He addressed it and gave it to the waitress to drop in the mail-box. He had no money to squander on detectives, but he had a friend, Connery, who as a reporter had achieved a few bits of sleuthing in cases that had baffled the police. That evening Gilfoyle went hunting for Connery.
CHAPTER XXIX
Kedzie simmered in her own wrath a long while before she realized that she had let Gilfoyle escape. He was the very man she was looking for, and she had planned to go even to Chicago to find him.
He had stumbled into her trap, and she had driven him out. She ran to the window and stared up and down the street, but there was no trace of him. She had no idea where he could have gone. She wrung her hands and denounced herself for a fool.
She went to the hall to pick up the photograph of Jim Dyckman. Both halves of it were gone. Now she was frightened. Gilfoyle had departed meekly, but he had taken the picture; therefore he must have been filled with hate. He had revenge in his mind. And she trembled at her danger. He might strike at any time.
She suspected his exact intention. She dreaded to have Jim Dyckman call on her. She had a wild notion of asking him to take her away from New York—down to Atlantic City or up to the Berkshires—anywhere to be rid of Gilfoyle without being left alone. If she had done this she would have done just what Gilfoyle wanted her to, and the Mann Act could have been wielded again as a blackjack.
Meanwhile Anita was afraid to have Dyckman come to her apartment as he constantly did. She telephoned to him that she would be busy at the studio all day. She would meet him at dinner somewhere. But afterward she would come home alone on one pretext or another.
She carried out this plan—and spent a day of confused terror and anger.