Lourdes

“You finally get to have coffee with me,” I pointed out. “Ain’t that great!”
The green eyes shifted towards me, but I am not sure he actually saw me. “Huh..yeah, right, let’s go.”
But we couldn’t because at that moment, Lourdes stormed into the lobby. Lourdes always storms into wherever she’s going, she has this tremendous energy that has to be dissipated by more violent movements than the rest of us staid types are habituated to. But today she had a good reason for storming. She was Mr Ed’s older sister.
“Annie!” She lunged at me and threw her arms around my neck. “Annie…!” That was as far as she got before dissolving into a storm of tears.
“Ma’am,” I mumbled through the hair that enveloped me. Barely able to see, I staggered towards the plastic chairs again, Lourdes wrapped around my neck. We fell into the seats.
“Annie,” she said when she had overcome her spasms, “tell me what happened. Who could have shot poor Eddie. He never did no harm to no one. The police called me and said my brother was shot, he passed over on the spot. He always helped everyone. I always told him, ‘Eddie, you shouldn’t work for the criminals, they don’t deserve it’. But his heart was full of sympathy for them. ‘Lulu,’ he said to me, ‘they ain’t got nobody else to go to.’ So he got them out of jail. And now somebody has gone and shot him.” She dissolved once more into paroxysms of grief. I couldn’t blame her. I knew her only briefly as she passed through the small foyer of the office, saying Hi to me and carrying on with her conversation as she walked into her brother’s room.
I felt obliged to sit with her a while as she alternated between sobbing and talking about Mr Ed. The police apparently had no spare person to attend to her now that Hwang had gone, they continued to tramp importantly up and down the stairs with people in lab coats and medical gear. Eventually, her husband Miguel, a solid man preceded by a vast stomach, turned up and balanced himself on one of the chairs, holding her hand and patting her shoulder.
I really needed that coffee now. Archer had positioned himself at the foot of the stairs, lounging against the wall with thumbs in pockets, and seemed to be imbibing the snatches of conversation that passed by him. Occasionally, he idly asked someone a question or two, like he was not really interested. Maybe he wasn’t, maybe he left homicides entirely to the cops and just worked on minor matters such as divorce cases. His laidback questions did get answers though, I noticed.
I smoothed down my hair, mussed up due to Lourdes, and went up to him. “I can make it to the police station on my own, if you would like to go on ahead.”
He straightened up and took my arm. “Let’s have that coffee.”
We went to the Starbucks in the strip mall across the street. “How long have you been with Mr Ed?” he asked after we were settled with our espressos.
I was exhausted. It was long past my office hours. So for the first time since he walked into the office six months ago, I actually had a sensible conversation with him.