It's Christmas eve 1930 and Eliot Ness and his men are investigating the murder of a close friend of his, Hap Levinson. The man had been playing Santa Claus at a children's orphanage and had just left when he was gunned down by a passing car. Levinson was the front man in a nightclub-speakeasy and he and Ness had spent many hours together laughing and passing the time of day. As Ness looks into his old friend's background, he learns that he may have had a girlfriend named Renée that he kept in a downtown apartment.