Chapter 57: The Midget Smalls

I didn’t check out when I left the hotel. I expected to return later. I drove unhurriedly down to Orlando, letting the miles roll by. Being from the South, I knew the Georgia State Patrol was not known for being warm or fuzzy. Even today, they’re not known for those qualities. The Florida Highway Patrol wasn’t as bad as Georgia’s, but they weren’t the kind of people I wanted to run into either. So I stayed with the flow of traffic all the way down I-75 into Orlando.

I booked a room close to Mandy’s sister’s address. I planned to get up early and catch them before they left for the day. I figured one of their stops would be the Mouse House. Her sister worked there, so admission for her and the kids would be minimal, or nothing at all.

At the new hotel, I once again went at a leisurely pace, unpacking. Though I wasn’t big on fast food, I grabbed a couple of roller foods from the gas station. I needed something to tide me over until I could find a Waffle House in the morning. I rehearsed what I’d say to Mandy if I got her alone. Without the kids around, she’d be more receptive to a stranger striking up a conversation.

I got lucky, arriving at Cassandra’s house just as she and Mandy stepped out with the two youngsters in tow. It was a typical one-story brick house that looked like a hundred others in the neighborhood. Mandy, by contrast, stood out with a deliberate, individual style. She wore a floral blouse that matched the pink and purple streaks in her hair. The colors matched the ones she’d used before going on stage. Her look was a godsend. She would be easier to follow from a distance once she reached her destination.

The look was definitely not “mom-like.” It took a good ten years off her, making her seem even younger than her little sister. Cassandra might once have looked like Mandy, but the sun and a bottle had bleached her hair years ago. She dressed more conservatively than the mother of two. Her neat, conservative look made sense as we wound through the turns toward Disney World, where she worked. Even so, both looked surprisingly hot in their floral blouses: Mandy in shorts, Cassandra in loose, free-flowing slacks. I was thankful for the blouse Mandy had chosen, but more so for her hair. It would help her stand out in the crowd. That meant I wouldn’t have to follow too closely, risking bumping into her more than once and raising her suspicion.

In today’s world, I would have just put a small tracker on her. Sadly, that kind of technology wasn’t available to the general public in 1981.

At the park, I stood out for all the wrong reasons. I was thirty-one, a grown man alone in a kingdom built for children, the so-called happiest place on earth. While the teller’s eyes lingered a second too long, a twenty-dollar bill for a two-day pass erased her curiosity. Once inside, I was swallowed by a flood of color, noise, and families everywhere. It was disorienting scanning the throng for the woman with pink-and-purple highlights and two kids in tow.

They’d come through the employee entrance, but I’d studied the park’s layout well enough to flank them. Having reacquired them, I stayed back far enough to stay unseen, close enough to catch the glint of Mandy’s hair. Cassandra handed Mandy a Disney employee lanyard, which she slipped around her neck. It was proof she had connections worth exploiting and the freedom to go and do as she pleased. She flipped it to read the code on the back, then keyed it into the employees-only gate. The steel gate clicked open with a buzz while her sister and kids went to get drinks.

She slipped into the restricted area just in time to see a dwarf in a Sneezy costume wink at her. I found the wink strange and brazen, as if they shared a secret. He’d intentionally peeled off from the other six before vanishing deeper inside. Mandy reappeared minutes later, smoothing her hair, looking as if the employee bathroom hadn’t been the only thing she used.

I followed them throughout Fantasyland until they boarded a boat at It’s a Small World. That ride exists solely to torture parents with the most obnoxiously monotonous song ever written. My ears were assaulted with the melody twice as long when her kids insisted on a second round.

I shadowed them for nearly two hours before they landed at the Mad Tea Party teacups. They spun in pastel teacups while I stayed in the shade, tracking them through my SLR’s zoom. Mandy was an anti-Alice in a darker, more alluring Wonderland.

After the teacups, Mandy leaned close to her sister. I couldn’t hear the words. Cassandra nodded and led the two children away. Mandy headed off alone, back toward the same employee entrance she had come out of earlier. She passed Snow White and the seven dwarfs still greeting guests before their mid-morning show.

Back then, the park had no problem hiring midgets to play the dwarfs. Each of the seven midgets grinned knowingly as Mandy passed, their eyes flicking up and down as if they recognized her from somewhere else. They sized her up in her shorts and floral blouse, appraising her as if she were part of the show. The whole exchange struck me as strange. The same Sneezy winked at Mandy again. His grin said they’d shared something once, something they weren’t supposed to. When she had passed, the dwarfs broke into chuckles, growing more animated the farther they walked. I couldn’t tell what was so damn funny, but whatever it was, she was at the center of it. But after what I’d seen her do at the Fox Hunt Club, I figured there had to be something there.

Again, I couldn’t follow her as she turned her lanyard over and punched in an employee code to slip through the ivy-covered staff gate. As she disappeared inside, I noticed Sneezy lean toward Snow White, say something, then start his sneezing act for the crowd that had gathered. When she gave a small nod, he peeled away from the other six and slipped toward the gate. He followed Mandy back into the area he’d just come from. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the code either of them entered, so I couldn’t follow.

I waited only a few minutes before Sneezy re-emerged, smiling. It wasn’t the kind of smile the park paid him for. Before he’d taken two steps from the gate, I moved toward him. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know who that woman was who went in right before you?”

He looked me up and down, weighing what to say. He finally answered, “No, I don’t know her name.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know anyone who might know her name, or who she is?”

This time, he gave me an honest but evasive answer. “All I know is she must work for the park, or somebody who does, who gave her the access code.”

Still trying to squeeze more out of the dwarf, I said, “Thanks. You’re sure you don’t know anything else about her?”

He studied me again. “No, not particularly,” he said, but the hesitation in his voice told me otherwise. I pulled out my wallet, the one carrying an FBI identification I’d liberated from Lewis Braggan shortly after his death.

Lewis wasn’t exactly a model agent. One of the cartels had put a contract on him. Normally, they’d have gone after his family too. But Lewis was single, an only child with parents long dead. The hit came because he was blackmailing them. It wasn’t just over drugs, but over their smuggling and sex-trafficking operations too.

When I found out about the girls, I broke my rule about leaving government officials alone. I took the fifty grand to stage a dump-truck accident. It only cost me a few hours to rig a device that would blow his brake line at the right intersection. I was behind the wheel of that dump truck, barreling through a green light on a busy suburban street. My fake driver’s license passed without question after the accident. It was just another tragic wreck: one man dead, no one to blame. I burned the license that night.

The FBI badge only cost me an extra five hundred, paid to an underpaid, equally corrupt coroner. He pocketed my money after taking the dead man’s wallet. It became just another piece of evidence that vanished during the transfer of personal effects, which nobody ever claimed.

I made sure the dwarf saw the badge and the fifty-dollar bill I slid out with it. “What time do you get off work? I think there’s more to this story than you’re telling me. Maybe fifty bucks could buy a little of your time.”