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proved sufficiently inventive not to rely on the AP for his mistakes. He wrote that Brautigan “apparently did not complete high school” and that Trout Fishing in America was “a novel written during the San Francisco flower child era.” Nearly every subsequent newspaper article included a quote from Tom McGuane: “When the 1960s ended, [Brautigan] was the baby that was thrown out with the bath water.”
    Over in his office at the Sheriff’s Department Investigations Division in the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County Civic Center, Sergeant Tony Russo had too much work to spend time reading newspapers. At ten in the morning on October 26, he interviewed Richard Brautigan’s daughter, Ianthe, and her husband, Paul Swensen. In her statement, Ianthe mentioned her father’s financial difficulties, calling him “cash poor.” Recently, he had begun borrowing money against the properties he owned in Montana. Her father had been depressed for quite some time, she told Sgt. Russo, and had been drinking heavily for the past five years. When alone and drinking, he would threaten suicide, most often talking about killing himself with a gun. In any case, he never believed he’d live a long life. Ianthe also said her father loved large-caliber nickel-plated handguns.
    â€œMrs. Swensen did not have any frequent direct contact with her father,” Sgt. Russo observed in his report. He noted some confusion concerning their final conversation. Ianthe mentioned she last spoke to her father at the end of May, when he called her from the neighbors’ house, not yet having the phone connected at his place. She also indicated that she had talked with him on Father’s Day. In any case, it had been at least three or four months before Richard Brautigan’s death since she last heard the sound of his voice.
    Just before two, Sgt. Russo spoke with Judge Richard Hodge at the Alameda County Superior Court. Hodge was the executor of Brautigan’s will and had been his attorney for a number of years. He remembered that during their last conversation, Richard said that he was writing a screenplay and sounded more “upbeat” than usual. Sgt. Russo asked Judge Hodge if Brautigan had been having problems with anyone.

    Thinking it over, the judge replied that Richard had been concerned “about some sort of conspiracy to get him by some woman poet who lived in Bolinas.” Rumors had circulated in the community that Brautigan had made “disparaging remarks” about a Vietnam veteran also living there. Judge Hodge had heard a story that the angry vet had come by to see Brautigan with a gun but that he had talked the matter over with him and had “gotten it settled.” The judge observed in closing that he had never heard Richard Brautigan ever mention anything about suicide.
    At 2:15 PM, Sgt. Russo called Joel Shawn at his law office in San Francisco. Shawn represented Richard Brautigan’s legal interests in California but said he not seen his client recently. A lunch date for September 5, 1984, had been broken when Brautigan missed the bus into the city.
    Shawn described the writer as being almost “childlike”: honest, righteous, a “straightforward guy.” Recently, he had seemed like “good old Richard” again, excited by the work he was doing in spite of financial problems. Asked about suicide, Joel Shawn said that Brautigan had never talked about it with him.
    Twenty minutes later, the detective telephoned Joe Swindlehurst in Livingston, Montana. The attorney stated that he last spoke with Richard Brautigan on September 13, when his client called to ask about selling his Montana property and to request some tax information for his accountant. Swindlehurst indicated Brautigan was experiencing financial troubles. Cash was not coming in, and he had mortgaged his Pine Creek place to raise money. Brautigan drank too much, Swindlehurst