Who is Harriet Huntress from Trouble Is My Business and what is their importance?

Harriet Huntressappears is a beautiful, red-headed woman, who acts as a shill for a gambler that Philip Marlowe has been hired to deal with. Harriet lives in the nineteen hundred block of North Sycamore in the El Milano.

Harriet's father jumped from his office window after the market crash in 1931, and her family was once listed in the Social Register. After her father's suicide, the family was ruined.