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“He’s devastated about his sister.”
“I meant how are you and he doing?”
“The work is going fine. He’s a good lawyer. We definitely have different styles, but I think we complement each other well.”
He finished up and brought the coffees over and sat down across from her. “I guess I’m not making myself clear.”
She stared deliberately at him. “I guess you’re not.”
“I told Shirl you had moved in here.”
“Someone tried to kill me at the hotel. Jack insisted that I stay with him.”
“Not disputing that. But Jack is a loner, always has been, at least after Jeff went away. Never married, hell, never had a serious girlfriend that I know about. So for Jack to invite you here, to stay with him—I’m not talking the race thing; I’m talking the man-woman thing—well, it’s an indicator of how he feels.”
“Our relationship is strictly professional.”
“Shirl just thought there was something there, between you and Jack, I mean.”
“Well, she’s wrong. We certainly can’t waste time on personal issues while we have our clients’ lives at stake. And I have no feelings for him in that way.”
“You sure he feels the same way?”
“That doesn’t matter, since I just told you how I stand on it.”
Peppers held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, sorry. Now, do you want to tell me what you found out?”
She did so, filling him in on the tontine arrangement, Pearl’s abortion on the day of the murders, and the fact that Anne Randolph was preparing to divorce her husband.
“But why would the lawyer have sent the package to the house? I mean, Leslie Randolph might have gotten his hands on it.”
She said, “I think he did open it and read the contents.”
“He must have been pretty pissed.”
“Their maid said he looked ready to erupt at lunch.”
“And Janice Evans? Any way to force her to come here and testify?”
“We can subpoena her but she’ll fight it. So what do you have?”
Peppers opened his notebook. “Tyler Dobbs is a gambler—dogfights, street craps, blackjack, you name it. He was in debt to multiple folks for over three thousand bucks, which is more than what the guy makes in a year.” He handed her some pages with notes on them.
“Was in debt?”
“It all got paid off after Dobbs talked to the cops.”
“And you think someone paid him to say what he did about Jerome?”
“What I’m thinking, yeah.”
She wrote down some notes. “What else?”
“Sam Randolph is flat broke. His crummy house is mortgaged to the hilt. He owes back taxes. He has no income. And... he’s really sick.”
DuBose looked up at him. “Cancer?”
“No, but it’s something in his lungs.” He looked at his notes. “He has an advanced case, and the treatments available here for that aren’t exactly doing the job for him. He’s looking to travel to Switzerland, where he can get experimental therapies.”
