She said, “I’d poisoned the drink I held in my hand I knew it made Carver furious when I drank, because whiskey makes me lose control of myself, and he never knew what I was going to do when I was drunk.

“I rang his bell, holding that glass in my hand. I leered at him tipsily when he opened the door, and walked on in. I said, ‘Hello, Carver darling. Meet your next-door neighbor,’ and I raised the glass to my lips.

“He acted just as I knew he would. He was furious. He said, ‘You little devil, what’re you doing here? I’ve told you I’ll do the drinking for both of us.’ He snatched the glass from me and drained it.”

“What happened?” Mason asked.

“For a moment, nothing,” she said. “He went back to the chair and sat down. I leaned over him and pressed that kiss on his head. It was a goodbye kiss. He looked at me frowned; then suddenly he jumped to his feet and tried to run to the door but he staggered and fell face forward.”

“And what did you do?”

“I took the key to his apartment from his pocket so I could get back in to fix things the way I wanted and get possession of the glass, but I was afraid to be there while he was—dying.”

Mason nodded. “You went back to your own apartment, and then, after you had waited a few minutes and thought it was safe to go back, you couldn’t, because Anita Bonsal was at the door?”

She nodded, and said, “She had a key. She went in. I supposed, of course, she’d call the police and that they’d come at any time. I didn’t dare to go in there then. Finally, I decided the police weren’t coming after all. It was past midnight then.”

“So then you went back in there? You were in there when Don Ralston rang the bell. You—”

“Yes,” she said. “I went back into that apartment. By that time I had put on a bathrobe and pajamas and ruffled my hair all up. If anyone had said anything to me, if I had been caught, I had a story all prepared to tell them, that I had heard the door open and someone run down the corridor, that I had opened my door and found the door of 702 ajar, and I had just that minute looked in to see what had happened.”

“All right,” Mason said; “that was your story. What did you do?”

“I went in and wiped all my fingerprints off that glass on the floor. Then the buzzer sounded from the street.”

“What did you do?”

She said, “I saw someone had fixed up the evidence just the way I had been going to fix it up. A bottle of whiskey on the table, a bottle of soda, a jar of ice cubes.”