The Glazed Donut Caper: A Noir of the Nth Degree

The rain tasted like regret and lukewarm tap water as I sauntered into my office, a space as bleak and uninspired as a Monday morning spreadsheet. My name's Mace Banyon, and my business card promised 'Investigations of the Utterly Mundane.' Today, the mundane had outdone itself.

She sat across from my desk, a dame whose wrinkles told tales of countless forgotten grocery lists and misplaced reading glasses. Mrs. Periwinkle. Her eyes, magnified by spectacles thick as a pre-war dictionary, held the despair of a thousand forgotten Tupperware containers. 'It's... gone,' she whispered, her voice a brittle shard of broken china.

'Spit it out, lady,' I grunted, swirling the tepid contents of my coffee mug – a liquid so dark, it questioned its own existence. 'What's gone? Your last shred of hope? Your will to live?'

'My... glazed donut,' she wailed, a single tear carving a clean path through her talcum powder. 'From the kitchen counter. The last one. The one with the perfect glaze-to-doughnut ratio. It was there. Now it isn't.'

My gut clenched tighter than a miser's purse. This wasn't just a snack-time disappearance. This was a crime. A confectionery catastrophe of the nth degree. I took the case, sensing a darkness so profound, it could only be sugar-related.

The crime scene was a pastel-painted kitchen, a den of domesticity where evil had apparently nibbled. I dusted for prints – finding only a suspicious smudge of jam and the undeniable residue of a thousand previous baking experiments. The witnesses were silent: a toaster oven that stared with blank indifference, a spatula that kept its secrets close, and a suspiciously full cookie jar. Each one, a suspect.

'They're all clamming up,' I mused aloud, addressing a particularly judgmental-looking houseplant. 'They always do when there's a sugar trail involved.'

I went to my usual contact, a street-smart feline named Mittens who haunted the back alleys of the city, trading purrs for pilfered salmon scraps. 'Mittens,' I hissed, holding out a sardine. 'Talk. Glazed donut. East side of Periwinkle's kitchen. You see anything?' Mittens merely blinked, then kneaded my leg with claws sharp enough to cut through the densest of plots, before sauntering off, a furry enigma.

The hours bled into each other like watercolor paints left out in the rain. The truth, I realized, was a fickle mistress, often hiding in plain sight, sometimes even in your own pocket. I reached for my pack of unfiltered existential dreads, only to pull out... half a glazed donut. The tell-tale sticky residue. The exact same donut, with the perfect glaze-to-doughnut ratio, Mrs. Periwinkle had described.

The culprit. It was me. Somewhere between the desperate plea and the initial investigation, my subconscious, ever the opportunist, had claimed the evidence. I ate the rest, slowly, savouring the irony. Sometimes, the deepest mysteries aren't about who did it, but about who forgot they did it. I had my answer. Now, to bill Mrs. Periwinkle for 'extensive investigative services, including evidence recovery and disposal.'