Champagne for One

"Good heavens, no. To have a suicide in her drawing-room was bad enough. If she knew I was here looking for support for my belief that it was murder she’d have a fit."

"Mrs Robilotti doesn’t have fits, Mr Goodwin."

"Well, you know her better than I do. If she ever did have a fit this would call for one. Of course, I may be sticking my neck out. If you prefer suicide to murder as much as she does I’ve wasted a lot of gas driving up here."

She looked at me, sizing me up. "I don’t," she said bluntly.

"Good for you," I said.

She lifted her chin. "I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you what I have told the police. Of course, it’s possible that Faith did kill herself, but I doubt it. I get to know my girls pretty well, and she was here nearly five months, and I doubt it. I knew about the bottle of poison she had-she didn’t tell me, but one of the other girls did-and that was a problem, whether to get it away from her. I decided not to, because it would have been dangerous. As long as she had it and went on showing it and talking about using it, that was her outlet for her nerves, and if I took it away she would have to get some other outlet, and there was no telling what it might be. One reason I doubt if she killed herself is that she still had that bottle of poison."

I smiled. "The police would love that."

"They didn’t, naturally. Another reason is that if she had finally decided to use the poison she wouldn’t have done it there at that party, with all those people. She would have done it somewhere alone, in the dark, and she would have left a note for me. She knew how I felt about my girls, and she would have known it would hurt me, and she would have left a note. Still another reason is the fact that she was actually pretty tough. That bottle of poison was merely the enemy that she intended to defeat somehow-it was death, and she was going to conquer it. The spirit she had, down deep, showed sometimes in a flash in her eyes. You should have seen that flash."

"I did, Tuesday evening when I was dancing with her."

"Then she still had it, and she didn’t kill herself. But how are you going to prove it?"

"I can’t. I can’t prove a negative. I would have to prove an affirmative, or at least open one up. If she didn’t poison her champagne someone else did. Who? That’s the target."