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different.
    Something he couldn’t put his finger on.
    “You like?” she was following Alan around. Lifting big sunglasses.
    He didn’t answer, starting to remember something. An article he’d read, years ago. An item that evaded detail, tucked away in the back of
Variety.
About the … but it couldn’t’ve been this house. This house was too cheerful. If something like that had happened in a place, you’d still feel it. There would be a feeling; a nausea. The white walls would have a telltale pinkness here and there where the paint didn’t quite—
    “Nice.”
    “Gorgeous.” She had a lung-cancer laugh; struggling for sufficient oxygen. Lit a Virginia Slim, took out her calculator, and opened the sliding door, seeking deck sun. A refuge to do math.
    Alan followed, leaned on the deck railing, instinctively smiled at the view. A family of porpoises was doing a smiley, slo-mo cruise through waves, yards off shore. As they traveled north, Alan kept staring, eyes losing focus. His mouth went dry as he imagined them being harpooned, silver skin bleeding, mouths screaming. The ocean turned to blood in his mind, an awful burgundy, crashing on sand.
    “There may be another offer coming in this afternoon. Just so you know.” Her right foot tapped air.
    Alan watched the dolphins writhing as the whalers laughed, pulling them closer to small boats. The young dolphins tried to stay with their parents, though the older ones frantically nosed them away to save them. The men had no faces, just smooth flat skin; slits for mouths. The mouths grinned, as arm muscles pulled harpoon ropes, and the porpoises were dragged through plasma, clubbed on the head. They struggled, making a horrible noise, and the sea churned, red foam.
    Alan turned to her. Looked back at the perfect blue Pacific. A windsurfer scalpeling currents.
    “The one who was a songwriter …”
    She looked up, sharply. Down again at her calculator. Flicked an ash into a potted cactus.
    “Did he live here in the seventies?”
    Then, all at once, he remembered. The article, buried deep. The murders. The man and his wife tortured in a two-hour attack by a former band member he’d fired when “Sunshine Lady” hit. Alan remembered hearing about the details at a party, where the host, a famous TV star, was tight with LAPD.
    The guy described detectives saying the couple wasbeaten, stripped naked, and nailed by ankles and palms to the bleached, wooden floor. The killer had taken two hours to crush their heads, ball-peening the skulls progressively harder until bone under bruised skin began to give.
    The murderer later admitted that while they were still alive, begging him to call an ambulance, he’d found an electric knife in the kitchen.
    He’d sawed all the way down the man’s sternum, slitting open skin and muscle, making crude scrimshaw on bone before moving the humming blade across to her. As her head shook from side to side, nipples were circled; cut off.
    Then, more cutting and sectioning, finally sledding to legs, thighs, and tendons which were sawed into ruin. The murderer had testified later that it took half an hour to trash both bodies. The screaming had slowed things until he realized by cutting their larynxes he could work in relative peace.
    When he was done, he took the desecrated bodies, placed them side-by-side on the master bed, resting on Ralph Lauren pillow shams, staring forward, waiting for the police.
    “A murder …”
    She said nothing.
    She was lying; could tell Alan knew it. She looked at sun doing cut-crystal on ocean. “I think someone in the office mentioned there was a break-in at one point but that’s all I know. I got the impression it was years ago.” She smiled useless comfort. “Anyway, in L.A. it’s hard to buy a nice house that hasn’t had something. That’s why they invented alarms, right?”
    Alan watched the porpoises steer around the small peninsula, continue north toward Malibu pier.
    “I have a feeling