Murder and Mega Millions: A High Desert Cozy Mystery Read online

  MURDER & MEGA MILLIONS

  By

  Dianne Harman

  (A High Desert Cozy Mystery - Book 6)

  Copyright © 2018 Dianne Harman

  www.dianneharman.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form without written permission except for the use of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1986668415

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first question I’m asked after I meet someone and they find out how many books I’ve written is, “How do you keep coming up with ideas?”

  It’s hard for me to answer, because ideas come from everywhere – a person I meet, a phrase, or perhaps something I read. This book is certainly a case in point. A few months ago my husband came home from playing golf and told me about a woman who had joined his threesome on the golf course. He said he was quite surprised when he asked her if she had a career, and she told him she was a philanthropist.

  It stayed with me, because I’ve never met anyone who defined themselves by using that word, and so a book was born. I decided I’d write a book with one of the characters being a philanthropist. The inclusion of art and antiques in the book came about quite naturally to me, as I love and collect both of them.

  Recently my husband and I were staying at the La Quinta Resort in Palm Springs while I was preparing to write this book. One morning I wandered over to the coffee shop and discovered some beautiful pieces of art hanging on the wall, all of which depicted scenes from in and around the beautiful La Quinta Resort. I immediately thought one of the paintings would make a great cover for this book.

  It just so happened that the artist responsible for these beautiful pieces of art, John W. Flanigan, was in the coffee shop. I got to talking to him and learned that he’s the resident artist at La Quinta. I commented that I was an author and would love to use one of his paintings on the cover of a future book. He agreed to my request, gave me his business card with his Instagram address, which is @jwflanigan, and told me all of his art is displayed on the Instagram site.

  Unfortunately when I tried to copy one of his paintings off of Instagram for use on the book cover, I learned I couldn’t use it because of Instagram’s policies. I had to develop a different cover which I think turned out vry well, but I still wish I could have used one of John’s paintings. They are so beautiful!

  To Vivek, Tom, and Connie, many thanks for taking care of the details and allowing me to do the broad strokes! And to my loyal readers, thank you for your buys, your borrows, your reviews, and your emails.

  And as always, I hope you enjoy the read as much as I enjoyed the write!

  Free Paperbacks

  I'm giving away FREE Paperbacks. Find out more at www.dianneharman.com/freepaperback.html

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  EPILOGUE

  RECIPES

  ABOUT DIANNE

  SURPRISE!

  PROLOGUE

  The sounds of traffic rushing through Four Corners, California, where Highways 395 and 58 intersect, woke twelve-year-old Melissa up on that windy winter morning. Four Corners wasn’t an exciting place to live, but it was the only place she knew. Surrounded by love, Melissa may have had little in the way of material things, but she was happy and content. She rolled over in bed, stealing a few more minutes of warmth under the tattered and worn blankets that covered her bed. If she’d known in a few hours her life would be changed forever, she would have stayed in bed far longer.

  She also didn’t know that in years to come she’d become rich beyond her wildest dreams and then get murdered.

  Karma? Fate? Or destiny? None of us can tell what the future holds, nor did she.

  CHAPTER 1

  Melissa Ross hated the wind that always swirled around the gas station her father owned at the intersection of the two highways that ran through Four Corners. She knew both highways led somewhere else, but being only twelve years old, she didn’t know where. She guessed it had to be somewhere much more glamorous and beautiful than the dry, hot, sunbaked desert that surrounded Four Corners. The two highways that intersected at Four Corners, 395 running north and south, and 58 from east to west, were heavily traveled by cars and trucks.

  The trucks drove fast, and the cars drove even faster. She was sure they wanted to drive as fast as possible, so they could get to some place where people didn’t have to listen to the incessant sounds of the traffic and wind. No one wanted to stop at Four Corners unless they needed gas.

  Her mother, Ellen, had often told her about those places. They were towns and cities that had museums, antiques, and art - all the things her mother loved. She and her mother spent hours looking at the art and antique magazines Ellen subscribed to.

  Looking at the magazines was the only thing they could do to escape the constant sounds of the incessant traffic on the highway. Cars and trucks frequently stopped at their gas station while they were on their way to another part of the state. Each time a big rig shuddered to a stop, their tiny apartment behind the station shuddered as well. Her mother promised her that someday they’d leave and get to see all the wonderful things they’d seen in the magazines.

  Ellen’s eyes lit up when she talked about the trips they would take. Melissa didn’t care about the destination as much as she wanted to be part of something that made her mother happy. The rest of the time, when the dog-eared magazines went back to their place on the cluttered shelf in the tiny kitchen, the shining light in Ellen’s eyes went out.

  A few months earlier her mother had finally persuaded her father to buy a computer. Despite her father’s protestations, he’d relented, and her mother spent hours on it, with Melissa by her side, looking at museum sites, auction results, and antiques. The faint traces of a smile crossed Ellen’s face as they explored the art world online, every click transporting them farther away from the dust and grime of Four Corners.

  “Someday, Melissa, someday,” Ellen would say, guiding her daughter’s hand as it rolled the computer mouse across the mouse pad, and together they traveled the globe with it.

  Someday never came for Ellen. When the San Bernardino deputy sheriff came to the gas station that morning, along with a man from the county coroner’s office, Melissa knew that something bad had happened to her mother. She tried to go into her parents’ bedroom, but her father told Melissa and Ed, her older brother, to stay in Melissa’s room. It was the first time she’d ever seen her father cry, but not the last.

  Later, after her father called a couple of men he knew to take over the gas station for the day, he’d come into Melissa’s bedroom where she and Ed were sitting on the bed. He’d sat down between them and taken their hands in his.r />
  “Children, somethin’ bad’s happened,” he said gulping for air and wiping a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand. “No use sugarcoatin’ this. You’ll find out soon enuf’. It’ll be the talk ‘round these parts for a while. Yer’ mom couldn’t go on livin’ here. Always promised her I’d take her to a big town when I made enuf’ money. Didn’t happen,” he said, openly sobbing, his thin body racked with grief.

  He caught his breath and continued. “She couldn’t take it no more and took a whole bottle of them pills the doctor in Barstow gave her for depression. At least she didn’t suffer. Musta’ taken ‘em when I was out gassin’ up the truck early this mornin’. Came in to get me some breakfast ‘bout the time I always do. There weren’t no breakfast. I went into our bedroom, and that’s when I found her. She weren’t breathing and was white as the sheet she was layin’ on. I called 911.”

  Melissa sat in silence, holding her father’s hand, and watching the tears roll down his face.

  Ed was the first to speak. “Dad, what’re we gonna’ do now?”

  “Son, we still got each other. We’ll jes’ have to work this out.” He put one arm around each of them, pulling them close. Ed pushed his arm away and stormed out of the room.

  Working it out had lasted for almost a year before Melissa’s father gave in to his grief and didn’t wake up one morning, leaving Melissa and Ed to work it out for themselves.

  *****

  Now, several years later, Melissa looked out the cracked window of her uncle’s home, if one could call a three-room tarpaper shack a home. She could see the desert town of Barstow in the distance. To the east stretched miles and miles of the desolate Mojave Desert. To the west, she knew, about 150 miles away, was Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean.

  The years since her father’s death had not been easy. Her uncle, Christopher Ross, had made it very clear from the beginning that the only reason he’d taken in his brother’s two children when his brother had died was because there were no other relatives.

  He spent his time sprawled on the couch watching television, drinking beer, going to the Quick ‘N Go to buy more beer, and going to the mailbox down on the highway once a month to get the disability check the oil company paid him for being injured when he was working for them on an oil rig near Barstow.

  The word her mother had used so often, “someday,” had become a mantra to her, and Melissa had vowed the moment her mother died, that someday she would do what her mother never could, buy the art and antiques Ellen had always so desperately yearned for. She had no idea how it would happen, but she knew it would.

  Melissa was seventeen when she’d finally saved enough money from her job at the café down the road to leave her uncle and the tarpaper shack that had become her home.

  Her brother had joined the Barstow branch of the East Side Victoria gang and had left two years earlier. She’d never heard from him again and wondered from time to time if he was even still alive. Melissa knew the young men in that gang had a very short life span, in or out of prison.

  She carefully put the few clothes she owned, and the worn copy of the Art and Antiques magazine she and her mother had been looking at the day before she died, in her backpack. She tiptoed quietly past her uncle who was snoring on the grimy grey couch and walked out the door, stepping into a new life.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Thank you, Percy,” Rhonda Taylor said to the driver from her seat in the back of the car, as he expertly pulled her Bentley into the long, curved driveway. He got out of the car and walked around to the backseat door, opening it for her. She quickly got out and walked up the steps of her large Mediterranean-style home located in the original part of Palm Springs.

  Rhonda’s home was one of the largest and most expensive in the area. The red-tiled roof topped the L-shaped southwestern style home which surrounded an Olympic size swimming pool. Not that Rhonda ever swam. The only time her hair ever touched water was at the beauty salon. Beyond the pool was a pool house and two guest houses. One side of the house was set snugly up against the Santa Rosa mountains. Rhonda’s husband, Dr. Wesley Taylor, a prominent psychiatrist and the head of the psychiatric department at the nearby Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, was a scratch golfer and often invited doctors he met at various conferences to play golf with him and stay in one of the guest houses.

  Between his medical practice and his golf, Dr. Taylor didn’t spend much time with Rhonda. Rhonda was pretty sure that in addition to his patients and golf, he indulged in his fascination with beautiful women. It was no secret among the medical community that Dr. Taylor’s good friend, Dr. Lewis, a plastic surgeon, was more than happy to provide Dr. Taylor with a never-ending supply of beautiful women. It had been rumored for many years that part of Dr. Lewis’ post-surgery procedures included lowering his fees for women who were amenable to getting to know Dr. Taylor in an intimate way.

  This being Palm Springs, where looks are everything, and plastic surgery is considered nothing more than routine body maintenance, Dr. Taylor always had a fresh supply of women to choose from. Long ago, Rhonda and her husband had arrived at an unwritten agreement which consisted of her ignoring his “long hours” in return for him giving her free rein to indulge in her passion – that of being the most prominent collector of art and antiques in the Coachella Valley. This was no mean feat given the amount of money available to a large number of the wealthy local residents, who also had a passion for art and antiques, but Rhonda was quite pleased that she alone reigned supreme.

  At least she had been until a woman by the name of Melissa Ross started buying art and antiques. And buy she had, with wanton abandon. The Ross woman had personally been responsible for driving up certain areas of the art and antique market in the United States. Unfortunately, these were the same areas that Rhonda had lorded over for many years, primarily fine art of the early 20th century as well as California pottery and living in Palm Springs, of course, Native American baskets, rugs, and pottery. It seemed like these days everywhere she went someone mentioned that Melissa Ross had bought this or that.

  Rhonda had never met the woman and had no desire to, because she was afraid she’d do or say something she’d really regret. However, what had happened at the auction in Los Angeles earlier that evening made her decide something had to be done to put the Ross woman out of commission.

  Rhonda had met the man who placed her bids, Jerry Mason, at Bonham’s Auction House in Los Angeles. Although everyone in the California auction world knew who she was, she preferred to let him bid for her. She’d talked to him earlier in the day and given him a list of the lots she wanted him to bid on as well as the top price she was willing to pay for any given item.

  She’d eagerly looked forward to tonight’s auction because a painting by her favorite artist, Granville Redmond, had been added at the last minute to the items that were scheduled to be sold. Rhonda secretly paid one of the staff at Bonham’s well for information such as that and had high hopes that none of the other California art collectors would know about the late addition.

  The desired result was for her to be able to purchase the painting at a fraction of what it would bring if it had been publicly featured in the auction sale catalog. Her contact at Bonham’s told her the owner desperately needed money for an expensive surgery for her granddaughter and the only way she could get that kind of money that fast was to part with her beloved painting.

  In addition to the Granville Redmond painting, there were several pottery pieces and baskets attributed to California Native American tribes which Rhonda planned on adding to her collection, along with a spectacular piece of Catalina Island pottery, a round tray. Although she had a number of pieces of Catalina pottery, she had yet to possess anything as well done as the piece displayed in the auction catalog. It was round with a blue and white glaze, depicting a three-masted sailing ship on the ocean set against a background of a blue sky.

  The auction had been a disaster from the very beginning. There was a
San Francisco simulcast and as soon as it began and the camera panned over the San Francisco bidders, Jerry leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Melissa Ross is represented. There’s the guy who always bids for her, Clayton West.” He nodded towards the screen and Rhonda felt her stomach knot up.

  Two hours later she felt like throwing up. Clayton West had outbid Jerry on every single piece she’d wanted. To add insult to injury, in order to ensure that Melissa Ross would get the Granville Redmond California poppy painting, Clayton had raised Jerry’s bid by $25,000, rather than the $5,000 increment being requested by the auctioneer. Wide-eyed, Jerry had looked over at Rhonda to see if she wanted to outbid him. Rhonda was in a state of shock and simply shook her head, indicating he wasn’t to bid anymore. As the auctioneer hammered his gavel down and said, “Sold,” the camera panned on Clayton West, who was smiling broadly.

  Rhonda didn’t even bother to say goodbye to Jerry as she furiously strode up the aisle of the auction house and out the door. When she got outside she opened the door of the Bentley before Percy could even get out of the car and open it for her.

  “Home, madam?” he asked.

  “Yes, and as fast as you can get there,” she snapped back, her face twisted in fury.

  *****

  Rhonda felt like she’d been hit by a truck. The reputation she’d so carefully crafted over the years as being the foremost collector of California art had just come to a crushing, and yes, embarrassing end. She’d fully expected to see a photo of the painting by Granville Redmond featured in the Desert Sun newspaper the following day with the caption “Just Purchased by Palm Springs’ Leading Art Collector” or some such similar thing, and without mentioning her name, everyone would know it had been Rhonda Taylor that the caption was referring to.

  Instead, her days as a leading California art connoisseur had come to a screeching halt with the sale of the painting, not to mention the Catalina pottery piece Rhonda had coveted, to that dreadful Ross woman. Building a reputation as the preeminent Palm Springs, California art collector had been Rhonda’s goal when she came to the realization shortly after her marriage that her husband had other interests in mind such as golf, medicine, and other women.