Help Wanted - Male

In the lacquered twilight of post-war American aspiration, a thousand crumpled dollars flutter like a wounded bird into the lap of Leona Stafford—an ingénue whose hunger for upward mobility is etched into the hollows of her cheekbones. She converts that meager inheritance into a Trojan wardrobe: silks that hiss across parquet, veils heavy as verdicts, a mourning brooch sharp enough to prick the conscience of any eligible plutocrat. Off she glides to a cliff-perched resort where chandeliers drip like stalactites over a menagerie of velvet-poor aristocrats and parvenus swimming in debt and champagne. Under the alias of a tragically widowed mystery-woman, she spins a cocoon of half-truths so luminous that the hotel’s night clerk—an armchair detective nourished on pulp correspondence courses—senses blood in the water. Rumor metastasizes: the celebrated aviator Captain Cromwell has vanished; surely this sable-draped siren has shackled him in some hidden alcove. Leona, sensing the net tighten, impulsively recruits a sunburned drifter called Tubbs, whose patched coat reeks of boxcars and starlight. She barters her last chip—trust laced with fear—only to discover that the supposed vagrant is the very phantom pilot whose disappearance electrified the headlines. The revelation detonates like magnesium: love recognized, transaction reversed, and a fortune-hunt mutates into matrimony in the time it takes a champagne cork to sigh.