P.I. Kent Taylor is nursing a hangover when a dame walks into his office. She wants her husband followed. She doesn't think it's another woman, although she admits it might be. She wants to know what he's keeping from her. She drops a c-note and walks out. Taylor splits the money with his secretary - he hasn't paid her in a while - and heads off to pay some bills, probably for liquor.
That evening, after trailing the husband home, he takes off for the evening. It's too bad, because he goes out later and is shot dead in an artist's studio. The police follow her to Taylor's office, where she drops more money on him. She leaves and gets herself killed too. Taylor thinks he owes her, so he starts trying to puzzle it out himself.
It's a fairly good example of the Hard-Boiled Detective yarn, half MALTESE FALCON, half MURDER MY SWEET, without much in the way of wisecracking, but plenty muddled, and competently directed by Eugene Forde. It's from Sol Wurtzel after Fox had closed down its B studio, but was still distributing his independently-produced movies. The Ritz Brothers may have mourned back when they were transferred to his division that they were going "from bad to Wurtzel," but his inexpensive productions made money, and in Hollywood, that made you very popular with the studio brass, even if some people claimed he was a worse vulgarian than Harry Cohn. Wurtzel produced movies for another couple of years, bringing his total of features up to 180, then retired. He died in 1958, aged 67.
