Talk of the Town

A Starbucks queue is one of the unlikelier places, in the 21st century, for a spontaneous face-to-face conversation to break out. Anybody under 40 is staring down at his or her smartphone. Most people over that age either are doing the same or, like me, are crabbily wondering exactly when standing idly for a couple of minutes became unendurable.

There’s something about a quadruple homicide, though, that gets mouths to moving.

I’m referencing here a recent crime in DC that was noteworthy enough in its heinousness, but particularly in its specific location, to make not just the local but the national news. A rich industrialist and his wife, their 10-year-old son, and a 57-year-old housekeeper were held captive and later (after $40,000 had been delivered at the threatened homeowner’s behest) murdered in their own home, which is located in an upscale neighborhood in Northwest between the National Cathedral and the US Naval Observatory. The residence then was set afire in an unsuccessful attempt to cover up the crimes.

It didn’t take law enforcement long to link the murders to a former employee of the slain industrialist. His whereabouts quickly were traced to Brooklyn and then back to DC, where he was arrested in Northeast and now is in custody.

Even in Washington—a city well-used to all manner of crime, deceit and spectacle—the slaying of four people, including a child, within a half-mile of the vice president’s residence was attention-getting. So much so that it prompted two smartphone-wielding young women—20-ish, I’d say—to look up from their screens in the Starbucks line on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, and verbally express their shock to each other. Whereupon a woman roughly 50 years their senior offered them her Washington Post to Read All About It in old-school newsprint. As one of the young woman gingerly held the paper in front of her, like a dusty musket at a firearms museum, and read the headline—“Suspect in Quadruple Killings Captured in DC, Police Say”—I chimed in with, “Thank God the guy just had to have pizza.”

This was because the big break in the case was a fingerprint left on a Domino’s box by the man later arrested. According to police, just as the husband had been forced by his captor to order thousands of dollars in cash delivered to the residence, the wife had been forced, the night before she and the others were killed, to order a couple of pies from the Domino’s in the nearby Tenleytown neighborhood.  

(My friend Joey in Charlotte later commented by email that, for a man with such a flamboyant approach to killing, the alleged murderer has surprisingly pedestrian taste in pizza. My response was that you’d think a guy who was plotting out such an elaborate crime would’ve thought to pack himself a sandwich.)

The four of us in the Starbucks line last Friday morning agreed that the whole pizza thing did not exactly bespeak “criminal mastermind.” The older woman opined that death would be too good for the accused—torture being a necessary antecedent to capital punishment. The younger women seemed noncommittal—possibly because they don’t believe in the death penalty, but more likely because the incensed senior spit out the word “torture” with a demented glee that suggested she likely has wet dreams about Dick Cheney.

I elected not to share with the others the fact that I’d just completed a morning run past the murder scene—lest I seem, like the older lady, a little too personally invested in the whole sordid affair. But the fact is, I’d parked my car in Northwest that morning and set out for Woodland Drive—a street I knew well from past runs—with the express purpose of finding out exactly which house we were talking about here.

It wasn’t hard to spot. The patrol car out front, the abundant crime-scene tape, the burned-out shell behind that tape, and the scent of smoke in the air all conspired to give the location away. So, now I’ve got another Murder House past which to run on my morning rounds of the city and its close-in suburbs. As I’d noted in my blog post of June 2, 2012, “Grim-Reality TV,” it’s a tour of tragedy that also includes, but is not limited to, the Maryland house in which an ex-State Department employee bludgeoned his family to death in the 1970s, the wooded hillside in Rock Creek Park where slain internist Chandra Levy’s remains were found in 2002, and the Northwest DC house in which a promising Indian-American poet—a tenant of prize-winning novelist Howard Norman—stabbed to death her two-year-old son and then herself in 2003.

I’d brought my own Washington Post to Starbucks from home, so once I got my coffee I read the article the older woman had pointed out. I’d already heard the basics about the arrest on the radio, but the newspaper story held other interesting details. For one thing, the accused—one  Daron Dylon Wint, age 34—was traveling in a caravan when arrested, with a white box truck ahead of him. The two guys in the truck were believed to be relatives of Wint’s, and the truck contained “at least $10,000 in cash.” I’m not an attorney, but I sense that detail could bode ill for the defendant at the time of trial.

Speaking of the trial, the other thing in the article that piqued my interest was the name of a one-time defense attorney of Wint’s who opined that his former client was “the last one I’d suspect of anything like this.” The lawyer’s name was Robin Ficker. As Joey put it in his email to me, “That Robin Ficker.”

Ficker is well known to sports fans like Joey because he achieved regional infamy decades ago as a heckler at Washington Bullets (now Wizards) basketball games. He is better known now to his fellow Montgomery County, Maryland, residents, like me, as an insufferable blowhard who’s perpetually running for political office and petitioning against pretty much all forms of government taxation, no matter how essential they might be to things like maintaining the public order and keeping the bridges from collapsing.

I hadn’t realized until I read that article that Robin Ficker’s day job is defense attorney, which strikes me as a surprisingly constructive societal role for him to be playing, although Ficker himself undoubtedly sees it as one more way of screwing with The Man. I’d have guessed that a guy with Ficker’s public skill set might, rather, be the proprietor of a bullhorn company, or headmaster of a training academy for Tea Party candidates.

Ficker had represented Wint, according to the Post, in “about six minor criminal and traffic cases,” and hadn’t seen his former client in 10 years. “He’s not a match for this type of activity at all,” Ficker said of the murders, before adding that line about Wint being “the last one I would suspect.”

First of all, the last person I’d expect to commit murder would be a nun or the Dalai Lama, not a guy who was in need of constant representation for criminal and traffic offenses, however “minor.” But second of all, you’d think a local defense attorney might have caught wind of some of Wint’s more recent run-ins with the law, like threatening the life of his own father (who received a restraining order), punching and groping a woman at a bar, and being rousted out from behind a gas station dumpster, where he was found to be carrying a machete and a pellet gun.

Sure, Wint is innocent until proven guilty, and all that. But he’s not the last guy I’d suspect of the murders on Woodland Drive. I'm just sayin’.   

In fact, I may bring that up if I’m on standing line at a Starbucks during the trial. Because I have a hunch that the kinds of juicy details that tend to come out during public testimony will get people talking.

Final Edition

Around this same time 23 years ago, I was an unmarried features writer for the daily newspaper in Savannah. To the extent that I was known professionally at all in Georgia’s “Coastal Empire”—which wasn’t much, believe me—it was for my movie reviews. I tended to be quite sarcastic and take many liberties with language and decorum, which I was free to do because it was a terrible paper with lax standards, and anything I wrote ran pretty much unedited.

(I still think I may have been the first movie reviewer to opine as to why films had been assigned their ratings. Newsies earned a PG for “contributing the dull-inquency of minors.” The R rating of the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead may have owed to a bare-breasted corpse, as “the undead know no modesty.” Reviewers do this sort of thing all the time now. Where’s my credit? I’m still bitter.)

Anyway, reporting never was my strong suit, as I couldn’t hand-write quickly and had trouble reading my own scrawl. That meant that I lost the meaty parts of lots of quotes. I should have tape-recorded everything, which is what I do in my job now. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t. I guess tighter deadlines were part of it. Also, a recorder would’ve been one more thing to carry, and I had no more hands then than the one that I have now.

The thing I hated doing the most was person-on-the-street interviews. Sitting alone in dark theaters was exactly my comfort level; abandoning my anonymity to walk up to strangers was its antithesis. But one day this week in 1992, I volunteered to drive down to couple of local malls to ask people their opinions. The reason was that Johnny Carson was retiring.

It goes without saying that the entire broadcasting landscape was hugely different then. The television networks still were king, with very little meaningful competition. “Media” was a word unto itself, not the lesser addendum to “social.” This week, people have been taking to Twitter and Facebook to share their thoughts about the end of David Letterman’s run on late-night TV. But back then, if you wanted to know what people thought about, say, Carson signing off from The Tonight Show after a quarter-century at its helm, you looked to newspapers, media and the boob tube, because reporters had to ask those questions for you. You had no way to ask them yourself.

I needed to ask people about Johnny. I couldn’t quite imagine the world without him. Not that I stayed up to watch him that often, or even taped him, though I did have a VCR. But when I did see him, both Johnny and the world he’d created around himself delighted me. He was so funny, and quick, and skilled at interviewing whoever sat in his guest chairs. His facial expressions and comic timing were perfect, whether he was serving as Don Rickles’ foil or a leopard from the San Diego Zoo was pawing at his scalp. His putdowns of buffoonish Ed McMahon, garish hornblower Doc Severinsen and bland saxophonist Tommy Newsom were hilarious. His over-the-top shtick as Carnac the Magnificent struck me as unfailingly, well, magnificent.

Let’s just say I didn’t get out much in high school or college. On any of those many nights when I wasn’t out on dates, however, I always could count on Johnny to provide me with laughs. As I got older, I saw his show less and read more about how he wasn’t the nicest or warmest guy in real life. He himself joked on camera about his divorces, but it seemed that he was divorced from people in more ways than that. Those details never much bothered me, though. In fact, it seemed to me that Carson in some ways was battling his very nature in order to entertain us. Anyway, I didn’t want to have a drink with Johnny. I wanted him ride Ed, the purported lush, for having drunk a few too many.

It wasn’t that I expected the people I’d be interviewing that day to feel as sad about Johnny’s departure as did I. Jay Leno, Carson’s designated successor, had a lot of fans and was getting a lot of hype. Then as now, popular culture tilted young, and Johnny was not young. I expected older people to lament but accept his passing from the late-night scene, much as they lamented but accepted their own increasing marginalization and eventual death. Most people my age—I was 33 then—probably were readier than was I for a changing of the guard. Those who were 20-something and younger probably wouldn’t much care one way or the other. Maybe they were watching that hip Arsenio Hall on the upstart Fox network.

Well, sure enough, a couple of youngsters I questioned at the malls shrugged about Carson but praised Hall. (Interestingly, one 23-year-old added, “But Letterman’s the man.”) Most of Johnny’s biggest fans shared his age bracket. Several senior citizens told me it had been years since they’d stayed up until 11:30 pm—meaning that while they wished Carson well in retirement, they'd have no loss to lament. My favorite respondents were a 22-year-old guy named Mike Jacobson, who bucked his generational norm by asserting, “Jay Leno will never be a Johnny Carson,” and 50-something Suenell Williams, who swooned, “I catch Johnny two or three times a week. I love him. I’ll miss him.”

Overall, the local mood was captured by the next morning's headline: “Savannahians Have Mixed Feelings on Carson’s Departure.” My lead sentence was “Johnny, maybe we just knew ye for too long.”

I of course have been thinking of all this as David Letterman has signed off this week after an even longer run—33 years—on late-night TV. There are so many parallels and interconnections, given that Carson had been Letterman’s mentor and was Carson’s personal choice as successor. Although Letterman was—is—the decidedly edgier of the two comedians, they shared a certain comic sensibility. They even seemed to mirror each other personally in key ways. As was Carson, Letterman is intensely private and is known not to be particularly cuddly off the set. There’s evidence that both men have treated the women in their life badly, although Carson wasn’t forced by an extortion plot to come clean on his behavior.

Also, as I had Carson, I loved Letterman the Host. The biggest knock on him, though more in his earlier years, was that he could be mean to his guests. But he always was harder on himself than he was on anyone else, and often hysterically so. In his unpredictability and his determination to follow his own whims—whether laconically taking fast-food orders from perplexed motorists or dropping objects off tall buildings just to gauge their splat—he really did redefine late-night comedy.

Again, I won’t pretend that I watched Letterman all that often. But when I did, I quickly was sucked in. Even when I didn’t quite get what he was trying to do, or when it just wasn’t working. Like Carson, Letterman reveled in his work. He aimed to please, both himself and the viewer, possibly in part because the rest of his life was a mixed emotional bag. There, too, were echoes of Carson.

Lynn and I actually caught a Late Show taping at the famed Ed Sullivan Theatre many years ago. Waiting on line outside with all the other happy fans on that February afternoon was a kind of New York dream. The show itself was an unmemorable one, but we didn’t care. We’d seen Dave in his natural habitat! Afterward we souvenir-shopped next door and had our photo taken with the Bangladeshi guys who’s been featured in several of Letterman’s on-camera gallivants through the neighborhood. It was winter, but the sun was shining. I’ll never forget it.

So, I felt I had to watch Letterman’s final show in real time, even though I knew it would be available—immediately afterward and in perpetuity—on any number of platforms, to use a word that didn’t exist in that meaning in 1992. If you care at all about Dave’s exit, you either watched it yourself, or read a review of it, or perhaps checked out the final, all-star top 10 list on YouTube. It certainly wasn’t the funniest Late Show ever, but to me it was kind of perfect.

Most of the jokes were at Dave’s own expense, and most of the sentiment was deflected onto his sidekicks and staff, of whom he was sincerely and movingly appreciative. Highlight reels captured some of his best bits over the years. He closed it all out with a dizzying, rapid-fire flash of Scenes From a Career as Foo Fighters—the band that had cancelled a South American tour to be his first post-heart surgery musical guests in 2000—played their deeply affecting song “Everlong.” Among its lyrics are these words: “And I wonder/If anything could ever feel this real forever/If anything could ever be this good again.”

I wonder that, too. Much as I did 23 years ago. Except that this week’s late-night departure has the added resonance, for me, of the final line in my long-ago newspaper story.

“I hate to see him go,” silver-haired Herbert Smith told the much-younger me, “because it means I’m getting old.”