Lola: Chapter Six

Lola is riding the bus once again, looking out the window, as it drives up the Pacific Coast Highway. She has a long ride ahead of her. Eventually, she reaches her destination deep in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. A little bungalow style white house that probably costs way more than it should amongst many other similar houses only a few blocks over from a major thoroughfare of traffic and only a few blocks over from several warehouses and a jack in the box and line of fast food places. Welcome to the valley.

This is not the kind of suburban living they have in the middle part of the country or in Kansas where Lola grew up, but it’s a kind of Los Angeles suburban living or was in the early 2000s for those that have made just enough to buy a little piece of property in a land filled with very expensive property.

Lola stands in front of this white painted stranger, this small barely two bedroom house. It has the feel of a distant cousin you haven’t seen since you were a child, it is familiar and familial yet still remote and strange. Lola takes her key out and looks at it. Just an ordinary key, an ordinary house key, one of only two items that survived the demolished motel room. Well, three items if you count Lola herself. Maybe her subconscious was the one who told her to take it, maybe somewhere, despite the forgetting, deep down she knew it was the key to her house, the key to her past.

She puts the key in the door. It fits. She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is watching, worried she’s entering the wrong house, someone else’s house. She turns the key, it unlocks the door. She steps inside.

“Hello? Is anybody home?”

Lola walks into the front hallway and closes the door behind her.

A black car drives down Arrowhead Lane. It stops a few houses down from the one Lola just entered. Walters had followed one bus after another, across half of Los Angeles to get here. He had been slowly crawling along once Lola exited at her stop and walked the 3 blocks to the house, making sure to stay just enough out of sight. Now he sits waiting, watching.

Lola walks into the front room. There’s a framed picture on a coffee table next to a couch. She rushes over and picks it up. She has the right house. The picture is of her, a little younger than now but not too much younger, maybe it was taken last year or the year before. She is with a handsome man, roughly the same age. They both look happy, so happy, holding each other and laughing as young couples do in photos.

Lola stares at the picture, mystified. She looks up to the wall, there are more pictures; of her with the man again, of her with other friends. She looks happy in all of them.

What happened to this life?

Lola, still holding the framed picture, sits down on the couch, trying to take it all in, the life she had that she doesn’t remember. It feels like some elaborate joke is being played on her.

She looks down at the picture again. She still can’t remember the man. The harder she tries to remember, the more her mind blanks out the past.

She finally sets it down on a table in front of her. No amount of staring at that photo is going to make her past come back.

She gets up and wanders into the dining room, more pictures of her with the guy, family, friends are around. Shell-shocked she makes her way into the kitchen.

Lola gets a glass from a cabinet like it’s a part of muscle memory and opens the refrigerator. The food in there looks fresh, nothing spoiled, it can’t be that long since she’s left her house.

She takes a jug of milk and checks the date. It’s still good. Lola takes a much needed drink straight from the jug.

As she does this, she notices a blinking red light. An answering machine that’s been waiting for somebody to play its messages. Lola takes another swig from the jug and with an absent-minded flick of a wrist she hits the blinking light and walks into a room where there’s a couch and sofa chair staring at a television and glass cabinet with more pictures.

The first message is an automated message from the energy company saying that her last bill is past due.

The second message is another automated message. This one from the cable company saying her last bill is past due.

Lola is still holding the jug of milk as she looks at the pictures in the cabinet. She focuses on one with her and an older woman. This must be her mother. It feels like it is her mother. The picture has that type of tension that pictures with mothers and adult daughters can have in them. There’s another picture with her an older man. This must be her father. It was taken several years earlier than the one with her mother. It is just her and the older man. There are no pictures with the three of them together.

Why can’t I remember my parents?

The third message on the machine is a hang-up. Lola squints, trying to remember her relationship with her mother, with her father.

How can I forget my own mother?

The fourth message comes on.

“I need to talk with you.”

Lola freezes...

“I think you know me...”

The voice is familiar.

“I don’t really remember.”

Lola drops the jug of milk.

“That’s why I need to talk with you.”

It’s her own voice!

“I don’t have a phone, but I’ll call back tonight. Please pick up. I’m desper..”

Lola runs over to the machine. The next message starts.

“I need to talk with you. It’s urgent..”

She frantically searches through papers and envelopes and notes on the counter.

“It’s a matter of life and death..”

She finds a bill. The name on it is “Dorothy Drake.” The message is still playing. It sounds like a ghost calling to her.

“Please, pick up if you are there.”

Lola finds another bill, same thing, the name is Dorothy Drake.

There is just static on the other end of the line now as Lola waits for “Dorothy” to pick up the phone. She runs through the tv room into the main bedroom. The answering machine signals the end of the messages with a few beeps then silence.

Lola is breathing hard, hyperventilating. She looks around the room, sees a dresser, opens a dresser, rifles through it, only clothes.

Another drawer, more clothes.

There’s a bureau next to the bed, she can barely see her heart is pumping so fast. Time is speeding up. It’s too fast. Her eyes can’t keep up with her mind, with the world. She goes through the bureau like a gopher digging a hole. Items flying up into the air behind her. She finds something. It’s hard to read when your eyes can’t focus. But she doesn’t need to read much.

It’s a passport. It has her picture. It has the name Dorothy Drake next to her picture.

Lola passes out.

A kaleidoscope of images. An entire life flowing through seconds then minutes, not in any order but in a way that might make sense to the mind that owns those images, to the person that has led that life. Lola is unconscious but her mind is awake, flooding her with memories, not everything just yet, but a lot of things, decades of life and events, of people and moments, of places and betrayals.

The betrayals are where those images stop and slow down, playing out in real time, no longer a kaleidoscope but distinct colors, distinct voices, distinct actions.

Lola waits in a car with the blonde in sunglasses. The blonde’s sunglasses are back on hiding her eyes. The blonde is at the wheel, Lola is on the passenger’s side. It’s a busy street, Wilshire Blvd, a fast-moving artery through the heart of Los Angeles. There’s a tall, striking black building on the other side of the street. It was built in some period when the people of the city took great care with the architecture. It’s an office building with as much foot traffic as there is car traffic on the street in front of it. Lola and the blonde continue to wait. It doesn’t take a genius to know what they are waiting for. Or who they are waiting for.

Frank Moreno is in a suit and tie. It doesn’t fit him any better than it did his brother. He’s also wearing handcuffs, or one handcuff, the other end is cuffed to a briefcase.

So we didn’t go straight from the coffee shop to the motel.

The pieces are coming together for Lola. The coffee shop was the first contact, this is the interception.

Lola exits the car. She walks stylishly in her black dress towards the black office building. She crosses the street against traffic with only one car honking at her to stop. She makes it to the building. She follows Frank from behind. He hasn’t seen her. She reaches the elevator when he does. Just after he does. The doors are closing. A hand sticks out to stop them. There are a couple of other people in the elevator. Frank pays no attention to the because he recognizes Lola. She smiles at him. It doesn’t take much imagination to know what happens from here.

Lola is amazed at the coincidence of them running into each in this place. Frank doesn’t have any suspicions. They flirt. They talk. Lola says she doesn’t have much time but she knows a place.

The place is the Starlite Motel. The blonde set the room up. Lola takes Frank there. She does the job the blonde asked her to do. Asked her to do to get paid. She doesn’t have to sleep with him. She only has to lead him into the motel room. The blonde says he stole money from her boyfriend. The blonde said if Lola helps her she gets to keep half of what’s in the briefcase. She gets to keep 93 grand. Lola isn’t usually the type to do these things. But she’s desperate. The blonde picked the right girl. Lola needs that money. Not to live. To survive. She has no one else to turn to. She has nowhere else to go. Sure, it’s a shady proposition. But she doesn’t have to sleep with the guy. And she trusts the blonde, she’s like a big sister to her, they’ve grown close over these last few months after they randomly met in a bar one night both drowning their sorrows. And the blonde said the money is really hers or actually her boyfriends, that this guy, this crook swindled them out of their hard earned cash. She’s really doing the world a favor, to try to stop con men like this and the blonde said she had a plan that the she’s going to confront the guy and the guy will cave, maybe the police will be there, Lola’s a little hazy on the details, but she doesn’t need details, she trusts the blonde, why wouldn’t she trust the blonde. She just wants her money back.

So they walk into the motel room. Lola keeps the door open a crack like she was told to do. She takes the guy to the bed. She’s distracting him, she knows how to do that, maybe the shoulder of her dress slips off, that usually works with guys, once the strap slips, guys tend to focus on the objects in front of them, they are so predictable, and then the blonde was going to come in and surprise the guy and get the money, it’s so simple, such an easy setup.

And the blonde does show up as they are on the bed. Oh yeah, there’s the bottle of champagne as well. The one they picked up on their way to the motel room. Now the guy is distracted with opening the champagne bottle. This is going to be a fun afternoon.

Or maybe not.

Because the blonde is behind him. She doesn’t have anybody with her. Lola catches that out of the corner of her eye. Lola is on the bed on her knees facing the guy, facing the open door. The blonde behind Frank, who pops the champagne all happy. He takes a drink from the bottle and moves to the bed to offer a drink to Lola. That’s when Lola sees the knife. The gigantic knife. She didn’t even know they made knives like that. Well, maybe she does know that, but she hasn’t seen one like that operated so swiftly, slicing a guy’s jugular so smoothly, blood pouring down his front. Lola’s screaming now. Really screaming. The blonde has to shut her up. Lola is in no place to practice self-defense. The blonde knows this. She doesn’t want to use her knife on Lola. And in a way, she can’t, not for the way this has to go. But she does need to shut her up. The champagne bottle will work, most of the champagne poured out of it anyway when she sliced Frank’s neck open. Now she just has to pick it up and whack Lola on the head. That will shut her up.

And it does. And Lola’s world, her memories, her life, everything go dark. And that’s how she ended up in that motel room with that dead guy and that bomb.