Detective Humpty Dumpty lives with his unhappy wife, Alice, in a land where nursery rhyme characters are riddled with troubled, complicated lives. He receives a call from Mother Goose who asks him to investigate the murder of her friend Hickety Pickety, a reformed drug addict and gambling chicken outlaw.

At the scene of the crime, Humpty finds the king's men roughly interrogating Peter Piper, a compulsive gambler whose wife recently committed suicide. Humpty follows Peter's suspicious son, Tom, into the village square. A vengeful and mentally-ill Tom buys a lethal bomb-in-a-pie, intent on blowing up the gambling hall until he is stopped by Humpty. After pleading innocent to Hickety's murder, Tom thrusts the pie onto Humpty and frames him for the crime.

After receiving a beating from the king's men for possession of the pie, Humpty returns home to find a distraught Alice. She confessed to having had an affair with Hickety, which inadvertently caused her murder. Apparently, after an intense argument, she had provoked Hickety to jump into a canon that would take her life. She then asks Humpty for a divorce.

Humpty looks back on this memory as he sits on the wall in the middle of the night, wondering where things went wrong and feeling despair.