Build a movie plot around this: Who murders Mullins? Kredge and Mrs. Deere
The film opens as an unseen assailant enters a dark house, removes a hammer from a kitchen drawer, and walks though the house to the bedroom of a sleeping man and woman. The killer uses the claw of the hammer to beat the woman to death, and the man is bludgeoned as well, his face mutilated. Then the murderer sets the room on fire. The man in the bed tries to crawl to safety, flames burning his face.Ellie Masters (Melody Patterson) wakes up screaming in bed, the opening incident being the subject of her nightmare. The murdered woman was her mother, Edna, who was a small town prostitute. The man in bed with her was her latest john, and his body has apparently not been recovered. A social worker named Mullins (Milton Selzer) has Ellie temporarily housed in a hospital, but Ellie wants to leave and go in search of her estranged father, whom she has never met. Mullins refuses, since Ellie is still a minor and technically a ward of the state, and Mullins says if she leaves, he will have to report it to the sheriff. Ellie does pack a suitcase and makes a run for it, but a mysterious man follows her in a car. He reveals himself to be Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback), a former theater performer and now a detective working for the county Sheriff's department. He tells Ellie he knows who she is, and that he will look out for her, and he takes her back to the hospital. Later, Calvin meets Mullins for a drink in a bar and asks about his intentions regarding Ellie. Mullins says he's placing Ellie in the Deere Youth Home, an isolated orphanage run by a recently widowed woman named Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame). Mullins accuses Calvin of having a prurient interest in Ellie, and Calvin admits that he'd like to make Ellie his wife because he considers her good "breeding stock". Mullins tells Calvin that Ellie could never be interested in him because he's too old for her, but Calvin cuts him off by revealing that he knows Mullins has an unorthodox "business arrangement" with Mrs. Deere where he sends certain orphans to her home....