When a Hollywood secretary is found murdered, a detective is hired to investigate the murder.

Private detective Tom Alder, who specializes in finding missing persons, links the murder of movie star Leroy Dane's secretary to the unsolved disappearance of heiress Doris Delaney several years before. Later, Alder meets Dane and Linda Foster, Alder's former fiancée who broke with him while he was in Korea. He also meets a young woman named Nikki Kovacs, and although he is not aware that Nikki is actually the missing heiress, he senses something familiar about her. He then is approached by Frenchy Pleschette, a man who tries to hire him to find his missing younger brother. After meeting Nikki on a plane, Alder remembers that they met in Japan while he was recuperating from a combat wound. It is then revealed that she had become involved with a man who made her pregnant and whom she thought she had killed. She had run away to Japan to avoid disgracing her family. Alder's further investigations also establish Dane as the killer of both his secretary and the man whom Doris thought she had murdered. He is also revealed to be the brother of Pleschette, and in a showdown between the two, the latter kills Dane. Alder and Doris resume the romance that started in Japan.