Riptide (17 page)

Maggie suddenly felt invasive and improper, and she and Coco walked back to the kitchen to get one more cup of coffee for the road.

Rather than drive all the way back out to her house, Maggie showered and changed at her parents’ home, and put Coco in the fenced back yard with some food and water. She was about to head to her car when her cell phone rang. It was the office.

“Hello?”

“Hey, uh, Maggie, it’s Dwight.”

“Hey, Dwight.”

“Hey. I’m real sorry about David. Real sorry,” he said.

“Thank you. What’s up, Dwight?”

“Well, we got a call few minutes ago, guy named Mitch Fallon, moved here a couple years ago from Alabama?”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“Well, anyway, he saw the foot guy’s picture on the TV, you know when Channel 10 came down to talk to Wyatt?”

“I didn’t know Wyatt talked to the news about it.”

“Yeah. Well, uh…it was the 4
^th
of July.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, Fallon says he saw the foot guy down by the docks when he was heading out that Tuesday night. He’s a shrimper, too.”

“Really.” Maggie turned around in a circle, looking for her keys, before she realized that she’d left them in her car. “How do I get in touch with him?”

“He’s down there now. Replacing one of the catheads on his boat.”

“Okay, where?”

“Number 14, over at Boudreaux’s.”

“Huh. Okay, thanks, Dwight.”

Maggie had almost headed for Café con Leche to pick up a double, but it was practically across the street from Riverfront Park and she just couldn’t do it. She ended up going the long way around to get to the marina, then sat in the sweltering car for a full five minutes before she could get out.
 

She made a point of not looking in the direction of the dock where she had gone out in search of David, the dock she’d returned to after she’d found him. Instead, she focused on the keys in her hand as she headed right toward slip #14.

Mitch Fallon was a short, stocky man of about fifty, with a Crimson Tide cap covering an almost bald head. When Maggie stopped at the slip, Mitch was squatting next to an open toolbox, wiping down a long wrench with a blue shop towel.

“Mr. Fallon?” Maggie asked.

He looked up, then stood. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered, in a distinctively coastal Alabama accent.

“I’m Lt. Redmond from the Sheriff’s Office.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said again.

“I understand you think you saw Brandon Wilmette Tuesday the 24
^th
?”

“Yeah.”

“You recognized him from a picture on TV?”

“Yeah. I was going to call right away, but I…uh…I was a little nervous about it.”

“Why’s that?”

Fallon glanced over his shoulder toward the Sea-Fair building. “Well, I mean, I sell shrimp over there, you know what I mean?”

Maggie nodded. “Yeah, I understand. What time did you see him?”

“I’m not real sure what time it was. It was close on to dusk, though. I was underway by ten. I got out late. Had some trouble with my winch.”

“Okay. Where did you see him, exactly?”

“He was going in around back, to Sea-Fair. Knocked on the back door.”

“Did someone open it?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I couldn’t tell who, from this angle. But a little while later, Mr. Boudreaux came out the back.”

“How much later?”

“I’m not sure. Sorry. But it couldn’t have been more than a half hour before I shoved off.”

“You didn’t see the other man come out?”

“No, I didn’t. I’m not saying he didn’t, but I didn’t see it. Course, I was working on the winch.”

Maggie looked over toward the Sea-Fair offices. Only a small slice of the front parking lot was visible from where she stood. “Did you happen to see Wilmette drive up?”

“Naw, sorry. I only turned around ’cause I heard him knocking on the door.”

“Okay.” Maggie bit the corner of her lip. “How did Mr. Boudreaux look when he came out?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, was he rushing, did he look upset or anything?”

Fallon looked uncomfortable for a moment. “No, not really. He just walked out to the front parking lot there.”

“Did you hear a car?”

“No, but there was a bunch of noise from over at Up the Creek. I think they had a game on.”

“Okay.” Maggie nodded. “Anything else you can think of?”

“Not really, ma’am. That’s pretty much it. I really only remembered it ’cause I didn’t have no crew that night. I remember seeing the guy and thinking I’d even take him, just to have another body. Well, you know what I mean.”

“Why
even
him?”

Fallon shrugged a shoulder. “Well, I mean he looked like a city boy. I doubt he had a callous anywhere on him.”

Maggie nodded again, thanked the man, and headed back to her car. On her way there, she saw Boudreaux’s black Mercedes parked in front of the Sea-Fair office, and she veered that way and walked through the glass front door.
 

The office area was nothing fancy, though it was respectable. An attractive, dishwater-blond woman who looked like the perfect soccer Mom sat behind an equally dishwater-blond reception desk.
 

She smiled up at Maggie as she walked in. “Good morning. May I help you?” She seemed to recognize or read the SO logo on Maggie’s polo shirt after the fact, and her smile faltered just a bit, not from fear, just from surprise.

“Yes, please,” Maggie answered with a polite smile she was surprised to manage. “I need to speak with Mr. Boudreaux for a minute.”

“Oh. Certainly,” the blond said. “He’s over in the new processing plant. If you’ll have a seat, I’ll call him.”

“Actually, could you just take me to him?”

The woman’s smile flickered, as she thought about whether it was okay. “Well, I…he usually talks to people in his office.”

“It’s okay,” Maggie said. “We’re pals.”

The woman looked back at her for a moment, then seemed to decide that this matter wasn’t going to benefit her from either direction, and was best gotten off her hands. She stood up and straightened her beige khaki skirt. “If you’ll come with me.”

Maggie followed the woman down a tiled hallway and through three turns before the hallway turned to concrete and they came to a brand-new looking steel door. The woman looked over her shoulder at Maggie, then depressed the bar to open the door.

Looking over the woman’s shoulder, Maggie saw a cavernous room, and industrial-looking spray hoses hanging from the ceiling in evenly spaced rows. The woman set one tan pump inside the room and bent to insert her torso.

After a moment, she raised a hand, and a moment later, Boudreaux appeared in the door way. “Yes, Patty?”

“Sir, this officer is here to see you,” Patty said hesitantly.

Maggie stepped to the side just a bit and Boudreaux raised his chin at her.

“Hello, Maggie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Boudreaux.”

Patty looked from one to the other of them, and Boudreaux seemed to wait for some explanation for Maggie’s presence. Patty seemed to hope she’d give one, too.

“I just stopped by to talk to you for a minute, if that’s okay,” Maggie said. “I’m sorry to bother you at work.”
 

Boudreaux nodded. “Yes, that’s fine. It’s good to see you.” He looked at Patty, who scurried back the way they’d come, and Boudreaux held the door open wider. “Would you like to see the new addition to the company?”

“Sure,” she answered, and stepped inside.

Several people, men and women, stood at two rows of stainless steel tables, scaling and fileting fish. Maggie could see clear plastic bins of redfish, sea trout, and snapper.
 

“We’ve expanded to include fish, as you can see,” Boudreaux said. “It’s good for business, of course, with the oyster and shrimp yields down, but it’s a handful of new jobs, as well. We’re selling fresh and frozen, to the supermarkets, to restaurants.”

Maggie looked at the far end of the room, where a tall, thin man at one of the tables was hosing down his station. The pinkish water slid across the floor, and swirled around and down one of several floor drains.

“Let’s head up there to the office,” Boudreaux said, pointing to a set of metal stairs that led to an office with a wall of windows.

“Okay,” Maggie said, and looked around as she followed Boudreaux across the room and up the stairs. The faint smell of some expensive cologne she didn’t recognize wafted down to her as she climbed the steps behind Boudreaux, and she thought, not for the first time, what an odd mix of blue collar and effortless class he was.
 

As she understood it, he’d worked on his father’s shrimp boats and oyster skiffs back in Louisiana, and here as well, when his father expanded to Apalach. Then he’d gone on to get a finance degree at Ole Miss, built his own businesses in Louisiana, and come here when his father had died. He’d taken the wholesale business and shrimp fleets his father had left and built a multi-million dollar business that included seafood processing, vacation rentals, vessel leasing and who knew what else.
 

If nothing else, she admired his work ethic and business sense. But there was something else she liked, as well, something she didn’t yet want to define very specifically.

Boudreaux opened the office door, and held a hand out to indicate she should sit in one of the vinyl armchairs. “Have a seat. Please.”

He closed the door as she sat down, then he took a seat behind the inexpensive oak desk that afforded a view of almost the entire room downstairs.

The office was spare and looked unlived in. There was a computer on the ell of the desk, a table with a potted plant, a brand new phone. No artwork, no rugs, no stacks of files or half-full coffee mugs.
 

Boudreaux watched her looking around as he leaned back in the brown leather desk chair. “This was supposed to be Gregory’s office,” he said.

Maggie glanced at him, then swallowed a tinge of nausea and occupied her eyes elsewhere for a moment. “Brandon Wilmette’s as well?”

“It would have been, yes.” He gently rubbed at one eyebrow with a slender finger. “Has our discussion yesterday been helpful?”

“I passed the information on to Wyatt. Thank you.” She looked at him. “For obvious reasons, I can’t actually have anything to do with the case.”

Boudreaux nodded. Then he waited for her to speak.

“We got a call from someone who saw Brandon Wilmette here the evening of Tuesday the 24
^th
. The day before he disappeared.”

“Yes. As I told you, he came by here that evening.”

“Do you remember what time?”

“I told him to come any time after seven, but no, I don’t remember when he arrived.”

Maggie nodded. “Do you remember what time he left?”

Boudreaux rubbed his eyebrow again. It was a habit that Maggie had noted lately. He seemed to do it when he was thinking. “Not really, no. He left before I did. I had some paperwork to finish up. But I left around ten, I think.”

“You don’t have any idea how long you’d been here after he left?”

Boudreaux put his elbows on the desk and folded his hands. “An hour perhaps? Maybe a little bit longer.”

“So, kind of a long conversation, then.”

“With Sport, every conversation was a long one, no matter how brief it was.” He rested his chin on his hands. “First we talked about Gregory, or I listened to him talk about Gregory. Then he went into a long, but unconvincing pitch for some pop-up gourmet business back in Atlanta. I declined to invest.”

“And then you offered him a job?”

“Gregory’s job,” Boudreaux said, and she wondered if he mentioned Gregory’s name so frequently in order to get a reaction from her.
 

“Why?”

“He was a dumbass, please excuse the language, but he’d been a friend of the family for a long time. I also didn’t have anyone to fill the position right away. I still didn’t, up until last week. One of the shrimpers’ wives used to work for the Publix seafood department. She’ll be taking over for me Monday.”

“Did you and Wilmette discuss your nephew’s suicide? Did he have any thoughts as to why he might kill himself?”