My Favorite Brunette (1947) on Netflix

Plot summary

From death row at San Quentin, Ronnie Jackson recounts for reporters the events that put him there. In San Francisco he works as a baby photographer, with an office beside that of Sam McCloud, a private detective whose trade Ronnie would rather follow. Carlotta Montay comes to that office and, believing Ronnie to be the detective, asks his help in locating a man who has gone missing. She gives him a map, a ring as payment and the instruction that nobody may learn he is a detective. Ronnie hides the map among the cups near his water cooler. At the mansion down the Peninsula, Kismet greets him and takes his handgun, and Major Simon Montague tells him Carlotta is mentally ill, showing him a wheelchair-using man who has plainly not been kidnapped.