Chance Elson Read online

  On any other night Chance Elson would have been at the Club and would not have found the girl crouched in the dark doorway. The Club was closed for no sentimental reason. Chance was a realist, and as he told Doc LiUer, "The suckers stay home one night a year, Christmas Eve. They've blown their wad on presents. Haven't got it for roulette and craps."

  He left Doc, walked out into the circular driveway before the low, rambling building. It had been a golf club once, but the depression had lolled the membership. The bank that held the mortgage had been very willing to lease it to them.

  Chance stood looking at it. Pride of ownership was a warm ball in his belly. This was his, his and Doc's and Dutch's.

  He breathed deeply. He was tall, nearly six feet, his body slender, httle fat on the big-boned frame. Wind ruflBed the crisp waves of his dark hair, and the eyes which studied the slanting lines of the brick and plaster manor were blue, light, a trace of ice in them.

  Cab lights cut the drive behind him and he turned, pulled open the door. "Take me downtown, EucHd and Ninth."

  They drove down Cedar Hill. The lights of Cleveland below them made a wide-winged V as the radiuslike streets ran in to converge at the Public Square.

  At Ninth Street he left the cab, walked slowly along Euclid, looking at the shop windows, imtil he reached the cafeteria. Joe would have dinner ready at the apartment, but he did not want to go home yet. He thought better when he was alone, and he needed to think, for although he was just past twenty-one, he was part owner of the biggest gambling club in Ohio.

  After dinner he walked down Sixth to Superior and turned

  east. It was nine o'clock, but there were few people on this secondary street.

  And then Chance saw her, huddled in the doorway, a bundle of rags against the dirty whiteness of the unshoveled snow. He thought she was dead, and knew the quick instinctive reaction of his kind to pass her by, to not get involved with any trouble that could be avoided.

  He took two steps, turned, and saw her move and saw the stark white despair of her face, the eyes like a cornered animal's, and he came back.

  "Hungry, kid?"

  She struggled to her feet. She would have run, but Chance's reflex action was to grab her. Then she went limp, her whole weight in his arms. His fingers biting through the dirty sweater felt her bony fleshlessness. It shocked him. She could not weigh more than seventy pounds.

  Chance had been raised in a hard school, a school that named you sucker if you worried about anyone other than yourself. But he had known hunger and exhaustion and hopelessness.

  The thing of course was to call the pohce. He looked at her tight, pinched face, and saw her shiver, and knew that she must have been hiding in that doorway for some reason. He did not question her. By his code a man's business was his own, and a police station was a hell of a place for a kid on Christmas Eve.

  He saw a cab cruising toward them along the street and signaled. When the cab puUed up, he gave the driver the address of his East Cleveland apartment.

  Joe Moore had been a club fighter, never good enough for the big time. Doc had won Joe's contract in a poker game with his drunken manager, and felt a httle taken when he found that his new property was round-heeled and punchy. Doc tried to give back his contract, but Joe had attached himself to the gambler with the tenacity of a leech. He was good-natured, wiUing, and he would do anything he was told. In desperation Doc had tried him as a cook and found that he was very good. Now Joe ran their apartment, took

  care of their clothes. He loved to wash windows and to run the vacuum cleaner. His mind was at times a Httle clouded, but usually he could think as sharply as the average.

  He stared at the girl when Chance brought her in, at the white face, at the shock of blond, tangled hair, at the eyes, gray, too large, soft yet hunted.

  "Christ, she's starved."

  "Feed her." Chance seldom wasted words.

  "What's her name?'*

  "Judy."

  "What are you going to do with her?"

  "How the heU do I know?" Chance turned and went into the front room.

  Joe looked back at the girl. For one thing she was filthy, as if she had rolled in the gutter. Joe was scrupulously clean. It was a fetish with him.

  "First you get a bath. Ill bet you got Hce."

  The girl had sunk into a chair beside the kitchen table, too exhausted to stand. Her hair, stringy with mud, hung down, partly hiding her face as she leaned forward, elbows on the table.

  She straightened. "No you don't."

  "Ah, for Christ sake." Joe was disgusted. "I used to be a rubber in a ladies' Turkish bath. Come on or III carry you."

  For a minute he thought she would fight him. But, either reason told her that struggle would be useless, or she was too tired to care, and she allowed him to lead her down the hall to the bathroom.

  Here he ran hot water into the tub and then peeled off her dirty clothes as he would peel an onion.

  She stood quiet, her eyes closed, her skinny body looking almost like a boy's. Joe put her in the tub. He scrubbed her head until he was certain that there were no Hce. Then he got the scissors and chopped off the hair in a square bob.

  "All right, wash yourself." He gathered up her clothes with obvious distaste and carried them out to the rear porch and dumped them into the incinerator.

  He came back carrying Doc's bathrobe and pajamas. Doc

  was the smallest of any of them. "Okay, get out and dry yourself. HI go scramble up some food."

  She didn't answer him. With her hair cut and plastered damply against her small head, she looked more than ever like a boy.

  When she finally returned to the kitchen Joe was busy at the stove. He said without looking around, "How old are you, kid?"

  She hesitated. Her voice was sullen. "Going on fifteen.''

  Joe turned. "You're a liar. You ain't more than twelve.**

  "If you know so much, why'd you ask?"

  Joe glared at her, feeling his anger rise. Smart kids annoyed him, and Doc said he should never get mad. "Watch your tongue," he told her. "Use it wrong around here and you'll get it slapped right out of your mouth."

  Dutch Mulhauser was the cashier at the Club. He was big, fifty, with a heavy face red from whisky bum. His cheeks were too fat and his eyes too small, but they could twinkle, and his laugh when aroused was loud.

  Dutch had started with a carnival at sixteen. He had been a grifter, a barker for a peep show, but he was a gambler at heart and had drifted into running a wheel of fortune, a ball game giving slum to the rubes, a thimblerig and finally a shell game.

  Dutch came home around midnight. One arm was filled with presents. A small Christmas tree was in the other. He tiptoed across the darkened front room, set up the tree and arranged his presents beneath it. He stood back to admire the effect, poured a drink from a bottle on the table, then went softly along the hall and pushed open the door of Chance's room.

  Light from the hall showed him the girl curled up in the middle of the big bed. He stood for a minute, held by surprise.

  "Jesus," he said imder his breath. Then abruptly he left the apartment. It was hard to buy a present for a kid at one o'clock on Christmas morning.

  Doc Liller was slightly drunk. He lay back on the seat of his cab as it passed Dutch at the corner of the street and did not see Mulhauser. Liller was a small man, with graceful, tapering hands. Men liked him, trusting him instinctively, and yet there was not a better "mechanic" in the business than Doc. He could do whatever he wanted with a deck of cards, dealing from the top, the second card or the bottom of the deck. Ask him for a pat poker hand and he would deal the cards you chose. He had worked the boats and played with the professionals, the plungers, the high rollers. He would bet on anyt
hing and usually won. Women trusted him even more than men did. A blonde had shot a redhead because of him. A sixty-year-old had wanted to adopt him. Whores loved him.

  *1 pay for mine," he always explained. "Then I can forget about it."

  He was dark haired with a smooth, oval, guileless face. His features had delicacy without in the least being feminine. His eyebrows were dark, nearly straight, slanting toward his nose. It gave him a certain resemblance to the devil, an accident which Doc had capitalized on more than once.

  He was by nature sardonic, a little mocking, and his opinion of the human race and its general intelligence level was extremely low. In Doc's book the world was divided between marks and wise operators, and he rated himself at the top of the second category.

  At the moment he was very happy. On the floor of the cab were four cases of Hquor. He had won them from a whisky dealer, which in his eyes almost doubled their value. Doc seldom paid for anything but women.

  The driver carried in the cases and stacked them in the automatic elevator. Doc handed him five dollars, then oflFered to match for it. The driver lost, walked from the lobby with Doc's Christmas wishes ringing in his ears. When he reached his hack, he pulled the stolen fifth from inside his coat.

  Doc made a lot of noise trying to get through the apartment door. He was singing as he dragged the cases along the hall. Joe Moore appeared, his purple bathrobe still bearing the legend in gold letters: TIGER MOORE.

  "Pipe down. Chance will cut your heart out if you wake the kid."

  Doc stopped. A kid meant only one thing. "Are you telling me that Chance brought home a dame?"

  "Naw," said Joe, "a girl. A snotty Uttle bitch, the dirtiest thing you ever see. She ain't more than twelve."

  Doc Liller sat down. His eyes were just out of focus. "Say that again, my punch-drunk friend."

  "I ain't pimchy. You call me punchy, I'll knock your head off. It's the truth. Chance picked her out of the gutter. She was starved, and I had to bum her clothes. She's wearing your pajamas."

  '*Well I'll be damned." Doc ran his hands through his curly hair. His smile was ironic. It was this look that made him hard on women.

  Chance came out of Joe's room at the end of the hall. He had been asleep and his dark hair was mussed and his long legs showed beneath the edge of his robe. "What the devil's going on?"

  Doc looked up. "What's this about some kid?" Chance told him.

  "Where's she from? What was she doing in that doorway?" "I don't know. I didn't ask her."

  "Jesus Christ. This is all we need. A twelve-year-old kid doesn't just drop from the sky. The cops are probably looking for her now, the parents raising hell."

  "From the looks of her, her parents, if she's got any, weren't taking much care of her. What was I supposed to do, leave her to freeze?"

  Doc thought about it. The thinking made him nearly sober. "This could be a dirty mess. It would be bad enough if you were some married guy with a woman to look after her, but four bachelors, and gamblers at that. Can't you see the headlines?"

  Chance said, "Stop borrowing trouble. We'U send her on her way tomorrow morning."

  "What in? Joe said he burned her clothes." Chance was silent. In the resulting stillness they heard the sound of a key in the lock.

  Chance looked at the door, startled. "Who's that? I thought Dutch came in half an hour ago."

  "He went out again," said Joe.

  The hall door opened. Dutch stood blinking at them. He was balancing a glass bowl in one hand. In the bowl was water, and three goldfish swam in short, unhappy darts.

  "What in the hell are you doing with that?"

  Dutch gave Chance an uncertain grin. He came in and shut the door behind him. "Present for the kid. I didn't know she was here till I got home."

  "Where'd you get it?"

  "All-night restaurant around the comer. They had it in the window. I gave the guy five bucks." He carried it over and set it on an end table beside the Christmas tree. "Pretty, ain't it?"

  "If you like fish."

  "Well, hell," said Dutch, "I had to get something. Who is she anyhow?"

  Chance told him, watched the dismay grow on the big red face. Evidently Dutch agreed with Doc.

  "It's a bad rap," Dutch said. "I remember a guy with the Singer Show. They caught him wdth a thirteen-year-old in a vacant lot. He got twenty years."

  Chance said, "No one laid a hand on her."

  "Joe gave her a bath."

  "So Joe can take the rap."

  The ex-fighter looked from one to the other uneasily. He never was quite sure when he was being kidded.

  Dutch had suddenly spotted the three cases of liquor under the tree and the one Doc still had beside his chair. "Well, well, where did that come from?"

  Doc smirked. He caressed his mustache wdth the tip of his forefinger. "Santa Claus is a mark, he thinks three kings beat five spades. Get some ice and glasses, Joe. Let's see how the brew is at the North Pole."

  Joe came back with glasses, ice, a pitcher of water. He helped himself to a hberal drink. Doc watched him. "Careful, son, you'll get the idea you're Max Baer."

  Dutch had taken one of the bottles. He didn't bother with

  ice or a glass. He held up the bottle to the light and then drank deeply, smacking his lips. "That's the one thing I'll give Roosevelt. When I think of the shellac I used to drink."

  Chance grunted. He had a highball in his hand but he had barely tasted it. "Saturday night he used to spend our last dime on booze and then go to bed with the bearded lady. Christ."

  Doc grinned. Joe was wide-eyed. "You're not just building it? He did go to bed vidth the bearded lady, honest?"

  "Ask Dutch."

  Dutch took another drink. The liquor was warming him, loosening his tongue. "Joe, my boy, you ain't hved until you've gone to bed with the bearded lady, but if you think she's good, you should try the tattooed one."

  "She was better?"

  "Well, you could look at the pictures if you got bored." Dutch's laugh rolled through the apartment.

  Chance said, "Keep it down. You'll wake the Idd."

  "Let's wake her," said Dutch, "and give her the fish. Maybe then she'll beHeve in Santa Claus."

  "Naw, let her sleep." It was Joe. His face was flushed and he had finished his second drink. "Tell me about the time you found Chance, Dutch."

  Dutch took another drink from his bottle. It was nearly empty. "I've told you a dozen times."

  "Tell it again. It's Christmas." Joe was having the time of his fife. Joe loved it when they sat around the apartment, talking of things that had happened to them. Joe didn't get a chance to listen to them much. They worked every night and slept most of the day. He felt a little lost when they were at the Club, a little out of things, as if he did not quite belong, and he wanted to belong so desperately. They were all he had, the only people who ever spoke to him, who knew that he was still alive.

  Dutch winked at Doc. Doc had that resigned look he usually wore when someone else was talking. Doc liked to talk himself.

  "It was this way," Dutch said. "I was with the Singer Show then and the weather had been lousy and we hadn't made

  coffee and cake money. Well, we set up in this little Wisconsin town maybe thirty miles out of Milwaukee and IVe got my pitch off the midway. The law is fixed but iVe been warned to play it easy. I've got three marks and I take them for five bucks and they've had it, so I'm standing there, moving the shells just for exercise and I see this kid watching me. I make it that he hasn't got a dime, but I figure it doesn't hurt to con him a little so I ask does he want to play.

  "He comes over closer and says he don't know how. So, I tell him it's simple. The hand is quicker than the eye. All he has to do is to tell me which shell the little pea is imder. I'll bet him that he can't, any amount. Well, I move the shells back and forth clumsy-like as a come-on. Then I say, 'How's about it, sport, want to try it?*

  "He looks at me. 'When those men were playing, it wasn't under any shell. It was
in the crook of your little finger/*' Mulhauser broke into heavy laughter. "I'll never get over it, a green kid spotting me when I've been a grifter all my life."

  "You were so damn awkward," Chance said, "any fool could have spotted you."

  Dutch was just drunk enough to be offended. "The heU I was. No one ever caught me before. You've just got sharp eyes."

  "Nuts," said Doc.

  Dutch said, "Okay, you wise bastard. Ill bet you one him-dred bucks right now that if I had my shells you couldn't tell where the pea was."

  "A safe bet," said Doc, pouring his drink and refilling Chance's, "we have no shells."

  "Joe, we got any walnuts?"

  Joe looked at Dutch expectantly. "Sure, a whole dish full."

  "Go out and crack three, I want three half shells, not broken, you understand."

  "Sure. You think I'm dimib?"

  "I know you're dxmib. That isn't the point, and get a dried pea."

  "We ain't got no dried peas."

  "All right, a bean then, for Christ sake." He finished the bottle he had, reached for another.

  Chance leaned back in his chair, relaxed, more relaxed than he had been in months. The last few months had been a continual strain. He wasn't worried about Dutch's drinking. He'd seen Dutch put away three quarts and then walk to bed.

  Sitting there he tried to analyze his feeling for Dutch. Doc was different. Doc was educated. Doc had been bom a gentleman. Doc had everything that Chance wanted, but Dutch was still a big yokel for all his years with the carnival.

  He guessed maybe his feeling for Dutch was something like he might have felt for his father, if he had known him, a father you like, yet whose weaknesses you recognize.

  Dutch had picked him up that night at the carnival. When Dutch was drinking, he was a sentimental man, and Chance's story of running away from the farmer in whose home the orphanage had placed him had overridden Dutch's better judgment.

  Later on, after Chance had learned to drive the battered Ford that carried them from one fair to the next, to coc^ on the alcohol stove, to set up the pitch and size up the marks, he had figured out that Mulhauser was lonesome, feeling sorry for himself; that he had brought along the boy to have someone to grumble to.