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God-given untimely death that indemnifies them.”
    “Heart attack victims don’t usually crap their pants,” Dryden said. “I think he was poisoned, but we won’t know for sure till we do an autopsy and a tox screen.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    Chuck nodded and went back to work.
    “Did you hear that?” Kylie said. “He said poison.”
    “He said he thinks it was poison.”
    “I hope he’s right,” she said. “I’ve never worked a poison homicide before.”
    “In that case, can I give you a little free advice?”
    “Sure.”
    “A lot of people are watching us. Try not to look quite so happy about it.”

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?”