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But he eventually made sure that she would make haste to dress and meet him in the restaurant. They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie was aglow with the whole procedure. "You ought to write a novel about us," she told Gilfoyle. "It would be a lot better than most of the awful stories folks write nowadays. And you'd make a million dollars, I bet.
There was a vast amount of mail, for it is one of the hardships of the movie business that the actors are fairly showered with letters of praise, criticism, query, and flirtation. But there was no letter ever from Gilfoyle. Yet Gilfoyle was constantly within hailing distance. With the aid of his friend Connery he had concocted a scheme for keeping Kedzie and Dyckman under espionage.
And how they liked my catch-phrase?" Kedzie nodded. Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: "Well, a man's a genius if he succeeds, and a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as ever that there's a fortune in Breathasweeta. But when Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost my halo. He and Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They blame me!
If Gilfoyle could catch Dyckman taking Anita motoring across the State line into New Jersey or Connecticut he could arrest them or threaten them. Also he could name Dyckman as co-respondent in a divorce suit or threaten to and collect heavily that way. This was not blackmail in Gilfoyle's eyes. He scorned such a crime. This was honorable and necessary vindication of his offended dignity.
He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret. As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman's money grew huger and huger. The dog had not merely thousands or hundreds of thousands, but thousands of thousands. Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar bill.
He convinced Gilfoyle easily when they were far from Kedzie and close to poverty; but when they hovered near Kedzie, Connery had the convincing to do all over again. He worked up an elaborate campaign for gaining entrance to Kedzie's apartment without following the classic method of smashing the door down.
Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.
He advised Kalteyer to borrow a lot of money at the banks and sling himself. Kalteyer breathed hard. Gilfoyle was assailed by an epilepsy of inspirations. In place of "Kalteyer's Peerless Gum," he proposed the enthralling title, "Breathasweeta." Others had mixed pepsin in their edible rubber goods of various flavors. Gilfoyle proposed perfume! Kalteyer was astounded at the boy's genius.
By the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem of love he was so exhausted that any other emotion was welcome, best of all a good quarrel and the healthful exercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate at the drop of a hat. When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of introduction to Miss Havender with the verbal message that Miss Adair was waiting outside Miss Havender nodded.
He was troubled by the first frenzy she had ever shown for him, and he might have learned how much more than a merely pretty child she was if she had not suddenly felt an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them. A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag her back. She slid from Dyckman's knees, gasping: "Oh!" She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle.
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