"Lloyd Rennart'?"

Esperanza nodded: "He's dead."

"Oh." Dead. As in dead end. Not that it had been much of a begirming. "You could have just called."

"There's more." .

"Oh?"

"The circumstances surrounding his death are" she stopped, bit her lower lip "fuzzy."

Myron sat up a bit. "Fuzzy?"

"Lloyd Rennart apparently committed suicide eight months ago."

"How?" +

"That's the fuzzy part. He and his wife were on vacation in a mountain range in Peru. He woke up one morning, wrote a brief note, then he jumped oif a cliff of some kind."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. I haven't been able to get too many details yet.

The Philadelphia Daily News just had a brief story on it." There was a hint of a smile. "But according to the article, the body had not yet been located."

Myron was starting to wake up in a big hurry.

"What?"

"Apparently Lloyd Rermart took the plunge in a remote crevasse with no access. They may have located the body by now, but I couldn't find a follow-up article. None of the local papers carried an obituary."

Myron shook his head. No body. The questions that sprang to mind were obvious: could Lloyd Rennart still be alive? Did he fake his own death in order to plot out his revenge? Seemed a tad out there, but you never know. If he had, why would he have waited twenty-three years?

True, the U. S. Open was back at Merion. True, that could make old wounds resurface. But still. "Weird," he said.

He looked up at her. "You could have told me all this on the phone. You didn't have to come all the way down here."

"What the hell is the big deal?" Esperanza snapped.

' 'I wanted to get out of the city for the weekend. I thought seeing the Open would be fun. You mind?"

"I was just asking."

"You're so nosy sometimes."

"Okay, okay." He held up his hands in mock surrender.

"Forget I asked."

"Forgotten," she said. "You want to fill me in on what's going on?"

He told her about the Crusty Nazi at the mall and about losing the black-clad perpetrator.

When he finished, Esperanza shook her head.

"Jesus," she said. "Without Win, you're hopeless."

Ms. Morale Booster.

"Speaking of Win," Myron said, "don't talk to him about the case."

"Why?"

"He's reacting badly,"

She watched him closely. "How badly?"

"He went night visiting."

Silence.

"I thought he stopped doing that," she said.

"I thought so too."

"Are you sure?"

"There was a Chevy parked in the driveway," Myron said. ' 'He took it out of here last night and didn't get back till three-thirty."

Silence. Win stored a bunch of old, unregistered Chevys. Disposable cars, he called them. Completely untraceable.

Esperanza's voice was soft. "You can't have it both ways, Myron."

"What are you talking about?"

"You can't ask Win to do it when it suits you, then get pissed off when he does it on his own."