The M&M’s Mystery, Part 4 – Who Did It?

    I gave Tony the eyeball at breakfast the next morning, and when he came over I told him what we wanted. He came to our room a few minutes later.

    “Norma? I can give you a lot of dirt on Norma.” He hadn’t failed to notice Little Debbies Mildred held in her hands.

    “We really want to talk to you about something else. Sit down, please,” I said, as sternly as I could muster.

    “Well, I do need to get back.”

    “Sit down or I’ll scream,” Mildred said. He immediately sat, and we both faced him. “You know we’ve been trying to figure out who killed Redwine.”

    “Yeah, and you haven’t gotten anywhere or you wouldn’t be pumping me for information.”

    “We have gotten somewhere. We think you did it,” I said. 

     Tony stared at us. He didn’t blink, didn’t look down or up or right or left, and his face remained frozen in a pleasant neutral. Then he laughed, a loud, snorting guffaw. “Me? Why would you think that?”

    We focused on his face as I said, “We googled you and you’re a ghost. You have no address, no driver’s license, no family, no history. What are you, an assassin? In witness protection?”

    “You two are bat shit crazy if you think I had anything to do with Mr. Redwine’s murder. Why would I want to kill him? You can’t prove I did it, because I didn’t. Look, if there’s nothing else, I have a lot to do this morning.” He stood, winked at us, and left, but not without taking the Little Debbies.

    “Hardly what I expected,” Mildred commented. “Did you see any tells? Do you think he lied?”

    “I didn’t see a smidgen of a response. Not a blink, a twitch, or an eye roll. And I still think he did it. What about you?”

    “Me, too, but I give up, Miriam. We got nothing and he’s not going to tell us anything. I can’t think of where to go from here. Even if it’s not Tony, the murderer may still be here.”

   Mildred’s word chilled me, and we put a chair under the door knob at night.

******

    Two months elapsed, and Redwine’s murder remained unsolved. The police had interviewed everyone and finally stopped coming around with questions. Tony, bless his soul, still thought our suspicion of him was hilarious and apparently forgave us, because he remained accommodating to our needs and as nice as ever.

    We didn’t stop trying to find something, anything about him, slyly probing Norma to no avail and making a failed, middle-of-the-night attempt to get a look at employee files.

    More deaths occurred, but only the usual from usual natural causes – old age, dementia, pneumonia. Mildred and I stayed healthy, until she didn’t. She developed a wracking cough and a high fever, and Norma finally called an ambulance. After the attendants lifted her onto a gurney and wrapped her in blankets, she asked them to wait outside, she needed to tell me something in private.

    They left our room, and she began coughing again, exhausted from the effort. I took her hand, and looked down at her, feeling indescribable grief.

    “Living with you has been the most fun I’ve had in years, Miriam,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I’m not coming back, and I need to tell you something.”

    I leaned down to hear her weak voice. “That we’re eventually going to meet up again in a place better than this?” I asked her.  

    Mildred smiled and shook her head, coughing.

    By now tears streamed down my cheeks. “I love you, kiddo, and my life will be empty with you gone. You’d better get well.”

    “Buck up, cream puff,” she said. “I need to tell you something. You know those lawsuits against Redwine? Follow up on that composer. The one who lost his lawsuit.”

    The attendants came back in the room. “Love you, too,” Mildred rasped as they wheeled her out.

    I collapsed in our chair by the window, drained and crying, and only roused when Norma insisted I come to lunch. I don’t remember what I ate. I only knew Mildred wasn’t in the seat beside me.

    I dragged through the next two days, asking Norma over and over if she’d heard anything from the hospital. To her credit, she did call and ask, but had nothing to report. On the third day, she came to my room before breakfast. I knew the minute she entered what she would say.

******

    The next day, my emotions more in control, I sat down at the desk and turned on the computer, then pulled out the notes Mildred had taken in her neat handwriting. Seeing them, my tears started again. I found and Googled the name of the composer who had sued Redwine: Shaunessey, first name Patrick. Found him. I read picked out the two best sources of information about him, Wikipedia and his obituary. According to Wikipedia, he was indeed a classical music composer of some renown, one who had bankrupted himself suing Redwine for stealing one of his pieces. It was entitled The Red Herring Sonata.

    I skipped over his early life and the family connections and moved on to the obituary. There I discovered what Mildred wanted me to know: Patrick X. Shaunessey, beloved of his wife Mildred, nee Wrightnour, professor emerita of biology at Boston University.

I hope you enjoyed my short mystery!