Lennie walked through the foyer of his building and dug in his pocket for his keys. He slowly made his way upstairs to his apartment. Lately it was getting harder to make it up the single flight of stairs at the end of the day.
"Hello Leonard," Mrs. Landers greeted him cheerily.
"Evening Mrs. Landers," Lennie said trying hard not to get entangled in a conversation with his busybody neighbor.
"You feeling all right, Leonard? You like tired," she observed solicitously.
"I'm fine, ma'am, just a tough day," Lennie responded.
"Well you take care, now," she said as she closed her door.
"Yeah, take care," Lennie said as he took off his tie and coat and slipped off his shoes.
He walked over to his kitchen sink and began his evening ritual of taking pills; it was similar to his morning ritual. He poured out the prescription pills designed, the doctors said, to enhance the effects of the radiation and chemotherapy he'd had, and then there were other pills to combat the side affects of those pills. Some days he felt like flushing the whole lot down the john. They made him miserable, and for what? So he could snoop around the records of a good cop trying to see if there was any proof that maybe he wasn't such a good cop? When he had a whole fistful of pills, he threw them back in his mouth and washed them down with a big gulp of water. He shook himself a bit from the bitterness of the pills.
God, he wanted a drink, a real drink, vodka or scotch, not diet coke or club soda with lime. Here he was an old, broken down retired cop, alone, dying of cancer. Nobody gave a rat's ass about him, so why should he care whether he stayed sober. Suddenly a knock at the door broke through Lennie's depressive reverie.
"Who is it?" he growled.
"It's me, Eddie Green. Open up Old Spice, let me in. I got some of my Mama's cookin' to share with you," his old partner answered.
Lennie shoved himself up out of his beat up old easy chair where he had been sitting and stewing about his situation, and went to his apartment's front door.
"Come on in, Ed," he said with a laugh. Taking the younger man by the arm and guiding him into the apartment, he quickly relieved him of the food he'd brought by. The set it all out on the kitchen table and ate until they were full. The two men talked about everything and nothing for hours.
Ed would later report to Lt Van Buren that Lennie didn't look well and hadn't had his legendary appetite when he saw him. He had no way to know it would be the last time he would see him alive, nor could he realize how much that visit had meant to his former partner that night. It was just one of those things you do when you're missing an old friend and something deep inside you tells you it's now or never.
