They were just kids really, too young to have adopted the requisite pretenses of adulthood. But they sensed a new age dawning so they dropped out, left home, and moved to New York City to do their own thing, which happened to be opening a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. All was going well until a cop stopped by with his hand out, and the partners freaked out-one of them remembered she had a cousin who was a former police officer, a certain Mitch Tobin. Tobin was a different kind of dropout; he'd been expelled from the NYPD and middle-aged cynicism had long ago replaced whatever youthful ideals he might have had. Awash in shame and self-pity, Tobin does his thing by building a wall around his house in Queens. Yet when his cousin, Robin Kennely, begs for his help, Tobin reluctantly agrees to take the long subway ride into the city. Arriving at the coffeehouse, Tobin is met with a grisly scene: there's been a double murder-Robin's boyfriend and a nameless prostitute have been brutally knifed. And Robin, covered in blood, is the police's prime suspect.