Driving his Shelby Cobra in the desert at night to clear his head, Ron rescues attractive and married Faith Cameron, setting up the scenario for his implication in her murder. They’ve met before at a kinky Halloween party. Faith’s relationship with her husband, Chip, involves a bizarre sex game: he puts her into dangerous situations, and she fabricates stranger stories to relate to him in exchange for financial favors. In this case, Ron’s rescue and purported seduction is exotic enough to be worth a topaz and sapphire necklace. When Ron questions Chip’s affections, Faith asserts that Chip loves her. After all, he calls her his ‘million dollar baby.’

    Elise Bender, hotel horticultural designer, creates exquisite interior gardens. Her talent is the only reason Ron continues to put up with the flaky, unconventional behavior of this tall, emaciated woman and her fashionably-attired stuffed bear. An ugly incident involving Elise and a hotel guest at the Brass Ring focuses attention on her idiosyncrasies. Ron admonishes her to cut ever-escalating conservatory costs. She protests, but also requests that Ron hire her intellectually-challenged cousin, Chigger, who is more than satisfied to take a minimum wage job pulling weeds at the hotel.

    Ron's girlfriend leaves him. He falls back on a long-standing on-again, off-again relationship with the beautiful, and eternally single, Diana, and is rebuffed when he finally gets the courage to propose. Her admission to the murder of her fiancé leaves him wondering if her intimate confession is the truth or an overactive guilt coloring her perception of an accidental drowning.

    After a flurry of very large checks made out to Hiram Seward and Cara Winard, Elise suddenly quits. A videotape shows Elise's husband, a short private investigator named Vince, using the name Hiram Seward to purchase the gun used to murder Faith. Vince is arrested.

    Chigger tells Ron that Elise spent her childhood perfecting personifications of Hiram Seward and Cara Winard, but is murdered before he can tell the Attorney General. Vince convinces the court that Ron hired him to cover his illicit affair with Faith, as evidenced by the gift of the topaz and sapphire necklace.

     Arrested for Faith's murder, charged with using hotel funds to pay off Vince, and unsettled because of Diana' suicide, Ron is trapped, and it doesn't look like there is any way out.