***SPOILERS*** Lying in bed and playing with a paper-clip Jericho Mansions superintendent Leonard Gray, James Caan, tell us the story of what happen in that apartment building that put him in the place that he's in now.
Leonard knows only his life as a super at that apartment building and nothing else. In his fifties he knows nothing of what he did up until he was in his late twenties. That's when he somehow became the superintendent of that building. What he did and what kind of life he lead before that is a total blur to him. But two events happened the week before that had his past come back to him and it came back with deadly results.
The landlady of the Jericho Mansions Mrs. Lily Meinick, Genevieve Bujodl, had just lost her husband of over thirty years Robert, Pierre Rioux. Shortly after Roberts funeral she got a call from her sister in France Bettina, Lenie Scoffie, via a singing telegram that she's coming over to see Lily for the first time in thirty years. These two events set Lily off in an insane way to get rid of her long-time superintendent Leonard Gray by hook or by crook. Even if it took a murder on her part to do it.
You wonder why this hatred and at the same time fear of the meek shy and seemingly harmless Leonard Gray? He never left the building in the thirty years that he worked there! Leonard also seems to be so helpless outside that if he's fired, which Lily can't do because he belongs to a Superintendents Union, he my well die on the cruel and cold city streets.
When in desperation trying to get Leonard arrested by the police for stealing her husbands watch it becomes obvious that Lily planted it in Leonard's room. It's then that her whole plan to rid herself of him completely begins to fall apart. Then one evening one of the tenants in the building Bill Cherry, Peter Keleghan, is found dead at the bottom of the buildings incinerator. Lily seeing her chance tries to blame his death, or murder, on Leonard! But with no evidence at all to Leonard's guilt for the death of Bill Cherry and Lily totally unable to get rid of him she starts to lose her sanity and begins to go mad. What's the reason for all these actions on the part of Lily anyway? What is there about Leonard that she's been keeping hidden from him and suppressing all these years? We find out at the end of the movie that the secret that is hidden by Lily as well as hidden deep inside Leonard's subconscious mind have left the two suffering with deep psychological scars. That secret is so terrible that we slowly begin to understand why Lily acted the way that she did in trying to get rid of Leonard all through the film.
It was the past that she and her husband so cleverly covered up over the last thirty years that was about to the surface. Now everything that Lily did to prevent it from coming out was as useless to stopping it as a sea-wall is in holding back the Atlantic Ocean. And it's that dark and hidden secret that was to lead to her doom.
