Suave, lip-reading DA Thatcher Colt plans to get away from the big city for a while. So he and his secretary, Miss Kelly hop on a train for an Upstate NY town called Gilead. They expect a calm oasis, but when a small time circus rolls into town they soon find themselves caught up in a sordid tale of marital infidelity, murder, cruelty to animals, and cannibalism.

Roy is a newspaper reporter. He goes to Cheyenne to cover the activities of supposed bad guy Arapahoe Brown. Roy, of course, discovers who the real bad guy is.

There is a garage in downtown New York City on the ground floor of an eight-story building, with a winding ramp, that serves as a cache for stolen automobiles. The second floor is the repair shop, with the third, fourth and fifth as storage rooms and the sixth is the paint shop, where the hot cars are quickly changed via new paint, fenders and windshields and license plates. The seventh has a speakeasy, and the eighth is the penthouse where the supposed-gang leader,Jenkins, resides in comfort, while the real head of the gang rambles about posing as a deaf-mute known as 'The Dummy." All of this goes undetected by NYC's Finest, and might have continued to do so if the ground-floor-garage manager and "front-man", "Beef" Evans , hadn't been sent on a one-way ride down the ramp, and his widow, Nancy, asked her brother, "Gabby" Denton, to investigate. Or, if Jenkins' sweetie, "Silver," hadn't gotten the sweets for "Gabby."