“Thank you for what?” she asked David, turning from the guide to her husband. She spoke softly in response to his whisper. The camera loved it when she spoke quietly, and directors had often told her that her voice, when she murmured, was gold.
“For this,” he said. “For bringing me here. For bringing us here.”
She took his fingers that were on her shoulder and brought them to her lips. She kissed them. Though David was her first husband, three years ago she had been briefly engaged. That fellow—that actor—had been threatened by her bank account. Not by her, but by her box office grosses. She had broken it off when he disappeared, drunk, the night of the Wild Girl premiere. He ended up going to Italy to lick his wounds and be the bad guy in bad films: Gunfight in Bloody Sands and The Smoking Winchester. Her brother the shrink had warned her that it would be difficult to find a man she might actually love who would ever be completely comfortable with her success, unless he were at least as successful. But men like that? They were rare. Grace Kelly had had to marry an honest-to-God prince. Elizabeth Taylor had just married her fifth husband, Richard Burton, an actor whose star was as bright as hers, even if the movies weren’t the blockbusters that Liz’s were.
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.