THE PLOT

Mr Burroughs was an honorable and exceedingly rich businessman. His second wife was Martha. His children by his first wife are Jeremy (or Jerome), a nice lad who somehow got caught up in organized crime, and Jane.

A gangster by the name of Mr Leris has a night of fun and games with Jane and snaps some incriminating photos, which get into the hands of a different gang leader, Ruby Prescott, who uses them to blackmail Mr Burroughs. In the meantime, Leris has discovered that Jane’s stepmother Martha has money and is ripe for the plucking. He has his goons arrange a convenient hit-and-run accident to get rid of Mr Burroughs, and Martha is instantly his. But Jane is now a distinct liability. Once Leris hooks up with Martha, he’ll have to spend his new dough on blackmail payments, and since there is nothing but friction between Martha and her stepdaughter, it is best to get rid of Jane.

Now that Mr Burroughs is dead, Prescott demands to see Jane herself. Jane needs protection, and so she takes her brother Jeremy along, but since Jeremy knows nothing about the photos, she can’t tell him why they’re going to Prescott’s club. After dancing together for a few minutes, Leris and Martha walk in. Leris wants to make sure that everyone and everything is in place. Jane leaves in a panic. Leris, though, has seen enough. He guesses correctly that Jane will come back, and he orders his goons murder Prescott upon her return. Jane does return, though by now Jeremy has wandered off somewhere. Jane now must face Prescott alone. The goons quickly go through Prescott’s files, his desk, his safe (they know the combination) in a search for the photos, but they abandon their search when they hear Jane’s footsteps in the hall. They vanish just in time for Jane to step in. Jane stares in horror at the cadaver, and has no idea what to do. Because of the blackmail scheme, she knows that she will be the prime suspect. Leris has already arranged for Jane to be caught in the room with Prescott’s freshly killed corpse, which would settle the issue once and for all and get her out of his hair. But his plans are foiled when Bernard unexpectedly decides to walk in for a chat with Prescott. Bernard gathers some evidence — money and a datebook — but just then he and Jane hear approaching footsteps in the hall. Bernard runs out an emergency exit and drags Jane with him.

Jelly-Roll witnessed Bernard go up the hall to see Prescott. The next thing he knew was that Prescott had just been killed, his date book had been stolen out of the safe, and Bernard had disappeared. The police are summoned, and Jelly-Roll tells them his suspicions that the Frenchman was probably the murderer.

Jane tells Bernard some of what she knows, but doesn’t say that the photos are actually of her. Jane wants to go to Prescott’s house herself to see if she can find the photos, but Bernard goes in her stead. He arrives to see that the doors are all unlocked, the bookcases have been toppled, the safe has been raided, and papers have been strewn about the floor. Prescott’s assassins have beat him to the punch and have already searched the house. Just after Bernard enters, Jelly-Roll and his bodyguard enter as well, having just been able to get away from the club. Whom do they catch? Bernard. They have no doubt but that he’s Prescott’s assassin. Bernard, having learned some tricks of the trade in Algiers, pulls a fast one on them, kills the bodyguard, and knocks Jelly-Roll cold.

Bernard returns, tells Jane nothing of the excitement, and decides instead to persuade her into his bed. She reluctantly takes his lead, but vanishes as soon as he falls asleep and runs back home. But at home the situation is even more troubling. She is questioned by the police, and because she has no idea what to say, she puts her foot in her mouth, making herself look suspicious. Now suddenly she needs Bernard, who is also an innocent suspect, and arranges a meeting with him, but not before taking a gun from her home, just in case.

Since his first plan was foiled, Leris comes up with a new plan. He arranges for Jane to be kidnapped and killed, and he wants to make it look as though Prescott’s gang did it.

After a brief search for Jeremy, whom Bernard suspects is the murderer, they take a walk in Hyde Park where they think they cannot be overheard. But they are followed by a dwarf. Though the dwarf works for Leris, he is completely unknown to Jane. When she’s finally vulnerable for a moment, the dwarf gives the signal, Leris’s gang abduct Jane, and the dwarf knocks Bernard out cold.

Thanks to Bernard’s photographer friend David, he locates Jeremy just as he receives a ransom call. Bernard tells Jeremy of the dwarf, the hoodlums, and the car they were driving, and that’s enough for Jeremy to identify the kidnappers. They are Leris’s men, and he knows their hideouts. They find one of Jane’s abductors at the docks, and Bernard, pretending to be a tourist, summons him for directions, showing him an address in Prescott’s datebook. The gang member clearly does not recognize the diary for what it is. They overpower him, and he confesses where the dwarf is hiding. By a brilliant use of surprise, Bernard and Jeremy are able to outwit Leris’s men and rescue Jane.

Bernard is beginning to feel out of his depth, and wants to go to the police, and he also wants to see Leris. Jane is terrified and dashes off without explanation. She knows that confronting Leris about any criminal activity will be her doom, and the presence of police will only make the situation worse. Bernard catches up with her, and Jane, seeing no way out, steels herself against her fears and accompanies Bernard on a visit to Leris’s apartment. Prescott’s gang have figured out who killed their boss. They send over a few men to put Leris out of his misery, and they leave behind planted evidence to implicate Jane. After all, she would have had the motive to eliminate Leris, who had seduced her, who had taken incriminating photos that led to a blackmail scheme, who had then seduced her stepmother, and who followed that up by murdering her father. Bernard and Jane arrive to see that Leris has just been killed.

They dash away before they can be discovered, but Jelly-Roll is preparing something for Bernard. Yet before he can gather all his forces together, he has to give chase with only two men. Jane has no idea who these three men are, having never seen them before. She realizes they are after Bernard, as indeed they are, for they want the datebook that Bernard stole from Prescott’s office. Jane and Bernard split up, and Bernard knows that he will likely be caught by the gang, as indeed he is. He breaks under torture and agrees to lead them to Jane, who currently has possession of the diary and is for the time being hiding out at David’s studio. They drive him toward David’s studio, but because they are only three men rather than the required four, Bernard manages to dash out of the car, causing an accident in which Jelly-Roll and his driver get killed and the third gangster gets arrested.

Bernard crawls back to David’s studio where he finds Jeremy. Since Bernard is under the impression that the planted evidence belonged to Martha, he is convinced that it was Martha who murdered Leris. He wants to talk with her, and so Jeremy agrees to take him to a happening where Martha is spending the evening looking for guys to pick up. Jane is mortified at the idea of going to see Martha, as she is convinced that Martha is as guilty as Leris of her father’s murder. After she runs out of excuses, she relucantly decides to go along.

Bernard finds Martha, confronts her with the evidence, but she recognizes the evidence as belonging to Jane. She is convinced that Jane killed Leris, and now believes that their one-night fling of some weeks before had continued. Bernard is now convinced that he has been played the fool. He has been protecting the love of his life from a murderer, but it turns out, he now believes, that the love of his life actually is the murderer.

Jane by now has had too much excitement. Her life had been unusual, true. Her brother had gotten involved in criminal activities, and her stepmother, she believes, killed her dad with help from her new boyfriend, who is clearly a mobster. But the worst dramas only really started with the appearance of Bernard, one night earlier. As soon as Bernard entered her life, she was a suspect in a murder case, she was seduced, she was interrogated by the police, she was kidnapped and threatened with an automatic weapon, she was chased by underworld mobsters, and now enough is enough. Jane’s life has been in danger from the moment she met Bernard, and she has every reason to think that her life will continue to be in danger so long as Bernard is around. If she can get rid of him, she thinks, no one will suspect her; instead, all suspicion will fall on the mobsters. What she doesn’t realize is that the mobsters who had been chasing after Bernard are all either dead or imprisoned. She sees Bernard, and she hesitates. She has never before handled a gun, but when Bernard concludes that she was the murderer all along, she grows stone cold and shoots him. All evidence for several murders will now point to her.