A broke PI attempts to prove the innocence of a wrongly convicted homeless man.
Late at night by posh Gramercy Park, a woman peers into the backseat of a parked car. She's never seen a dead body before, but there's enough blood that she has no doubt what she's looking at. She remembers seeing a strange man nearby, and the police use her fuzzy identification and a few other bits of tenuous evidence to finger Billy Sowell, an alcoholic bum with limited intelligence and a patchy memory, as the killer. Who cares if he's guilty? Billy's an easy conviction, and his case is forgotten until years later, when it falls in the lap of PI Marty Blake.
Blake will take anything as he tries to rebuild his practice after a year's suspension for illegal surveillance, and he attempts to clear Billy's name using his expertise at computerized investigation. But when it comes to proving the New York Police Department wrong, virtual sleuthing will not be enough. For this computer expert, it's time to play tough.
