Working for a slick restaurateur who has fallen for her, a down-on-life songstress falls instead for a crusading crime reporter, unaware that her employer is the secret head of the city's major gambling machine racket and has a penchant for murdering anyone who gets in his way.

On Chicago's South Side reporter Ed Ames finds the body of a dead girl. Her address book leads to a host of names of men frightened by her death but claiming never to have known her. Ames comes to know quite a lot, dangerously so.