The Walk Away Case, A Miles Mitchell Mystery

By aaforringer on February 28, 2020 • ( 0 )

In case you want to find me live and in person, my offices are right on Route 192, below me an Indian restaurant, next door a shared wall with a place that rents machine guns to tourists who want to play Rambo. Of the two, the Indian restaurant is the one that is the most annoying; the smells that permeate the air are so enticing, and for a perpetual broke guy like me it is torture.

But the Walk Away case came in on my landline (I really do not know why I keep it except that it came with the office and I did not have the money to upgrade the system to something more modern). The voice on the phone was pure upper-class white woman, North Eastern US prep school and rich (I am really good with voices).

The whole conversation lasted about fifteen minutes, but the summary is this: Mrs. Rich Woman, also known as Mrs. Janet Armstrong from Connecticut, wanted to hire me to tail her husband and prove that he was cheating on her with some doll here in Orlando. A typical infidelity case; find the husband, catch him doing the horizontal mambo with his side piece, and I would be eating for a month.

Mrs. Armstrong was smarter, or at least more devious than most wanna be ex-wives who already had a divorce shyster. She had installed tracking software on her husband’s phone, and she was also the person who made all his travel arrangements. What I initially thought was going to take a couple of days was most likely only going to take a day at most, depending on his libido. Well, I remember what my mother used to say, ‘don’t count your fried eggs before they are on your plate’.

Have I told you before that my mother is a bit of free spirit and doesn’t really go along with convention?

But she sent me a link on my cell phone after I embarrassingly told her she was talking to me on a landline and gave me a password to track her husband’s cell phone.

The suspected Mr. Armstrong was staying at one of the convention resorts on Disney property, the Coronado, probably one of the biggest ones by my guess. So, I went home, got a pair of pressed chinos and a dress shirt (typical convention wear here in Florida), and headed for the resort. Parking was never a problem here, as most attendees to conventions are bused around and never bother with a rental car, so I was able to park my car close to the convention hall.

I pulled up Mr. Armstrong’s location on the app Mrs. Armstrong sent me and noted he was in a room. I walked by it hoping I could catch a glimpse of him, and if I was lucky with his lady friend. I met with no luck, but I did note that I could sit nearby on a bench and casually monitor his room, so I sat down for a long wait.

Mr. Armstrong was out in less then a half hour, dressed not for a convention like most other corporate drones, but in a Duck Tales t-shirt and cargo shorts. Okay, I thought, maybe he is going to meet his girl in a park, so I did what I was hired to do: follow him.

Eight hours later I returned home, hot, tired and sweaty. Mr. Armstrong had toured the Animal Kingdom park with a vengeance, and after passing thru the touch points he had headed into Guest Services, not wanting to tip him off that I was following him I hung back. Over the next couple of hours I figured out what he had done in Guest Services: he had paid for a service to give him Fast Passes to every major attraction in Animal Kingdom. Expedition Everest, Flights of Passage, and Kilimanjaro Safari (he did that one twice). I was able to keep my eyeballs on him at Festival of the Lion King and the Finding Nemo show. No one joined him the entire day. No cute girls, or guys (not that I would judge). He was alone throughout the entire day. From what I saw he never took a single call throughout the day. I had thought he was some big wall street guy, but I never knew them to not be on the phone from morning till night.

It was nightfall before he returned to his room. I could see he was dragging butt as much as me, so I figured he was not going to have company for the night. Being the diligent investigator I was though, I set myself up on the bench near his room for an hour afterward and made sure he did not leave again or have a visitor.

Nothing, nada, zilch. I did not believe anything would happen, but it was billable hours. The guy was slightly older than me and I had caught him napping a bit on the bus on the way back to Coronado Springs. I checked my notebook to make sure the receipt for the thirty-dollar t shirt I had bought in the park as camouflage was still there. That was going in my bill to Mrs. Armstrong as well. I headed out when I saw the lights go out in Mr. Armstrong’s room. I could still track his phone, so if he went out, I would know it.

I went home with the best of intentions to be back at it first thing in the morning. That did not happen.

The rest of the story can be found at Smashwords – The Miles Mitchell Mysteries – a book by A.A. Forringer