by HAL MOUNTSAUERKRAUTEN, Alternate Reality News Service Crime Writer
Considering how successful a mystic she was, you would have thought Cassandra Weinstein would have foretold that she would be beaten to death with a bronze Snoopy.
"I'm as much of a Charles Schultz fan as anybody," commented Detective Inspector Cassius Brutus Cassius. "But, this...this was cold, man. As cold as...a bronze sculpture of a beloved cartoon icon."
"The cheap irony of her demise notwithstanding, Cassie was an inspiration to spirit workers everywhere," commented Lucifer Peltier, Chief Steward of the Witches, Warlocks and Wastrels Union (WWWU). "She was Madame Blavatsky with pink hair and a Marilyn Manson tattoo, but without the compulsion to cavort with, you know, demons."
So far, the police have three suspects in the murder. All of them were clients of Weinstein.
Martilda Katamaran, a floral products tester for Ford Motors and Breakfast Cereals, was told by Weinstein that she had been a victim of Jack the Ripper in a previous life. "Okay," she grumped, "I wasn't expecting to be, like, Queen Victoria or anything. But, like, I wasn't even one of the famous victims of Jack the Ripper - my body was thrown into the Thames and never found. Where's the fun in that?"
"Katamaran was one of the most disgruntled people I have ever met!" Inspector Brutus Cassius commented. "Her gruntle was livid!"
Another client of Weinstein's, Ricky "Richard" deNada, was told that he had been an anonymous slave in Pharaohnic times who was responsible for cleaning the latrines of the slaves who hauled rocks to build the pyramids. When I tried to arrange an interview with him, his wife, Deedee "Deirdre" deNada told me that he was conducting a sewer inspection and wouldn't be available for at least four months.
"We had to keep deNada's gruntle in a box during his interview," Inspector Brutus Cassius stated. "It was hissing and spitting and, frankly, some of the boys were afraid it would give them rabies!"
The third suspect, a shin and left nostril model with the prestigious MAXxed Out Agency named Quincy Favre (pronounced: "Jones"), was told that she had been Marie Antionette's eyebrow plucker in a past life. "I...I haven't been able to look a pair of tweezers in the eye since!" Favre (nee: Grotchkin) sobbed fetchingly.
"She had just the most adorable gruntle," Inspector Brutus Cassius told me. "It wore pink bows in its fur, and the spittle that came out of its mouth when it growled at people reminded everybody of the cascading foam of a perfect beer head. The boys in the squad room were alternately enraptured and repelled!"
This is not the first time a medium has been killed by an unhappy client. In 1938, seer Montague Distangue was bludgeoned to death with a statuette of Shirley Temple. Contemporaneous reports (those with a sufficient level of contempt for the people portrayed in the story) stated that Mort Flavisch, who had been a farmer all of his life, had been disappointed to find that he had been a farmer in all of his previous lives, too.
Given the similarity in their methods, could Flavisch' spirit have been reincarnated in the body of Weinstein's murderer? "I'm a follower of Minerva, myself," Inspector Brutus Cassius uncomfortably said. "Still, at this early stage in the investigation, we cannot rule out any possibility..."
Really, because -
"Except that one," Inspector Brutus Cassius interruptively added.
An anonymous source within the WWWU who asked to be referred to as "Deep Moat" (although having the Twitter handle @deepmoat and an "I Heart Deep Moat" Facebook fan page tended to undermine the whole anonymity thing), told the Alternate Reality News Service that the police were looking at the wrong set of suspects. The murder, Deep Moat argued, had been committed by somebody high up in the WWWU hierarchy.
"Weinstein pissed off a lot of people in the union by telling her clients the unvarnished truth about their past lives," Deep Moat explained. "No polish. No lacquer. And, certainly no glaze. Just life, in all its non-shiny, non-celebrity, non-glory!"
Deep Moat added that seers throughout the country were losing customers who no longer believed that they would find comfort in dramatic re-enactments of their colourful past lives.
Peltier called the accusation ridiculous. "That's ridiculous," he ridiculed. When asked to elaborate, he added, "That's, uhh, ridiculously ridiculous?"
When I accused him of being in the pocket of the Coalition to Increase the Use of the Word Ridiculous in Popular Discourse, Peltier spit some lint out of his mouth, looked deep into my eyes and said, "I see traces of Richard the Lionheart in you. Have you ever felt the desire to conquer Europe?"
The investigation continues.