Louis Jean Heydt (in his first movie role) has come from the premiere of his first Broadway show. He drops in on Lora Baxter, and tells her that if it is a success, he wants her to star in his next. She turns him down. She's retiring and getting married. After he leaves, her old lover, Russell Hicks comes in. He doesn't feel too well and lies down. When Miss Baxter checks on him, he is dead.
She makes some phone calls. A dead married man in her apartment is not something she wants bruited about. In comes Doctor Leo Carillo. He says it was not a heart attack, but nicotine poisoning, that he found Hicks' will in his breast pocket -- where people always keep them -- and it leaves $200,000 to Miss Baxter. He suggests that he can take the corpse to his sanitarium and report the death as a heart attack for $200,000 in cash by the next day.
This interesting written murder mystery suffers a common issue for Poverty Row dramas of the era: very stagy line readings. However, the excellence of the story and Leo Carillo makes it very worthwhile. Although Carillo is probably best remembered as Pancho on TV's CISCO KID, and frequently played with a Mexican accent, in truth he came from a wealthy Los Angeles family who could trace themselves back to the Conquistadors. His grandfather had been the first provisional governor of California, and his father the first mayor of Santa Monica. Carillo himself was a trained engineer and cartoonist. In the 1930s he excelled at playing threatening villains, although his career turned into one of more standard accent parts in the 1940s. He died in 1961 at the age of 80.
