Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the man's throat has been slashed with Arfel's knife.

Arfel knows he's been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once a safe distance from the southern town, Arfel makes the acquaintance of Lemontree Johnson, a fellow...

Arfel Booker is a great young blues musician in the 1940s South. One night, after playing a blues gig in a new town, a beautiful woman takes him back to her log cabin to make love. In the morning (after blacking out from too much liquor), he awakens to an unwelcome surprise. Instead of the woman, an unfamiliar white man is in the bed, and the man's throat has been slashed with Arfel's knife.

Arfel knows he's been framed, so he makes a run for it and heads north by hopping trains. Once a safe distance from the southern town, Arfel makes the acquaintance of Lemontree Johnson, a fellow...

Money in 1923 is an object of excess, not restraint or caution. New York City is a metropolis of big business and Wall Street and gritty finance. It's the Gilded Age and Maxwell Engelbert De Wolfe loves being immersed in it. A New York-based financier and owner of De Wolfe & Fitch, he's one of the world's wealthiest men.

The fifty-four-year-old De Wolfe is trapped in a loveless marriage to Alexandra Bauer, a marriage arranged between two wealthy German families thirty-one years ago. To satisfy his needs, he maintains Eva Durant as his mistress, hiding her in a building at 10 Ballad...