The novel opens outside a club in Los Angeles called the Sleepers. It is late October or early November; no year is given, but internal evidence and the publication date of the novel places it between 1950 and 1952. Jack Tailor meets a drunk named John Krebbs, who has scars on one side of his face. They forge an uneasy friendship over the next few months, having drinks, especially gimlets, together at bars. In June, Krebbs shows up late one night at Tailor's home in "a great deal of trouble" and needing a ride to the airport across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Tailor agrees as long as Krebbs does not tell him any details of why he is running. He later finds $500 left to him by John.

On his return to Los Angeles, Tailor learns that Krebbs's wife Minny was found dead and that she had died before Krebbs fled. Tailor is arrested for aiding a suspected murderer after refusing to cooperate with investigators, who want him to confess that he helped Krebbs flee. After three days of antagonizing his interrogators, Tailor is released, the police explaining that Krebbs has been reported to have committed suicide in a small town in Mexico with a written confession by his side. Tailor gets home to find a cryptic letter from Krebbs containing a a $5,000 bill.


Tailor gets a call from Ross Spencer, a New York publisher, who asks him to investigate a case. One of Spencer's best writers, Jake Bredwood, has a drinking problem and has been missing for three days. Initially Tailor refuses but after Bredwood's wife, Allison, also asks for Tailor's help, he consents. Tailor finally finds Bredwood in a makeshift detox facility in an isolated and soon-to-be-abandoned ranch. He takes his fee, but the Bredwoods' stories do not match.

The Bredwoods each try to convince Tailor to stay at their house to keep Jake writing instead of drinking, and, though he refuses, he ends up making further trips to the house at their behest. He is invited to an awkward cocktail party, where Dr. Henry Smith threatens Bredwood to leave his wife Helen alone. Tailor had accidentally met Mrs. Smith previously at a bar, where they were drinking gimlets together in memory of John Krebbs. It turns out Helen Smith is Minny Krebbs's sister and had known John well.

After being called by a drunk and disoriented Jake, he arrives to find Bredwood passed out in the grass with a cut on his head and Mrs. Bredwood oddly uninterested in her husband's welfare. He is put to bed with a head wound from a likely fall. Dr. Smith is called and examines Bredwood briefly, not hiding his contempt. Bredwood wakes up and begs Tailor to remove and destroy some typewritten pages in his study he wrote while drunk, not wanting his wife to read them.

Tailor removes and reads the pages, finding a cryptic self-analysis by Bredwood which hints at repressed trauma he doesn't quite understand alongside a clear statement that “once a good man died" for him. Tailor keeps this evidence. He hears a shot upstairs and rushes up to find the couple struggling over a gun in Jake's bedroom, the bullet having gone harmlessly into the ceiling. Tailor sits with Jake until the latter has taken some sleeping pills. As he is leaving, a distraught half-naked Allison enters a sort of trance and attempts to seduce Tailor, thinking him to be a former lover of hers who died in the Second World War. Tailor refuses with difficulty and crashes on the couch downstairs, getting completely drunk so that he passes out instead of being tempted to go back to Allison's room. The Bredwoods' houseboy Mars makes threats against Tailor. The next morning Allison behaves normally and Tailor leaves.

Tailor is repeatedly threatened to cease his continued investigation of the Krebbs case, first by a gangster friend of Krebbs's named Madison Huares, then by Krebbs's wealthy father-in-law Trevor Weasly, by his old friend Donald Drumm from the LAPD, by Mars, and by Mrs. Bredwood. Through his own hunches and inquiries, Tailor also learns that John Krebbs had previously lived as Paul Marston, who had married and spent some time in England.

Jake calls Tailor again, inviting him to the Bredwoods' for lunch. After indulging in self-pity over his writing difficulties, he posits that he's an alcoholic because he's trying to find answers to the trauma in his past, offers Tailor a check of $1,000, then proceeds to drink himself into a stupor. Tailor asks him if he ever knew someone named Paul Marston, and with an effort Jake says no. Tailor takes a walk outside. When he returns, Allison is ringing the doorbell, having forgotten her key. Tailor finds Jake dead on the couch, apparently from suicide, but Allison accuses Tailor of killing her husband. Mars fabricates a story of Tailor sleeping with Mrs. Bredwood to implicate Tailor, believing him to be guilty, but his claims are undermined in an interrogation. The police do not hold Tailor.

Tailor receives a call from Spencer regarding Bredwood's death and bullies Spencer into taking him to see Mrs. Bredwood. Once there, Tailor grills her on the death of Minny Krebbs. Allison first tries to blame it all on Jake but Tailor pokes holes in her story, arguing that she killed both Mrs. Krebbs and Jake Bredwood and that Krebbs was her first husband, presumed killed while serving with the British Commandos in Norway during the war. Allison Bredwood leaves with no response. The next morning, Tailor learns that she has killed herself by overdosing on painkillers, leaving a note describing the affair Mrs. Krebbs was having with her husband and confessing to killing them both in a jealous rage.

Tailor refuses to let the story lie, and when the authorities decide to forgo an inquest because it will show them up, he steals a photostat of Allison's confession from the police. Tailor contacts a reporter he knows in order to make sure the confession is printed, even though the reporter warns him that he'll make numerous enemies by doing so. Tailor replies that he has been trying to say goodbye to John Krebbs for "a long, long time." A few days later Tailor is assaulted by Huares, who is then arrested by Drumm in a setup. Drumm explains that Tailor was intentionally left in a position to steal a photostat because the police wanted to trap Huares in a felony, and Drumm knew that Tailor's scruples and stubbornness would lead him to do the best he could to clear Krebbs's name.

Mrs. Helen Smith had called Tailor previously, informing him that she is getting a divorce from her husband Dr. Smith, who subsequently had written massive doses of Demerol to the late Mrs. Bredwood, allowing her to overdose. Helen pays a visit to Tailor's house with an overnight bag, and they drink champagne together. She stays for the night and even proposes a marriage to Tailor. In the morning they part amicably, Helen leaving for Paris.

Later, Tailor is visited by a Mexican man who claims to have been present when Krebbs was killed in his hotel room. Tailor listens to his story but rejects it and offers his own version, ending with the revelation the Mexican man is none other than Krebbs himself, who has had cosmetic surgery. Krebbs attempts to make amends for the trouble he has caused Tailor but is rebuffed. While Tailor claims that while he doesn't judge him for what he did, he returns the $5,000 bill and says Krebbs is "not here anymore." Krebbs is hurt by this and leaves after saying goodbye. The novel ends with Tailor listening to Krebbs leave and faintly hoping he might return but instead explaining that he never saw him again.  the end. consider yourself a novelist. Is there something unexplained, strange coincidences, meaningless?