Jubilee Hitchhiker Read Free Page B

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    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