LOLA

WALTER NEFF

"Look at me, Mr. Neff, I'm not crazy, I'm not hysterical, I'm not even crying. But I have the awful feeling that something's wrong. And I had that same feeling once before when my mother died."

"When your mother died?" Neff was getting that "hunk of concrete" feeling in his stomach that old Keyes, his colleague and friend across the hallway of the insurance offices kept telling him about.

"We were at Lake Arrowhead. It was six years ago. We had a cabin there and it was very cold. My mother was very sick; she had pneumonia, there were just three of us there in the cabin. One night I got up and went into my mother's room. She was delirious with fever, all the bed covers were on the floor. The windows were wide open. The nurse wasn't in the room. I went and covered my mother up as quickly as I could. Just then I heard the door open behind me. The nurse stood there. She didn't say a word, but there was a look in her eye I'll never forget. Two days later my mother was dead."

Neff's bad feeling was growing bigger and bigger by the second, churning away like a regular cement mixer.

"Do you know who that nurse was?"

"No, who?"

He almost didn't want to hear the answer even though he already suspected what Lola was about to say.

"Phyllis!"

And just like a dynamite explosion going off inside his head, Neff felt his world now disintegrating into a million pieces.

NINO ZACHETTI

Reading reports in the newspaper about Neff being sent to the gas chamber for shooting Phyllis Deitrichson in her home, Nino thought back to how easy it would have been for Neff to frame him as the perpetrator of the crime that night especially given that he had come to see Phyllis as part of their ongoing affair behind her stepdaughter Lola's back. The fact the older gentleman didn't allow him to enter the bloody murder scene proved something about the small modicum of goodness inside his character that would all be forgotten now just as the newspaper he was holding in his hand would soon be yesterday's news.

Nino sensed that he might just have had more in common with Neff than he had initially thought and it made him wonder if perhaps the insurance salesman had shown mercy on him because he recognised some part of the younger man in himself.

Finishing up the last of his tepid black coffee in the dust-filled diner, Nino knew that things would never work out with Lola after all that had happened at the Dietrichson family home up in Los Feliz. The last time he had seen her, she seemed mentally disturbed as if she didn't quite know who she was anymore. Understandably she was traumatized by the murderous event earlier in the summer and of course, he hadn't helped the situation by cheating on her with Phyllis. When Neff had given him a nickel to call Lola the night of Mrs Dietrichson's murder, he never did. Nino always stubbornly refused to do what others told him to. But he'd kept the nickel. Holding it now between his forefinger and thumb he thought how appropriately symbolic it would be for it to pay for his last coffee and pancakes in Los Angeles before he left the city for good.

Quietly tearing the article on Neff out of the newspaper, Nino pocketed it in his jacket thinking he might use it one day as a cautionary tale as a reminder to himself of what happens when you make the wrong choice in life.

In this sense, Neff's legacy would not be so easily forgotten.

LOLA DIETRICHSON

Ever since that night sat talking with Neff above the Hollywood Bowl, Lola couldn't get that piece of Schubert out of her head. Late at night while she tried to sleep through the remaining sticky hot summer nights of July she could still hear the music haunting her carried by the near imperceptible breezes that gently swayed the white lace curtains of her room.

With ghostly strings followed by undulating basses, Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony could have easily been written specifically for her right now with her fragile, broken state of mind in tatters. Thoughts went round and round her head like a never-ending merry-go-round with one notion in particular that she had become obsessed by.

It had bothered Lola greatly that Phyllis had managed to rob both her mother, father and Mr Neff of their lives and only paid once with hers. In many ways, she felt as if it should have been her who'd shot Phyllis and not Neff. She should have been the one who enjoyed the exacting of revenge for the death of her beloved parents. But now she knew the meaning of the word impotent and had nowhere to properly direct her anger. Nino Zachetti had practically disappeared from her life, meeting only once with her and seeming incapable of relating to her suffering. She had wondered if he was a genuine psychopath as she'd read an article about how they tended to lack empathy not unlike Phyllis.

Now all she had was the Schubert she couldn't get out of her brain for company and it scared her to think she might actually be going insane.

Unable to sleep and anxiously restless in her bed, Lola impulsively decided to call a cab and visit her father's old house in the hills. She still had the keys to the old place and although it might have seemed like a strange thing to go back there after all that happened she wanted to prove to herself that she wasn't afraid of the past any longer.

As the cab crawled slowly round the winding road up to the familiar Spanish-style house in Los Feliz Boulevard Lola felt her own 'hunk of concrete' inside her empty stomach and she sensed she perhaps wasn't cut out for returning to the cold, lonely house just yet.

"Turn the cab around would you please mister?"

And with that, she headed back to the city knowing that she would continue to be haunted for a long time to come.

Perhaps forever.

Then the Schubert started up again. Lola asked the cab driver to turn his radio up hoping she could drown out the music inside her head.

It worked for the rest of the journey home but as she returned to her crumpled bed in her tiny rental apartment and turned off her bedside light the orchestra started up all over again.

Closing her eyes, desperately hoping she would fall asleep the only face Lola could now see was Neff's as if he was calling out to her in anguish from beyond the grave.

Both he, like the music would not be silenced without the aid of some heavy liquor or narcotics. Lola didn't want to succumb to such methods to deal with her demons but sensed she may not have any choice.

It was either that or the sanitorium.