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mysterious container in the care of Tom McGuane, along with his guns and fishing rods. Contacted following his return from New York, McGuane shipped the urn to California.
    Twenty-seven years after Richard Brautigan’s death, his ashes remain unburied. The Japanese urn resides, along with a bottle of sake, in the top drawer of a dresser in his daughter’s Santa Rosa home. “I won’t keep him forever,” Ianthe told an interviewer for the Pacific Sun on August 29, 2000, “but he’s safe now.” A slat nailed to the wall prevents the drawer holding the urn from being pulled out more than a couple of inches. “He can’t get out,” she said, “whenever I think of putting him to rest, so to speak, I just can’t. My stomach just churns.”
    On Monday morning, October 29, 1984, Herb Caen’s column in the Chronicle led off with a long paragraph about Brautigan. The “Sakamenna Kid” recounted the first time he met the writer (1968) “standing at a Powell St. cable car stop, handing out seed packets on which he had written poems, a different one on each packet.” The columnist remembered Please Plant This Book. Caen’s piece ended incorrectly. Repeating the weekend’s erroneous story that his New York literary agent had hired “the S.F. private eye who found Brautigan dead,” Caen added a final dramatic irony. “The agent had news that might have saved Brautigan’s life: an offer of a two-book contract.”
    Over in Marin County, Dr. Jim Smith’s dental x-rays arrived from Montana. Dr. Laverine took the delivery and completed his odontological presentation. At five minutes after ten, Sgt. Tony Russo was on the phone, conducting his first interview of the day. He contacted James Sakata, proprietor of Cho-Cho, a restaurant on 1020 Kearny Street in North Beach. The .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver Richard Brautigan had used to end his life was registered to Mr. Sakata, and his name was engraved on the butt. He stated he had loaned the gun to Brautigan in March or April of 1984, around the time he returned from Japan. Brautigan told him that he didn’t have any weapons in his Bolinas residence and “just wanted one around.”

    Sakata told Sgt. Russo that he lost Richard Brautigan’s telephone number and had last seen him in September, when they discussed a long poem Richard wrote about the Los Angeles Olympics. Asked about suicide, Sakata said Brautigan never talked about it in a personal way but they’d once had a discussion about other writers who had taken their own lives. He remembered the focus had been on Ernest Hemingway. Sakata got the impression that Brautigan was “fascinated with his own suicide.”
    At quarter to three in the afternoon, Russo telephoned Becky Fonda at Indian Hill Ranch, her home in Paradise Valley, south of Livingston. Their conversation was brief. She told the sergeant she’d last spoken with Brautigan on the third of September, when he talked about coming up to Montana for the bird-hunting season. She tried calling him two weeks before but was unable to reach him. Brautigan’s answering machine appeared not to be working. Alarmed by this, she contacted David Fechheimer, asking him to look for their friend. Mrs. Fonda mentioned Brautigan’s fondness for guns, adding that he was an avid hunter and an excellent shot. Asked about the writer’s death, she said that she would suspect suicide before foul play.
    Sgt. Russo phoned Marcia Clay in San Francisco at 3:00 PM. It was his last call on this case for the day. There wasn’t much to tell. Marcia Clay had seen Richard Brautigan only once in the past four years, when she encountered him somewhat accidentally at Enrico’s Sidewalk Café on Friday, September 14, 1984. She described their meeting and a subsequent phone conversation, shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of the fifteenth. Clay said