The Lioness(4)

But David was different. He was a gallerist: he owned a gallery in Beverly Hills. He’d grown up in Manhattan, too, in the same building as her own family, and had always been in her world because of his friendship with Billy. In some ways, he’d been like an older brother to her, too—albeit one she lost touch with until he moved west and opened a gallery on the corner of Rodeo and Brighton. Her brother was the one who’d suggested they get together, and so they had: he’d brought David to her house that first time and then had the two of them to his place for lunch. Their first date had been dinner at Taylor’s Steakhouse.

“It is amazing, isn’t it?” she said to him now. “More magic than I ever expected.”

The giraffes that were drinking raised their gargantuan necks and joined the two others that were staring at the five humans. They grew more attentive. Alert. She tried to imagine what one of them had done to interest the giraffes, but suddenly they were retreating, retreating fast, racing in that distinctive giraffe gait: what Juma called “pacing,” the two right legs moving and then the two left. She smiled at their beauty, their grace, but then she heard the pops behind her, understood they were gunshots, and—more curious than alarmed—along with all of the people around her turned to look back at the camp.





CHAPTER TWO


    David Hill





Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill was spotted having a very intimate dinner with Katie Barstow. Sources tell us the pair are childhood friends from New York City, but the two of them looked like much more than mere childhood “chums.”

—The Hollywood Reporter, February 13, 1964



He watched the white men appearing from nowhere with their guns. It wasn’t what he expected—not that he really had expectations—but he sure as hell didn’t anticipate that someone was going to die on this safari. He’d never before seen a human being shot. His camera slipped from his fingers, and he only understood that he was no longer holding it when he felt the sting of it hitting the bridge of his foot.



* * *



.?.?.

David had known Katie Barstow when she was a little girl named Katie Stepanov—since she was his pal Billy Stepanov’s kid sister. The Stepanovs lived two floors above his family in the monolith on Central Park West, in a dark, sprawling apartment with beautiful views to the east and waterfalls of light in the morning, and then shadows the rest of the day. The boys joked the whole building was haunted, and there likely were ghosts in the Stepanovs’ place. Sometimes the two of them went out of their way to frighten Katie by conjecturing what sorts of spirits lived there in the pall. In the maid’s room, where no maid actually slept because the “Irish girls” who cleaned the apartment and did much of the cooking arrived in the morning and left after dinner, and so it was where both Stepanov siblings hid those nights when their parents, usually (but not always) drunk, were bickering in the master bedroom. In the supernaturally vast walk-in coat closet opposite the front door, where David knew Glenda Stepanov would lock her son when she wanted to punish him. In the study, with the framed posters from Broadway dramas and musicals, many signed by the very same actors and actresses who appeared, on occasion, in the living room and sipped bourbon or rye from cocktail glasses with unicorns cut into the glass. Katie was always the kid who sang at her parents’ parties or recited poetry or simply smiled adorably and was, justifiably, adored. She drove her older brother crazy, in part because most younger sisters drive their older brothers crazy—the behavior was existent deep inside the genetic code in much the same way that birds knew to fly south and bears to hibernate—and in part because Katie was just so much more drawn to the family business. Or, to be precise, the family passion. Theater. Roman and Glenda Stepanov produced Broadway musicals, and it was only a matter of time before Katie would be in one. She was twelve when she was first cast. She was onstage for about three minutes in the first act and about six in the second, but that was enough for the critics, with cause, to fall in love with her.

It was also enough for her mother, who was never going to win a Tony for Warmest Parent and sometimes made Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, look like an absolute slacker when it came to stage parenting, to stop allowing dessert or chocolate in the home. She began to obsess about her daughter’s complexion and weight, and to start choosing all of her daughter’s clothing. She hired a governess for the child, a statuesque thirty-something burlesque queen whom both Billy and David thought was beautiful and, yes, insane. She was ferocious, and the teenage boys felt bad when they watched the beauty and exercise regimes to which she subjected Katie, and the way food (often terrible food) became a reward. In theory, the woman had experience as both a stylist and nutritionist, but David and Billy were sure that her “training” had been at places like Minsky’s. Makeup sat like spackle in the deeper lines and crevices of her face.

The two boys were seventeen when Katie’s first show opened in 1946. The war had ended before they were needed, and, in hindsight, the two of them had been more focused on the fact that soon they would go to college and not, thank God, to Iwo Jima. David’s father did something vague for the Office of Strategic Services and was constantly traveling to Washington, D.C., for meetings, but his precise responsibilities existed behind an opaque curtain of spy craft and bureaucracy, and that was as close as either David or Billy ever got to the war. But a kid like Katie? David had thought she was utterly oblivious to the veterans coming home without an arm or a leg, or the images that Eisenhower had filmed in color at Buchenwald. She was a sheltered child, and she had seemed too absorbed by what her mother referred to some mornings as her future and some afternoons as her career. It had seemed to him that, pure and simple, she was about as shallow and mercenary as Glenda Stepanov. Billy and he shared a lot, but Billy, back then, wasn’t capable of revealing how miserable his sister was; Billy likely feared that he had already told him too much about how secretly horrible both of his parents were.