****SPOILERS**** Leaving a local movie house after catching the latest and most talked about whodunit of the year Officer Eve Whitfield, Barbara Anderson, runs into a robbery in progress. In a wild shoot-out with the two masked robbers Eve takes down, with a hail of bullets, the most violent and dangerous of the two. Instead of running like his partner he decided to shoot it out with the police and lost. It turns out that Officer Whitfield had shot and killed young 17 year old Billy Matlin.
It's when Officer Whitfield and her boss Special Police Consultant Robert T. Ironside, Raymond Burr, check out Billy's background in order to identify and capture his partner, who turned out to be career criminal Harry Chezwich, it's discovered that the late Billy Matlin was a really good boy and upstanding young man! the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back, even if it didn't fit, if you needed it! Then why would such a good boy and fine lad end up dead in the gutter from a hail of police bullets!
All this good boy stuff plays on the mind of the by now guilt ridden Officer Whitfield who is now so distressed in her gunning down the good boy, who was shooting at her, that she seriously plans to quite the SFPD and become a Catholic nun even though she's, at the time , not only not Catholic but even religious! It up to Ironside to straighten his fellow cop, Eve, out and he does it by keeping her on the case until they catch the late Billy's partner Harry Chezwick. And with Chezwick hopefully, if he's not shot and killed, in custody we'll all get, including Eve, the inside dope or full story behind Billy Matlin's criminal background!
***SPOILERS*** With Chezwich captured alive, after Eve winged him, at his hideout in Golden Gate Park the truth comes out from Chezwick's mouth what kind of nice and good boy Billy Matlin really was. Not only was Billy involved in a number of robberies with his partner Harry Chezwick but was the trigger man in all of them. Just like he was when he tried to gun down Eve Whitfield the evening she, in self defense, gunned the "Good Boy" down.