Aunt Whizzie and the Pet Psychic

by William de Rham

I love my job as First Deputy District Attorney and Chief Trial Counsel for Jefferson County. The pay may not be great, but I carry a badge, am chauffeured to court in a car with a siren and flashing lights, and have a large office staffed by a mess of assistants. I get to try lots of cases, which I’m good at, and it feels great having everyone treat me like I’m somebody. Everyone, that is, except Aunt Whizzie.

The other day, my team and I were camped in my office waiting for a verdict in the death penalty phase of the Louie Scapisi trial. We’d just nailed “Orange Louie” (a/k/a “Louie Oranges,” a/k/a “The Orange Peel,” a/k/a “The Peel”) for the murder of Soong Fat Lee. Soong, the owner of a string of Asian restaurants, had refused to pay protection to the Scapisis, or to buy from their wholesale supply company. They found him last Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of one of his restaurants, dismembered and deep-frying in a vat of peanut oil. The jury took just two hours to find “Louie Oranges” guilty and now we were awaiting the coup de grâce.

This is a pretty tough state, and lethal injection isn’t favored. Down at the corner café, I’ve heard more than one person say that DBLI is too much like putting down a favorite hunting dog; that it’s too nice, too painless. No, our people are eager to see their murderers “ride the lighting.” They want to make sure each and every one suffers a goodly amount on the way to his, or her, final reward.

But in this case, the jury had been deliberating for over a week about whether “Louie Oranges” should fry. I had underestimated just how charming old Louie could be. And since my boss, the county D.A., was retiring and I hoped the people of Jefferson County would elect me to replace him, that was bad news. The voters want a D.A. who’s hard as nails. If Louie got away with life in prison, come November, I and the rest of my team would be looking for private work. None of us wanted to go back to writing wills and doing divorces. Tension in the office was so high that every time the phone rang, we jumped. So Aunt Whizzie’s call, when it came, was anti-climactic.

“Robert?” Is that you?” my eighty year old Aunt quavered over the speakerphone.

“Yes, Aunt Whiz,” I answered, concerned since her voice seemed so much weaker than when we last talked. Then she cleared the frog from her throat and what I like to call her “Southern soprano” reverberated off my knotty pine walls.

“Robert! How many times must I tell you? You can call me Elizabeth, or Beth, or Liz, or even Lizzie, but this Whizzie business has got to stop! Just because you had trouble with your L’s as a boy is no reason for me to have to endure that awful nickname!”

“Sorry about that, Aunt Elizabeth.” I said, smiling a smile that some might have called patronizing, and receiving like smiles from my team.

“Now Robert, I have a question.”

“Yes, Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Is the testimony of a pet psychic admissible in a court of law?”

I dove for the receiver and waved everyone out. I could already see the writing on the bathroom walls.

“Come again, Aunt Whiz?”

“Is the testimony of a pet psychic admissible in a court of law?”

I had three choices. I could explain about experts and hearsay and hope that, by the end of it, Aunt Whiz would be sorry she’d asked. Or, I could just say no, claim an emergency, and skedaddle off the phone. Or, I could ask why she wanted to know; which is what I did. After all, Aunt Whizzie introduced my mother to my father. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here.

“I’m not sure Aunt Liz. It’s something I’d have to look into. Why do you want to know?”

“Because of Tango.”

“Tango?”

“My orange tabby. The cat you’re allergic to.”

That eff’n feline! Just the mention of his name sets my sinuses flooding.

“And how is Tango?” I purred. “What a character! Such a fine …”

“He was mugged.”

“He was what?”

“Mugged. MUGGED! What’s the matter with you, Bobby? Are you going deaf?”

I soldiered on.

“How do you know he was mugged?”

“Because his tail is broken and Meredith—she’s the pet psychic—said Tango told her he got mugged.”

I responded in the grave tones usually reserved for the victims of violent crime. “I don’t suppose Tango told the pet psychic who attacked him?”

“Well of course he did! I must say Robert, you’re not very quick today.”

“Sorry Aunt Liz. Got lots on my mind.” What else could I say to the woman who paid to put me through law school?

“Tango told Meredith he was mugged by two teens.”

“Teens?”

“Teens! TEENAGERS! Don’t start acting like you inherited your father’s fat-head gene. Why your mother ever married that goober of a brother of mine is beyond me! Anyway, one of the muggers was a red-headed white boy and the other was Hispanic. They tried to snatch Tango, but he fought them off and got his tail broken in the process. I drove around the poorer neighborhoods looking for them—like Meredith suggested—but they must have been hiding out. So now, I want you to get the police on it. Two teens. You got that? One white with red hair …”

“… and the other’s Hispanic. I got it. But look Aunt Whiz, I can’t go sending the police off after …”

“Why of course you can! You’re the First Deputy District Attorney!”

“But you live three counties over and my jurisdiction doesn’t extend that far.” And thank God for that, I prayed to myself.

“Well,” Aunt Whizzie persisted, “don’t you have friends on the police force over here? I hear you fellows are always doing each other favors.”

It’s true. People in law enforcement do extend professional courtesies to each other. But a request to be on the lookout for two cat-mugging teens, based solely on the word of a pet psychic, would have most of the state’s police and prosecutors looking at me in a new and not very flattering light. I didn’t need it going around that I was five shots shy of a fifteen shot clip, not in the middle of my first election.

“Auntie, before we go putting the police to all that trouble, maybe we should look at some alternative theories of the case. After all, we don’t know that Tango was mugged. Isn’t it possible he was shading himself under a car and got his tail run over by accident?”

“There’s that fat-head gene again! Don’t you think I looked for tire marks? No, Meredith understood Tango clearly. He was mugged by those young men.”

Having been the First Assistant District Attorney in charge of Frauds, I was beginning to think it was Meredith we should investigate.

“Auntie, are you actually paying this Meredith to talk to your cat?”

“Well, of course!”

“How much?”

“None of your business how much.”

“You asked for my help and I’m trying to help you.”

“Well, if you must know, it’s two hundred dollars an hour.”

My jaw dropped. “Two hundred dollars an hour? Aunt Whiz????”

“What? It’s my money! And yes, you’re still going to inherit it all some day, although why, I’m not entirely sure. I suspect it’s because I feel sorry for you, considering who your father is and all. That man is so incompetent I sometimes wonder if he’s able to …”

“… Now, you know as well as I do, he’s perfectly competent. He’s a tenured biology professor over at State.”

“Then why couldn’t he pay for your law school?”

“He helped some. But with two other kids in college and a third on her way…”

“Piss poor planning, if you ask me.”

“Not to change the subject, but two hundred dollars an hour seems high for the services of a pet psychic.”

“What would you say if I told you Meredith’s a Harvard graduate? Or that she went on to attend the Yale Law School? Of course, it wasn’t until she spent a summer in Tibet that she found her true calling—her spiritual path. She gave up the law to become a massage therapist. And she’s devoted years to studying everything there is to know about bodies and what it takes to heal them. Things like CranioSacral therapy, homeopathy, acupuncture, feng shui and aromatherapy, not to mention the properties of certain crystals. And her views on reincarnation are truly enlightening.”

“Reincarnation?”

“Yes. For instance, did you know my African parrot, Mr. Greensleeves, is the reincarnation of Daring Dapple, the horse that almost took me to the Olympics? God I loved that horse! How I’ve missed him through the years!”

It’s true. When she was a teen, my Aunt was a champion equestrian who might have made it to the Olympics had her horse not gone lame before trials. It was probably just as well however, since it gave Aunt Whiz all the more time for her studies, which led to medical school, which led to fame, not to mention a fortune, for her work in psychiatry. My Aunt Elizabeth was so talented it was just a matter of time before someone in our family started calling her “The Whiz.”

“Robert, you have no idea what a comfort it is to know that every time Mr. Greensleeves speaks, I’m hearing Dapple’s soul.”

Okay, that was it! I made a note to direct the First Assistant over at Frauds to see Meredith onto a bus to someplace out of state. Two hundred dollars an hour? Jehoshaphat!

Just as I was about to begin the delicate task of explaining to my aunt that she was being conned, my secretary rushed through the door pointing at the phone. From her urgent expression, I surmised the court was calling to say we had a verdict. I told my Aunt I’d call back and picked up the other line.

It wasn’t the court. It was a reporter looking for a reaction to how long the verdict was taking. Still, a quote is a quote. In an election year, you’ve got to do everything you can to keep your name in the papers.

So we didn’t have a verdict that day. Or the next. Or the next after that. But on the day after that, the following article appeared on the front page of the Jefferson County Daily Intelligencer:

The judge had not seen fit to sequester the jury. Down here, we really don’t have the money for that kind of thing. Aside from which, folks from Jefferson County have a reputation for making up their own minds, no matter what they read in the papers. At least they did until the day of the verdict. The morning the article appeared, the jury filed into the courtroom—some with the Intelligencer still in their hands—and passed a sentence of death on old “Orange Louie.”

But defense counsel pointed out the jury’s newspapers for the record and that forced the judge to inquire whether the story about the Scapisis and all those cats affected their verdict. When a couple of jurors admitted that it had, the judge vacated the death penalty and sentenced Louie to life without the possibility of parole. Thank God that down here, life really means life!

All in all, things worked out pretty well for just about everyone. Discretion being the better part of valor, I dropped any thought of having Aunt Whizzie’s pet psychic run out of town. And Aunt Whizzie saw Tango avenged without me having to make so much as a phone call.

As a result of the trial, the citizens of Jefferson County know I’ll be a tough D.A. After all, I was the one who convinced the jury that Louie should ride the lightning. It wasn’t my fault that the judge, looking to forestall a lengthy and expensive appeal, reversed their verdict.

And I’m actually content knowing that Louie will spend the rest of his life in jail. Truth be told, I don’t have much use for the death penalty. I’d hate knowing I was responsible for the killing of another human being. But hey—don’t tell that to the citizens of Jefferson County until after I’ve had a good long run as their D.A.

Things didn’t go as well for that orange-haired Scapisi clan. The state shut down their wholesale supply business. Young Joey—that chip off the old block—got ten years. The people of Washington County hate it when you’re cruel to their cats. And “Louie Oranges?” Well, let’s just say he won’t be getting his chance at reincarnation any time soon.