There are two orderlies working in the forensic morgue of the provincial hospital - former criminal-recidivist Pal Palych Shishko and former detective Nikolai Ivanovich Kedrov. They are completely different, do not like each other, but in public they communicate in an emphatically formal manner. The only thing they have in common is work. One day, a young investigator, senior lieutenant Dmitry Saikin, appears at the morgue. The management considers him a failure and pins the most hopeless cases on him.