Hired by the city’s bankers to track down and apprehend the thief who is plundering their banks, private detective Sheldon Minick develops a friendship with his chief suspect, Nicholas Hale, an elegant young man-about-town who is in every way the sober Methodist detective’s opposite. They agree to a truce and undertake each to show the other the city that he knows and values.
Further adventures follow, including a visit to a whorehouse with leap-frogging whores, but when the truce ends, the inevitable finale comes in the dark midnight vaults of a bank.