment. Judge Brattle was well known as a prickly, sarcastic taskmaster, devoted to precedent.
Not the kind of guy to go against legal traditions.
What Sedgewick didn’t know was that Pete Brattle had just endured one of the most emotionally devastating experiences in life: the death of a beloved dog. The brindle boxer’s name was Bonaparte. Brattle called him Bone. The two had been side by side for sixteen years.
Central to Brattle’s relationship with Bone, and central to his later landmark rulings in Angle v. Dorian Trusts, was the judge’s certainty that the creature he loved possessed a conscious mind. Holding Bone’s ruined body in his arms, looking into the boxer’s eyes, Brattle was sure the animal had a soul.
>
His wife, June, was a sweet enough woman, but she was emotionally dim. The judge’s deepest relationship was with his dog. It practically killed him when Bone died.
So it was a chastened black-robed human who mounted the bench in the multimillion-dollar civil suit seeking relief for the plaintiff’s pain and suffering. Many in the media saw the proceedings as a natural coda to the celebrated chompanzee criminal case. The idea was helped along by the fact that, standing before Brattle in superior court that morning, were the same two attorneys who had appeared before Judge Etha Keris in the earlier criminal hearing, Tricia Sedgewick and Rick Stills.
The legal standards of civil trials are different from those for criminal proceedings. Orenthal James Simpson experienced this rude awakening when he was judged not guilty criminally but held liable financially in a wrongful-death civil suit brought by the families of his victims.
That wasn’t the core of the matter, though. What made Angle v. Dorian Trusts so remarkable was that a nonhuman animal was seeking judgment in court. Not the animal’s owner but the creature himself.
In order to do this, Attorney Trish Sedgewick had to accomplish something that had never been done in millennia of Mesopotamian, Roman, English, or American law. She had to establish Angle before the court as a person, not a thing. A person: “recognized as a potential bearer of legal rights.”
Rick Stills was optimistic. Not ADA Rick Stills anymore. After leaving the county D.A.’s office, he had joined Buffum, Buffum, Oatman & Stanfill, the law firm that served the Norman Dorian Trusts. The former ADA’s humiliating loss at the preliminary hearing in the earlier criminal trial, with Judge Keris ordering the immediate release of Mace Arthur—all that was behind Stills now. He would not be humbled again. An ape appearing autonomously in court? Ridiculous!
But at every juncture Judge Peter Brattle allowed the civil case to move forward. Stills filed motion after motion. Each was denied. The stunned lawyer felt as if he had blundered into a Twilight Zone. He had been so sure of himself, especially when Brattle was chosen as judge for the proceedings. But the man seemed to have grown a new personality.
Sedgewick uncovered and presented to Brattle a hidden history of animal law. In medieval times, creatures had been hauled into court repeatedly. A pig accused of causing the death of a human child was dressed in human clothes, tried, found guilty, and hanged. Rats, crows, and a whole species of beetle were put on trial for decimating crops. In the case against the rats, the proceedings had been postponed several times when the defendants failed to appear in court.
Now it had come to this. Sedgewick stood before Judge Brattle with a packed gallery of spectators and media people behind her.
“I call the individual Angle to the witness stand, Your Honor.”
Stills shot to his feet as murmurs rose from the crowd, and Brattle gaveled for quiet. “Once again, I have to object to this, on the basis of Federal Civil Procedure Rule 17b, in that the witness so called is not classified under law as an individual.”
Brattle responded, “And once again, Mr. Stills, I say we will let the jury decide.”
“Judge, by allowing this, we contravene stare decisis and thousands of years of legal tradition.”
“Your objection has been recorded.”
Many spectators seemed to treat the occasion as a kind of novelty act. Few grasped the historical profundity of the moment. But, collectively, the courtroom held its breath. Layla Remington and her father, seated in the second row behind the plaintiff’s counsel, watched as a legal revolution unfolded.
Holding his attorney’s hand and accompanied by an ASL interpreter, Angle the chimpanzee crossed the courtroom and took the witness stand.
Acknowledgments
I owe a debt of gratitude to my editor at Random House, Kate Miciak, for her insight, attention, and enthusiasm, and to Paul Bresnick for helping to put it all together. Thanks also to Rich Procter, for his passion, common sense and grasp of L.A. geography. Richard Jaccoma gave an early read and helped with a vital piece of the narrative puzzle. Appreciation also goes out to Josefa Mulaire, John Bowman, Eric Saks, Sandy Smolan, Dave Riggle, and Rick and Lisa Wheeler. Jean Zimmerman and Maud Reavill were there for me every step of the way.
About the Author
GIL REAVILL is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. His crime journalism has been widely featured in magazines. Reavill is the author of Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, The Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting that Unmasked the Mob and Aftermath, Inc.: Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home, as well as the pseudonymous co-author of the bestselling Beyond All Reason: My Life with Susan Smith. Reavill co-wrote the screenplay that became the 2005 film Dirty, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. He lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife, the writer Jean Zimmerman, and their daughter.
Gilreavill.com
@greavill
If you enjoyed 13 Hollywood Apes by Gil Reavill, read on for an exciting preview of Layla Remington’s next thrilling adventure
13 Stolen Girls
1
Afterward her mother suggested that God must have meant for the girl’s body to be found. It had been extremely well hidden, concealed in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum, the drum welded shut, the barrel weighted with a concrete lid and buried on a remote hillside in Malibu, California.
“Our darling would have been there until Christ summoned her on the Final Day,” said Cathy Gunion, a woman of such severe evangelical beliefs that her daughter had fled the family home to escape.
For a long time, the barrel remained safe and secure in its subterranean home. Undisturbed, out of sight, and out of mind (except for one mind). The area was locked in a terrible drought and, even in normal times, was celebrated for its relative lack of rain. Water, the enemy of all those at rest beneath the ground, never penetrated the six-foot-deep retreat.
In the unremembered dreams of the twisted soul who buried it there, the body always broke free on its own. The girl rose from the dead, burst out of the ground, and pointed an accusatory finger at her killer.
But that was only a nightmare vision.
The naked girl was drugged and unconscious when she was placed in the barrel. A terrible question naturally occurs. Did she wake? We can only imagine the horror if she did. Better to believe that the airless confines of the drum produced a gentle, sleepy asphyxiation.
Days, then weeks passed. Spinal and brain fluid leaked from the dead girl’s orifices. She bloated, the bloat collapsed, the body began the long process of dry decay, more familiarly known as mummification. Months, then years. At some point her fingernails detached from her hands, to drop off and land soundlessly in the soft muck at the bottom of the barrel.
Only the girl’s hair survived unchanged—feathery, white-blond, her most distinctive feature when she was alive. Human hair is nearly indestructible. Fire will do it, of course, but most acids won’t, nor will immersion in water or exposure to ultraviolet rays. The simple march of time seems to have no effect. In the waste pools of Auschwitz there is still hair from Holocaust victims, intact seven decades after the fact.
Unstirred by the ocean breezes up top, the limp hair of the victim in the barrel remained, like a marker or a calling card.
Or a prayer.
I was here. I was me. Remember me.
Eleven years, four months, sixteen days. The prayer changed, became distilled, refined to its essence.
Revenge me.
Who would accomplish that hopeless task? How could it possibly happen? Who would turn up such an unsavory, unseen prize?
A contractor at work on a foundation for a million-dollar Malibu mansion? A crew of laborers digging a trench for a gas main? Some mad treasure hunter?
None of the above. Whether a divinity was responsible or some other, darker force, it would not be human agency that evicted “our darling” from her makeshift crypt.
I was here. I was me. Remember me. Revenge me.
—
“We’re not positive what it is,�
�� Deputy Paz Tejeda told Detective Investigator Layla Remington when dispatch patched the call through. “But the dog alerted, so we’re pretty sure it’s human remains.”
“Where are you?”
“East. Down by Piedra Gordon, on Big Rock.”
Remington could hear the sirens and the civil-defense horns over the radio static. “It’ll be awhile before I can get there.”
Dispatch marked the time as 8:42. The disaster had hit Malibu four and a half hours earlier, at 0417 that morning—a 6.1 earthquake. The Malibu Fracture Zone, a fault line running east–west just off the coast, had finally done what seismologists had long been predicting it was going to do, which was kick the holy hell out of some of the world’s most expensive real estate.
Ground velocity measured as extreme as anything since the Northridge quake in ’94. An expert interviewed that morning on KTLA came up with a homey image: “You shake a rug on your floor, you flip it up and down, and something like a wave will pass through it—that’s what happened in Malibu this morning.”
When Remington fielded Tejeda’s call on her shoulder-mounted two-way, she was standing ankle-deep in water from a utility-main break. The tangle of roads above Malibu Lagoon ran in a steady cascade downhill toward the Pacific Coast Highway. Leaking natural-gas pipes also flared with orange and red flames, making it appear as if the flowing water were burning.
It took Remington all morning to travel the five miles from central Malibu down the coast to the community’s far eastern border. She passed through a battle zone, one more front in the ongoing war of Nature versus L.A. The PCH was closed. Units of the Guard had moved in. She heard “tsunami” from the lips of stunned, vacant-eyed citizens, the term hanging in the air like a buzz of insects.
“Up there, where the slide pushed up against that grove of cottonwoods,” Deputy Tejeda told Remington when the detective finally made it to the scene.