Racketeers Robbie LaRose, Frank Valle and Vince DeMotte run a numbers game in a nightclub that contains private rooms. In one of them, Robbie is carrying on his affair with Joan, Frank's wife, when a disagreement leads her to knife him. Overhearing a phone call Joan makes while disposing of the corpse, Pam, a young woman who works at the club, assumes that Joan is turning to her husband Frank for help.Downstairs, Robbie's cousin Iggy DiAnthony waits for him with a friend, Paul Musa, whom he hopes Robbie will hire. When Robbie doesn't appear, Paul asks his sister Rose, who lives in the same building as Frank and Joan Valle, to plead with Frank to hire her brother; and after a heated sexual encounter, she succeeds in getting Paul the job. Frank and Vince temporarily re-divide the business between them until Robbie shows up, but Iggy lets it be known that Robbie must appear or suffer the consequences.