Jubilee Hitchhiker (3 page)

Bob Junsch moored his fishing boat, the
Pacific Fin
, in Morro Bay above San Luis Obispo and flew down from Marin County to make his living whenever the albacore or swordfish were running. Things were slow at the time, and Junsch was staying at home between trips when Curt Gentry called him on the evening of October 24. The next morning, Junsch and his deck hand, Jim O'Neill, made the short drive around the lagoon from Stinson Beach to Bolinas, arriving at Terrace Avenue a little after ten o'clock. They climbed out of the car and had a quick look. Everything felt still, mysteriously quiet. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Some local mongrel with a red bandana tied around his neck. “Probably named ‘Siddhartha' or ‘Steppenwolf,'” Richard Brautigan once joked.

Before trying the door, Bob Junsch went around back, where the house was built up against the sloping hillside. Shading his eyes, he peered through a small uncurtained kitchen window about a foot square. He barely made out what looked to be liquid on the floor, as if something had been spilled. Junsch also glimpsed a single sneaker, “an Adidas-type shoe,” lying alone and forgotten. Somehow, it looked wrong. Junsch felt things “had a bad ring to it.” The back kitchen door was locked. He returned to the front of the old shingled house and had Jim O'Neill boost him up the corner onto the second-story deck.

A pair of French doors opened onto the porch, unlocked but tightly closed. Junsch pulled them open with a fierce tug. He was struck by an odor of rot so overpoweringly putrid as to seem almost tangible. Clouds of flies swarmed everywhere inside. Bob Junsch followed his nose hesitantly into the twilight gloom. Hundreds of larval shells crunched underfoot. An anticipatory dread assailed him. Looking around the unmade brass bed, Junsch spotted Brautigan's maggot-infested corpse stretched out in the corner.

He was a shocking sight, most of the head gone and his stomach exploded. The facial features were missing, the ruined skull gaping horribly. All of his remaining skin tissue had turned black. A large quantity of blood and the fluids of decomposition contaminated the floor around the body. For a moment, Bob Junsch stood transfixed by shock. At that same instant, downstairs under the house, Jim O'Neill had been poking around. Discovering the power was turned off, he flipped the main switch back on. The radio in the kitchen blasted full volume into raucous life and the sudden unexpected clamor “scared the shit” out of Junsch. He ran down the inside stairs, unbolting the door and rushing into the clean, fresh morning air.

Junsch blurted out what he had just seen upstairs to O'Neill. They went next door and told Karly Zeno of their grotesque discovery. “He's in there,” Bob said, visibly shaken. “He's like totally undescribable. You can't recognize him at all.” Mrs. Zeno got him a beer. Junsch didn't want to stick around. He wondered if he would ever wash the morbid taste of death from his throat. After calling Curt Gentry, Bob gave Karly Zeno his home phone number over in Stinson and he and Jim O'Neill took off.

Here the mists of time draw a confused curtain across the memories of the participants. David Fechheimer phoned the Marin County Sheriff's Office to report the discovery of Richard Brautigan's body. He remembers Bob Junsch calling him with the grim news. Junsch recalls it differently. Acting on the behest of Curt Gentry, he didn't have Fechheimer's number. “And Curt didn't call me to say, ‘Go check on Richard. If you find him call Fechheimer.'” After leaving Bolinas, Bob Junsch drove straight up to Petaluma and headed for a bar.

Whoever called Fechheimer did so promptly. At about ten thirty, the dispatcher at the sheriff's office contacted Sergeant Weldon Travis and Deputy Joseph Dentoni, directing them to 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas, to investigate the report of a dead body discovered at that address. Upon arrival, Deputy Dentoni, the responding officer, was met by Karly Zeno. She told him friends of Richard Brautigan had seen what they thought was his body earlier that morning. Checking the residence, Dentoni found the front door ajar, just as Bob Junsch left it during his hasty departure. After mounting the stairs, the sheriff's deputy came upon “a decomposed male body lying on his back with the top part of his skull missing.”

When Sergeant Travis had a look at the scene, he immediately contacted the Marin County Sheriff's Office and requested a response from trained investigators. Due to the condition of the body and a lack of any visible identification, neither of the lawmen could be certain the remains in question were those of Richard Brautigan. The initial report referred to the event as an “unattended death.” At 12:40 PM, Deputy Dentoni phoned Bob Junsch's number in Stinson Beach. There was no answer.

Shortly before two o'clock, Sergeant Anthony Russo and Detective Dave Estes arrived from the sheriff's office in San Rafael. While Sergeant Russo began gathering evidence, Detective Estes was assigned the task of photographing the surrounding area. As reporting officer, Estes also prepared a rough sketch (a floor plan) of the second level of Brautigan's house. During Russo's examination of “the crime scene,” he came across a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, the right frame bent and one lens missing, lying on the window ledge near the “victim's” body. The right-hand lens was recovered from the arm of the blood-splattered, white-painted school desk.

Sergeant Russo also discovered the bullet hole in the molding above the southwest corner window. He removed the wood around the hole and subsequently recovered a spent large-caliber slug from within the wall. Russo bagged the evidence: the eyeglasses and missing lens, a tape recorder (containing a tape) found near the body, the nickel-plated .44 caliber Smith & Wesson (serial number N 284972), the spent bullet, and numerous miscellaneous notebooks and papers.

William Thomas, an investigator from the Marin County Coroner's Office, arrived and conducted his investigation after being briefed by the police officers. He had never before witnessed such a gruesome scene. Thomas noted the many fly larvae shells, some found and measured as far as thirty feet away from the cadaver. A set of false teeth turned up in the kitchen and was removed as possible evidence. (It was later determined they did not belong to the victim and had been kept by Brautigan as a novelty gag.) In the bathroom just off the office area, Thomas uncovered a variety of prescription medications: two bottles of Dalmane, 30 mg.; one bottle of Tranxene, 7.5 mg.; a bottle of Halcion, .5 mg.; and tubes of Tridesilon topical ointment and Montistat Derm, 2 percent, along with three packages of Durex condoms.

For most of the afternoon, the police were in and out of the Zenos' house next door, using their telephone. From overheard fragments of conversation, Jim and Karly concluded some question
remained as to whether it was indeed a suicide. Perhaps homicide had been committed at 6 Terrace Avenue. When Jim Zeno asked one of the officers, “Well, do you think someone might have killed him or something?” the detective replied that it was possible. Further talk concerned the bullet's entry and exit path. They didn't seem to align in the normal fashion of a suicide. What about the downstairs door, was it locked or unlocked? And if this guy Brautigan was supposed to be some kind of writer, how come he left no note? They had no way yet of knowing if the victim actually was Richard Brautigan. Officially, it was just the ninth unidentified male body found in Marin County so far that year.

Zeno informed them one way to be certain was to look at his cock. Richard had told him that years of herpes had left his penis covered with knobs and ridges. Brautigan joked about his “built-in French tickler.”

“Cock, hell,” said the cop. “We're scooping him up with a shovel.”

Marin County had no central morgue, so the Coroner's Office contracted with individual mortuaries, chosen geographically on a month-to-month rotation. In October 1984, the designated morgue for the area was the Russell and Gooch Funeral Chapel of Mill Valley. The firm's removal van arrived at 6 Terrace Avenue in Bolinas in the afternoon. Bagged and anonymous, the body identified as John Doe number 9 was loaded into the meat wagon and driven away. Soon after, the yellow tape went up and the residence was officially sealed.

By four fifteen, Sergeant Russo, Detective Estes, and Coroner's Investigator Thomas gathered in the preparation room at Russell and Gooch on Miller Avenue for an examination of the body. They cut away and searched the stiffened clothing, finding no personal identification. The wadded currency was all his pockets contained. While Bill Thomas had a closer look at the extensive damage to the cranial area and noted the gold restorations in the victim's molars, the two detectives checked out the handgun. The shiny Smith & Wesson revolver was found to be loaded with five live rounds and one spent shell in the top position of the cylinder under the hammer. The weapon was dusted for latent fingerprints and shipped for further testing, along with the bullets and spent shell, to the Department of Justice Criminalistics Laboratory in Santa Rosa.

Bad news traveled fast. Becky Fonda heard about Richard's death through David Fechheimer and passed the sad word along. John Fryer felt angry upon hearing from her. A Western horseman at heart, Fryer operated the unique store (Sax & Fryer's in Livingston) his grandfather had founded in the 1880s. “Richard finally found a way to hurt all his friends at once,” Fryer said.

As it happened, most of the Montana gang was off in New York at the time, staying at different hotels, pursuing various careers, their trajectories randomly intersecting. Tom McGuane was in town to celebrate the reissue of
The Bushwhacked Piano
in the new Vintage Contemporaries series, along with Jim Crumley for
Dancing Bear
. Russell Chatham was there to discuss a future one-man show of his paintings. William “Gatz” Hjortsberg was working on a screenplay outline with Paris-based film director Bob Swaim. Jim Harrison had come in for meetings with his agent, Bob Dattila, and his publisher, Seymour Lawrence, who had also published Brautigan for nearly fifteen years.

Becky called from Montana and word quickly spread, from hotel room to hotel room. Tom McGuane commented that “if Richard committed suicide to punish us he did a good job.” That evening, Chatham, Harrison, Hjortsberg, Dattila, Lawrence, and others gathered for a huge Chinese feast at a restaurant on the East Side, raising a sad toast, bidding a departed friend farewell. Sam Lawrence put it best, paraphrasing literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen (his professor at Harvard,
who committed suicide by jumping out of a Boston hotel window), when he said Richard “died of the Great American Loneliness.”

The following morning (October 26, 1984), pathologist Ervin J. Jindrich, MD, performed an autopsy on what was left of John Doe number 9. Dr. Jindrich repeatedly noted the presence of extensive maggot activity. In the thoracic cavity he found only residual tissue, with a few fragments of identifiable lung and heart within the pericardial region. In the abdominal cavity there was a small amount of dried parchmentlike material appearing to be residual intestine. He uncovered no evidence of internal hemorrhage and no trauma to the ribs, thorax, or vertebral column. What was left of the head was deformed, flattened in a transverse direction, with the superior scalp and calvarium absent. The skull was massively fractured and in numerous small fragments, containing no remaining brain tissue. Contrary to police speculation, the external genitalia revealed an identifiable penis.

Dr. Jindrich finished his work by eleven o'clock. He was unable to detect any powder residue on the victim's head and found it impossible to determine whether a large defect above the right ear was antemortem or caused by insect destruction. His diagnosis revealed only a gunshot wound to the head with marked postmortem decomposition. Before typing up his report, the pathologist completed a couple final tasks. He surgically removed Richard Brautigan's blackened hands for neutron activation studies. These tests would reveal the presence of microscopic gunpowder particles and demonstrate whether the subject had discharged a firearm prior to his death. Dr. Jindrich also retained the lower jaw and excised the upper for odontologic examination. Most of the upper front teeth were missing, avulsed from the impact of the fatal gunshot, yet many molars remained and hopefully surviving dental work would positively identify the victim.

A dentist's bill from Dr. Bennett Dubiner, DDS, who maintained an office on Sutter Street in San Francisco, was among the miscellaneous papers taken as evidence from Richard Brautigan's home. Contacted by the Marin County Sheriff's Department, Dr. Dubiner telephoned the Coroner's Office the same day as the autopsy and reported he had last seen the writer professionally on September 9, 1984. During that office visit he had taken three bilateral bitewings and one periapical X-ray.

The forensic odontologist for the Coroner's Office, Dr. J. Robert Laverine, was notified and immediately called Dr. Dubiner. Subsequent phone conversations compared the September X-rays with the victim's remaining postmortem teeth. There were three full gold crowns, two three-quarter crown bridge abutments, and two onlays in addition to two amalgam-filled molars. A couple of impacted upper third molars were also significant. The gold restorations and their radiographic outlines showing numerous concordant points proved beyond a doubt that the body in question was Richard Brautigan.

A set of x-rays from Dr. James E. Smith, DDS, Brautigan's Montana dentist, were being shipped down from Livingston over the weekend. Although a positive identification had been made, Dr. Laverine would not complete his final report until he had a chance to study this additional material. At the same time, a media bottom-feeding frenzy was well under way. The AP and UPI both put the story out on their wire services on the morning of the twenty-sixth, date line: Bolinas. Although the sheriff's office stated they had not positively identified the body, Seymour Lawrence publicly announced the author's death from his office at Delacorte Press in New York City.