Free No Lesser Plea by Robert K. Tanenbaum

Listen, don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it. And I’ll call you when I find out what’s going on. OK? Good. So long, baby.”
    Dunbar hung up and ran his hand over his face. If Donnie was holed up in a skell joint and shooting gallery like the Olympia, something might be very wrong indeed. He rose and left the precinct, first stopping off to hit up Petromani for three Tylenols.
    The lobby of the Olympia Hotel smelled exactly like those pink cakes of disinfectant they clip into urinals in gas station toilets, but stronger. It was furnished with two patched orange plastic lounges and a kidney-shaped gold Formica coffee table. Nobody was lounging over coffee though. The desk clerk was sacked out in the space behind his little barred window.
    Room 10 was on the second floor. Dunbar knocked on the door, which was immediately flung open. The detective had some difficulty in recognizing the rattled creature in the doorway as his brother-in-law; but Donald recognized the cop. He cried out “No!” and attempted to slam the door in Dunbar’s face, but the bigger man blocked it with his shoulder and easily pushed his way into the room.
    “Donnie, cut that out! What the hell is going on here? Ella’s worried sick.”
    But Dunbar knew what was going on. He had been in innumerable little stinking rooms like this. Donald was crumpled on the bed, moaning. Dunbar sat down beside him, grabbed Donald’s wrist and looked at the inside of his arm. “How long you been shooting dope, Donald?”
    “She shouldna called you. I tol her …”
    “Answer me!”
    Donald raised his head. “Not long, not long. I swear it, Sonny. I ain’t hooked, I just pop some now and again, I swear …”
    “Shit you ain’t hooked. You a smackhead, boy. You were, I mean, cause starting now you are off. Now get up and wash that snot off your face. I’m taking you home. We’ll figure out something to tell Ella.” Dunbar got off the bed.
    Donald shrank away. “No! I can’t, he kill me for sure. He said he gonna kill the kids, he …”
    “What’re you talking about? Who said?”
    “Nobody! Nothin’ … I can’t tell you.”
    Dunbar reached down and grabbed Donald by the front of his T-shirt, pulling his face close to his own. Donald’s breath was fetid. “Goddamit! Don’t give me that shit! Who’s gonna kill you? What you been up to, huh? Talk!” He threw Walker back on the bed like a rag doll, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
    Slowly, in disconnected sentences, the story emerged, helped by sharp questions from Dunbar. “Alright, you drive these two guys to the supermarket. Then what?”
    “Well … I was late, and the supermarket guy was gone, so I thought, that’s it, we can go home. But then Stack, he sees this liquor store, an he makes me park, then he takes his case an… .”
    “Wait! Where was this liquor store?” Dunbar had a sickening feeling that he knew what the answer would be.
    “I dunno, Madison, I think, around Fiftieth.”
    “Madison, between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth?”
    “Yeah, that’s the one.”
    “Oh, Donnie, you dumb asshole! Do you know your friend wasted two people in that store? Blew one guy’s head off with a shotgun and killed a seventeen-year-old kid.”
    “I din do nothin’! I swear, Jesus, I never even touched the gun. Sonny, as God is my secret judge, all I done was drive the car.”
    “Donnie, let me explain something. The law don’t care about that. The law says that if a murder is committed in the course of a crime, everybody involved in the crime can be charged with murder, just the same as whoever did the killing itself. You understand what I’m saying?”
    “Sonny, hey, that ain’t right! I tol you I din do nothin’.”
    “Yeah, baby, but that’s the way it is. Now look, Donnie, we’re in a bad situation here. You just told me about being hooked up in a crime. I’m a cop, right? That means I got to do something …”
    “You gonna arrest me!”
    “No, but I got to