Jubilee Hitchhiker Read Free Page A

discovered no one, including his agent, had heard from him in over a month. Joseph Swindlehurst, Brautigan’s Montana lawyer who handled his accounts in Livingston, told her that Richard hadn’t written or cashed a single check in all that time. Joe said mail was being returned unclaimed. He had called Dick Hodge and Joel Shawn, the author’s former and current California attorneys, asking them to look into the matter. Something seemed terribly wrong.
    Becky and her husband, actor Peter Fonda, talked things over and determined to find out what was going on. On October 23, 1984, they phoned San Francisco private investigator David Fechheimer, protégé of the legendary Hal Lipset and a pal of Brautigan’s since the early sixties. The detective had also been worried about his friend. He told Becky Fonda that he’d been over to the Bolinas house before leaving on a business trip about three weeks earlier. He’d found the lights on and the radio playing within. The door downstairs was locked. Fechheimer made no attempt to force an entry after knocking and not getting any answer.
    He didn’t tell Becky he suspected there might have been a booby trap waiting inside. After twenty years in his peculiar business, Fechheimer figured it would be unwise to go into Richard’s empty house in Bolinas under those circumstances without thinking about “Take this, you cocksucker!” Another thing he didn’t tell Becky was that he knew the moment she informed him Brautigan hadn’t written any checks in over a month that his friend was dead.
    David Fechheimer assured the Fondas he would get to the bottom of things. He told them he’d go out to Bolinas the next day. It had been on his mind to have another look at Richard’s house later that week. Fechheimer asked Tony Dingman if he wanted to come along. Dingman declined, fearing it might turn out to be a “horror show,” but suggested an acquaintance named Dwain Cox, a big guy who’d once been photographed for People magazine hauling Brautigan around San Francisco in a rickshaw. Dwain knew some people in Bolinas. Maybe he could get them to investigate.
    Later the same day, twenty-four-year-old Ianthe Swensen called Dingman from her home in Santa Rosa. She had not spoken with her father since the previous June, but people had recently asked about him, and now she wanted to know, “Where’s my daddy?” Dingman immediately phoned Curt Gentry and told him about Fechheimer’s request. Having coauthored the best seller
Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson, Gentry was well acquainted with the appalling grotesqueries hidden behind locked doors.
    The writer had an old friend, a commercial fisherman named Bob Junsch, who lived in Stinson Beach. Curt had known him since the early days when they both worked as bartenders in San Francisco. Junsch also knew Brautigan, having accompanied him on his first adult trip to Montana. Gentry promised Tony Dingman he’d call out to Stinson right away. Bob was a stand-up guy, someone who could be counted on when the chips were down.
    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