Marlowe receives a visit from his friend, Kathy Horne, who runs the cigar concession at the Mansion House Hotel across the street from his office. He says of her, “She was a tall, seedy, sad-eyed blonde who had once been a policewoman and had lost her job when she married a cheap little check bouncer named Johnny Horne, to reform him” (117).

Kathy tells Marlowe about the Leander pearl heist. Two valuable pearls worth a quarter-million dollars were stolen in a mail train robbery two decades earlier. A man named Wally Sype was convicted of the crime and served time in Leavenworth, but the pearls were never recovered. During his incarceration, Sype confided to an inmate named Peeler Mardo that he buried the pearls somewhere in Idaho.

Years later, Peeler stumbles across Sype, living in seclusion near Olympia, Washington. Peeler, now a cocaine addict, rents a room from Kathy, and over time tells her about the pearls and Sype. She agrees to help him recover the pearls for a finder’s fee, but they need Marlowe to act as a go-between to negotiate a deal with the insurance company.