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said. He hadn’t heard any talk about suicide, but it would not surprise him as Richard had a fascination for large-caliber firearms. Swindlehurst told Sgt. Russo about the times the writer had shot off a handgun inside his ranch house. “Maybe somebody will notice the holes Richard Brautigan put in the floor.”
    At 3:00 PM, Sgt. Russo made his final phone call for the day, contacting David Fechheimer at his home and office on the corner of Hyde and Lombard. Fechheimer told Russo that, having spoken with Becky Fonda in Montana, he had called Bob Junsch the day before, instructing him to check out Brautigan’s Bolinas house. If the sergeant informed him his friend’s death had been a suicide, he wouldn’t be surprised. Brautigan had long been interested in Japanese culture, he said, and in Japan suicide had “an altogether different meaning than it has in the United States.”
    Sgt. Russo asked the private detective his routine question, had the victim been having “any problems with anyone.” Fechheimer and Judge Hodge had heard the same stories. He replied that Brautigan told him that he’d been involved in a feud over a Vietnam veteran with Joanne Kyger, a poet in Bolinas. Sgt. Russo heard the name wrong. He wrote it down in his report as “Kieter.”
    Over the weekend, the press coverage continued unabated. Richard Brautigan was back in the headlines one last time. With each subsequent newspaper story, the spread of misinformation widened. Inaccuracies included referring to Brautigan’s daughter as “Ianthe Wiston” and stating Richard’s body “was found by a private investigator hired by the author’s New York agent.” Most egregious, an utterly fictitious story reported that a half-empty whiskey bottle, “with sunlight refracting through it,” had been discovered standing close beside the corpse.
    On Saturday, October 27, Brautigan’s obituary ran in the New York Times . It referred to him as “a literary idol of the 1960’s who eventually fell out of fashion.” Another obituary in the Times of London appeared the same day, incorrectly giving the author’s age as fifty-one and saying that “in later years, feeling that he had been unfairly discarded by public and critics alike, he became depressed and began to drink heavily.”

    One piece so teemed with malice as to be worthy of Tom McGuane’s adroit bon mot: “urinal ism.” Warren Hinckle III (whose black eye-patch, Falstaffian manner, and ever-present basset hound, Bentley, made him a local San Francisco celebrity since the days when he edited Ramparts in the midsixties), had an eponymous column, “Hinckle’s Journal,” running in the Chronicle . In a piece he called “The Big Sky Fell In on Brautigan,” Hinckle spun a vituperative tall tale suggesting the author had been destroyed by “a macho sense of competition” in what he termed “the jet-set enclave in the wilds of Montana.”
    The source of this dubious information was Ken Kelley, an Oakland-based journalist, acclaimed for his incisive Playboy interviews. It was Kelley who brought down Anita Bryant, letting her babble buoyantly about “queers.” A recent friend of Brautigan’s, Kelley had been invited to Pine Creek in the summer of 1979. Hoist by his own petard, Kelley rambled on and on to Hinckle, Jack Daniel’s in hand. “A bunch of artistic weirdos living in rancher country,” claimed Kelley. “It was the whole mental macho thing in Montana that I think really got to Richard.”
    Hyper and excitable, discursively elaborating to the eager note-taking Hinckle, Kelley appeared almost possessed as he furiously paced the deck of his shabby penthouse. “And the artists seemed compelled to compete in macho terms against the cowboys, and then tried to out-macho each other. Every night seemed to be the boy’s night out.