Chapters Nine - Eleven Summary

In chapter nine, Marlowe stops at a hotel in Puma Point for dinner. When he returns to his car, he finds it is occupied by a girl. The girl introduces herself as Birdie Keppel, and says she is a beautician by day and a newspaper journalist at night. She instructs him to drive her to a quieter place where they can talk. In response to her questions, Marlowe tells Birdie he does not believe Chess was responsible for his wife's death. Although she already knows what he does for a living, she asks anyway and suggests Marlowe might have had some interest in Muriel Chess. She mentions that a Los Angles cop who had called himself De Soto had been looking for a woman named Mildred Haviland. Although the woman in the picture he had looked like...