***SPOILERS*** With $20,000.00 missing from the robbery of the Argon Metals Ccmpany suspicion falls on one of the police involved in the shootout with one of the robbers Officer Dave Price, Tony Travis. With the surviving robber Al Sample, Richard Benedict, fingering Price as the one who took the money in a death bed confession he's now not only in danger of losing his job as a member of the Chicago PD but ending up behind bars as well. With Lt. Frank Ballinger, Lee Marvin, checking out the facts in the case he discovers that the robbery was an inside job where the now deceased Sample, under an assumed name, was working at Argon as a maintenance man just a week before it was ripped off. He also discovers that Sample got his job through a recommendation of night club singer Grace Richards, Monica Lewis, who in fact never knew or met him.
As things start to come together it was not Grace but her ex-convict boyfriend Greg Cook, Alfred Shelly, who got her to put in a good word for Sample who as it later turned out was involved with him in the robbery of Argon Medals. And not only that it way well have been Cook who took off with the stolen $20,000.00 that Officer Price is now accused off stealing. Let. Ballinger using strong armed tactics really gets to Cook manhandling and slapping him around, without as much as a shared of evidence, to try to get him to talk and confess his crime. This is before the Marinda Decision was passed by the US Surpreame Court some five years later that prevented this kind on unwarranted and intense police interrogation.
***SPOILERS*** Let. Ballinger tactics did in the end pay off with a panic stricken Cook not wanting to get roughed up by him threw down his guard by hiding his stolen stash in his girlfriend Grace's apartment. This not only implicated her, who was on the outs with him, in his crime but also alerted the Chicago PD as well Let. Ballinger to his trying to skip town and thus zero in on him. Trapped in Grace's apartment with no chance of escape Cook tries to check out, out the window, and then shoot it out with Let.Ballinger. All that gets him is a slug in the tight and a life time stay in state prison. As for Grace Richards she had enough of the big city and went back home to momma and the boy that she left behind.