Alvin Darby, 29-year-old insurance clerk, finds his comfortable middle-class lifestyle in turmoil when he begins to suspect his wife of adultery, and starts to plot the murder of his old friend, Pete Lanson, whom he suspects of being his wife's lover.

She took a final drag at the cigarette, flipped it away, and said, I don't get this line of talk. It's way over my head. Maybe you're waiting for some dream girl to come along in a coach drawn by six white horses, and she'll pick you up and haul you away to the clouds, where it's all milk and honey and springtime all year around.

It's winter in Philadelphia, January cold coming in off two rivers. Hart is broke, freezing, looking for a place to lay low from the cops. If he can't find somewhere soon he might do something rash - like steal an overcoat and accept a wallet containing ,000 from a man dying from gunshot wounds in the street.

In the rough end of Philadelphia, docker William Kerrigan obsesses over the mysterious suicide of his sister. Into a dive bar walks Lorretta Channing the beautiful, enigmatic socialite and sister of Newton the drunk. Loretta's the impossible dream, the escape route from his hellhole existence, but maybe she holds the key to his sister's death.