I Love Trouble (1948) Franchot Tone

A wealthy politician, Ralph Johnson, hires detective Stuart Bailey to investigate his missing wife’s background. Bailey discovers that the wife had been a dancer under her maiden name of Jane Breeger and had left her Oregon home town with Buster Buffin, a nightclub entertainer, who says Jane changed her name to Janie Joy and enrolled at UCLA. Buffin is killed before Bailey can question him further. Norma Shannon shows up, looking for her sister Jane, but when Bailey shows her a photograph of the missing woman, Norma says it’s not her. Bailey learns that the wife had used stolen papers from a girlfriend to enter college after she stole $40,000 from the club where she worked, owned by a man named Keller. The detective eventually learns that Johnson had killed his wife when he had himself discovered her past, in order to avoid a scandal, and that he had hired the detective in order to frame him for the killing.