Description
When Cleveland Barnes, a mildly deranged homeless man, is found wearing the bloody shoes of a recently decapitated man, attorney Stuart Clay is assigned to prove the innocence of Barnes.
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Murder is like real estate, and when Benny Batiste's head winds up on a Georgetown parking meter, defense attorney Stuart Clay finds that the location-location-location puts the District of Columbia in an uproar. Police detain Cleveland Barnes wearing a green army raincoat, a battered top hat, and bloodied Bally loafers. As Benny had been discovered both headless and shoeless, Cleveland is charged with murder and Stuart is appointed to represent him. Stuart thinks Cleveland is a hapless street person who filched some shoes, but nothing more. Homicide Detective Rhondo Touhey insists that Stuart is dead wrong and warns him that some mocking birds are guilty as sin and deserve what they get. Stuart's pursuit of witnesses and clues takes the reader on a tour de force of the D.C. criminal justice system and connects a band of homeless living under Georgetown's Key Bridge, the Bronx mob, the urban renaissance of Washington, D.C., and a malignant evil that fingers Stuart to be its next prey.
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