NYPD Red

Chapter 10



NOTHING CLEARS A crowded restaurant like a bleeding corpse. We were told that someone yelled “Call 911!” when Roth hit the floor. After that, everybody yelled out “Check!”

By the time the two uniformed first responders showed up, most of the witnesses had left the building. Luckily, this was the Regency and not a Starbucks, and Philippe, the very buttoned-up and genuinely helpful maître d’, assured us he could refer to his seating chart and reconstruct the entire population of the dining room from the minute it opened to the minute Roth died.

“Mr. Roth was at table twelve with four others,” Philippe said. “Two of them are still here.”

He pointed to two men in their early thirties sitting at a table in the corner, a silver carafe and two coffee cups between them.

I looked up, and one of the men grinned and started waving.

“He seems to be taking Roth’s death rather well,” I said to Kylie. “What the hell is he waving at?”

“Me,” she said. “I know him. He’s a friend of Spence’s.”

We walked over, and the man stood up. “Kylie,” he said. “I knew you were a cop, but what are the odds?”

“This is my partner, Detective Zach Jordan,” she said. “Zach, this is Harold Scott.”

“My friends call me Scotty,” he said, shaking my hand.

He introduced us to the other man. “This is Randy Pisane. We were having breakfast with Sid Roth when he died.”

“Thanks for staying,” I said. “Can you tell us what happened?”

“One minute Roth is fine. He’s telling us war stories. I mean this guy worked with everybody—Eastwood, Newman, Brando—the biggest of the big. I’ve got to tell you, even if half of that shit was true—”

“Scotty,” Kylie said. “What actually happened?”

“Anyway, to make a long story short, all of a sudden, bam—he’s standing up, puking, having some kind of a seizure, and then down he goes. Smashed his head open, bled all over everything. It was gruesome. I mean, you see a lot worse on film, but in real life, it’s—I don’t know—it’s real. It sucks.”

“Did Roth grab his chest or his arm or his shoulder?” Kylie asked.

Scotty shrugged. “I don’t know. It was kind of fast, and I was pretty grossed out by all the vomiting.”

“You mean did he grab his chest like he was having a heart attack?” Pisane asked.

“Yes.”

“No, there was none of that,” Pisane said. “Look, I’m no doctor, but I wrote for CSI: Miami for two seasons, and what happened to Roth played out like an episode we shot where the guy was poisoned.”

“You mean like food poisoning?” I said.

He looked at me like I was stupid. “No! Poison, like murder. Don’t you watch CSI: Miami?”

“So you’re talking about a homicide,” I said. “Do you know if Mr. Roth had any enemies?”

Both men laughed.

“It would be a lot easier if you asked if he had any friends,” Scotty said.

“Scotty’s right,” Pisane said. “Google him. He was a ruthless son of a bitch, but everybody wanted to work with him because he made a bitchload of money.”

We thanked them and found Dryden, who was still busy photographing table twelve.

“One of the witnesses corroborates your theory,” I said. “He says that the symptoms Roth displayed just before he died make it look like he was poisoned.”

“Is he a doctor?” Dryden said.

“A writer for CSI: Miami.”

“It’s crap. Never watch it.”

Philippe had had the good sense not to clear Roth’s table. There were still five plates, five coffee cups, five waters, and one empty juice glass sitting on the table.

“This is Rafe,” Philippe said. “He was Mr. Roth’s waiter.”

“Where was Roth sitting?” I asked.

Rafe pointed toward the juice glass.

I turned to Dryden. “Chuck, you can bag and tag it all, but do me a favor, when you run it through the lab, start with the glass.”

“And you might want to test everything in the kitchen,” Kylie said. “Just in case someone was targeting the whole dining room and Roth was the first to drink the Kool-Aid.”

Chuck moved his head imperceptibly in something that looked like agreement.

“Rafe,” I said, “did you bring Mr. Roth the juice?”

“No. There was a busboy—a new guy, Latino. I asked him to top off the coffee. When he got to the table, Roth asked him for the tomato juice, and he brought it.”

“What’s this busboy’s name?”

“I don’t know,” Rafe said. “Like I told you, he was new.”

“Where is he now?”

Rafe shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not here. He’s not in the kitchen. He probably went home.”

I turned to Philippe.

He shook his head. “We don’t have any new busboys today. This is a busy week. I have all my regulars—nobody new. The one who brought the juice—I don’t know who he is.”

My cell phone rang. It was Cates.

“Give me an update,” she said.

“We’re at the Regency. The Possible Homicide is looking more like a Probable Murder One, but we have to give the lab rats time to dust and dissect. We’re going to head back to the precinct.”

“Don’t,” Cates said. “I need you at Silvercup Studios. There’s another body. Ian Stewart, the actor.”

“What went down?” I asked.

“He was shot,” Cates said.

“Anybody see anything?”

“There were about a hundred witnesses,” Cates said, “and if none of them are any help, we’ve got the whole thing on film.”