Nightclub owner Shrimp Martin has been shot, and Hitchcock Sewell already knows who-done-it. It's his friend, Lucy Taylor, who went directly to Hitch's funeral home and placed the smoking gun on his desk. As it happens, Shrimp survives his gunshot wound. However, what he doesn't survive is the knife that is plunged into his heart as he lies resting in his hospital bed. Naturally, the police would like to question Lucy Taylor. But she has only slipped away from Hitch's custody, hooked up with Hitch's ex-wife Julia and the two have now disappeared. Matters get only more complicated when Shrimp's younger brother - also a friend of Lucy's - turns up dead. Is Lucy on a rampage? Is Julia somehow involved? As Hitch begins to nose about, he is joined by a private eye named Pete, who is in the full bloom of a career, and mid-life, crisis. Together the two uncover nefarious goings-ons at the nightclub, learn of a mysterious missing bag containing several hundred thousand dollars, and begin to wonder if a notorious year-old murder case involving a local student and her professor might not somehow be connected with all of this.