Chance Elson

by Ballard, Todhunter, 1903-1980

  Chance thought, "He's trying to let me get a little more anxious. He's stalhng merely to prolong my agony."

  He said, "I have an appointment at two-thirty."

  Smith's round eyes surveyed him. "About the financing of the hoteir

  "Maybe."

  Smith's thin smile actually seemed to hold amusement. "You are skilled at cards, Elson, but there are times when a bluff is unwise. We know that you've exhausted every other possible source."

  Chance said quietly, "I never bluff. Only a fool tries to play cards he doesn't have. Shall we get on with it?"

  Smith said cautiously, "I talked with one of my principals. We will advance the added money to pay off that bank loan, but of course in return we v^dll expect full control."

  Chance wadded the napkin into a small ball and laid it deliberately beside his plate. "In that case we are wasting

  time, both yours and mine. I'd rather not finish the hotel than give up control." "That's hard to beUeve."

  Chance stood up. "It's been an experience meeting you, Mr. Smith. Thank you for the lunch."

  Smith let him get to the door before he said, "Wait a minute, let's don't be hasty. Come back here and look at it from our angle for a moment."

  Chance stopped and turned. He knew that this was the biggest game he had ever sat in, and that Smith was as worthy an opponent as a man could ask.

  "I have looked at it from your angle. We both know that this is racket money or black-market money or both, and that it is seeking a home. We both know that due to the tax office and various government restrictions it is no simple matter any more to conceal money, or to invest it easily."

  Smith watched him.

  "We also know that your principals, whoever they are, do not stand a ghost of a chance of getting past the Nevada tax commission. In their own names they couldn't get a license to operate a bingo game.

  "So what am I selling you? I'm selling the fact that I have no record, that I have experience running a profitable gambling house in Las Vegas, that I still have friends in Carson City and Reno who will see that I have no trouble in securing a hcense for the hotel."

  "But not good enough friends to put up the money you needed."

  "Very true, but their doubt was about Vegas, not about me.

  Smith said, "What kind of arrangement would you suggest?"

  "Forty per cent of the hotel, the building, ground and gambling, for two nulHon dollars. That's cheap enough. From some deals that have been made in other places, this hotel for example, it's dirt cheap. The gambhng is to be leased to my partners, Doc Liller and Dutch Mulhauser, the restaurants and bar to my former chef. The gambling will

  underwrite the dining rooms and bar and guarantee Leon a fair profit."

  Smith said, "You've forgotten one thing. The million and a quarter bank loan which you want us to pay oflF. What do we get for that?"

  "I hadn't forgotten it. I'll personally assume that loan. You will lend me as an individual one milhon and a quarter. In return I will pledge my stock as security and promise to pay off the loan in fifteen years, but the stock remains in my control to vote as I choose so long as the payments on the loan are made. I figure that completed the hotel will be worth at least five milHon. I put in the land. Land like it down the Strip is being offered for sale for one milHon dollars flat. If you don't beheve me, ride down and take a look at the sign."

  Smith laughed. "I've seen the sign, and to think, ten or fifteen years ago this sagebrush could have been purchased for a hundred dollars an acre."

  Chance shrugged. "Doc, Dutch and I put between seven and eight hundred thousand dollars into the deal. That with the million and a quarter III owe you means that I have almost three miUion in the place against your cHents' two, and I'm offering you forty per cent, which is a fair division, since I don't hold the sixty. I had to give ten per cent to the contractor as a bonus."

  Smith considered. "Let me make another phone call."

  "Just so this thing is settled one way or another by two o'clock."

  There was a tenseness about his stomach as his mind went back over everything that had been said, word by word, wondering if he had said the right things, wondering exactly what Smith's reactions had been. The man was as hard to read as anyone he had ever met. But he was only the agent. Whoever he was talking to on the telephone would make the decision.

  Smith came back into the room. "Well," he said slowly, "it's a deal, except for one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "They want a bigger stock interest."

  "How much?"

  "Forty-five, They figure that you're using their million and a quarter. They figure they should hold as much as you hold."

  "And let the contractor have control?"

  Smith shrugged. "That's the way the ball bounces." The words sounded absurd, coming from his thin lips. "Take it or leave it, and we want to know before five this afternoon."

  "I'll take it, but I need the money by the middle of next week if we aren't to have an interruption in construction."

  "You can have it by day after tomorrow if the papers are signed by then. What lavi^er do you want to handle it?"

  "Morton Hoffner, if he's all right vdth you."

  He saw the slight flicker in Smith's eyes. It confirmed the guess Chance had already made, that Hoffner was connected with the Syndicate.

  "That will be fine. It's been a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Elson." He extended a small hand.

  Chance shook it. He walked out of the room, knowing that he had sold control of the hotel.

  ^^^ifoten, 20

  Judy's divorce was final. The court appearance took only a matter of minutes. She walked out of the room with Morton Hoffner at her side.

  She had intended to leave Vegas as soon as the divorce was granted, return to Hollywood, to work until she could save enough to carry her through the cure. Now she did not want to leave. Chance needed her. He was driving himself to exhaustion, trying to get the hotel finished.

  Doc was helping, of course, so was Dutch, but she knew that Doc worked with reservations. Doc was worried. Doc had not been the same since the day Chance had come home to tell them he had raised the money for completion, but that he had to sign away forty-five per cent.

  If Chance was worried, he gave no sign to Judy, however closely she watched. He was fully engaged, recruiting a staff for the hotel. He sent Doc to New York and Miami and finally to Los Angeles. He wanted assistant managers who had been in resort hotels. He wanted them young, preferably college trained. He wanted a good housekeeper and domestic staff. For the gambhng crew he drew heavily on the men who had been with them downtown, filling in with young dealers who had never worked in a gambling hall outside of Las Vegas.

  *1 want the top in service," he told Judy. "This is going to be the best-run, best-organized hotel on the Strip." They stood in the supper room. The building, aside from furnishings, was completed. Outside men were planting sod in the strips of lawn between the wide, curving flagstone walks, planting full-grown trees hauled in from the nurseries, planting flowers already blooming in the twisting beds. The opening was five weeks away.

  "Chance."

  He turned to look at her.

  "I got my divorce this morning."

  He came to her and pulled her into his arms. "Did you bring the preacher out with you?"

  She pulled back, laughing. "Now wait a minute. I told you I wouldn't get married until I'd had time to straighten things out."

  "Do that after we're married. My God, woman, how can I keep my mind on the hotel with you around?"

  "So you think you can marry me and then forget me, is that the pitch?"

  He grinned ruefully. "You always pick me up on my words."

  "Never mind, I'm not going to try to compete with a hotel opening when I do marry you. We are going away on a long, long trip then, so far that you can't hear the dice click on the table."

  He kissed her. "You're the boss. Say the word and well chuck the whole thing, get marr
ied, go away and let Doc open the damn place."

  "Would you do that for me?"

  "Don't you believe it?"

  "No. But it's a nice thing to say."

  He told her, "There's another reason it wouldn't work. I can't take the headliner of the floor show away on opening night."

  "The headliner . . . you mean . . .?"

  "Why not? The salaries you entertainers get, we'd better keep the dough in the family."

  "But, Chance, you need a really big name. The other hotels are hiring the biggest."

  '"Who says you aren't? Don't you want to do it?"

  Certainly she wanted to do it. It would give her a part. That's what she wanted, to really belong. She did not want to be merely Chance's wife, she wanted to be on the team.

  "When did you think of it?"

  "From the first."

  *'Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I was keeping it as a bribe, to hold you here."

  She kissed him.

  "Doc's hired Ehoy Pope to handle our shows. You know him?"

  "He's the best."

  "He's coming over Friday. Get with him, dope out what you want to do."

  Someone called him to the phone. She turned to survey the huge room with its big stage. Afterward she walked out to the patio. The pool was already filled, the water blue from the distant sky.

  She stood imagining what the place would look like after it opened, the rooms filled with people, people in the chairs flanking the pool, people on the golf course. . . .

  Some of the fever that affected Chance burned in her. She went in, found Dutch in his ojBBce.

  "Some joint, huh?" The ofiBce was furnished in red leather, with heavy carpeting, a modernistic desk.

  Dutch sat down at the desk. He took a cigar from the humidor and stuck it between his thick lips. "Some dive for

  old Dutch. Kind of hard to remember when I stood behind a counter, running a thimblerig."

  She went around and kissed his whisky-burned cheek. Dutch was as pleased as a child. She went back to the suite Chance had built for himself and Joe. Joe was there, putting things in order. Joe was grumbling to himself. He would much rather have stayed at the ranch.

  Friday afternoon Judy met with Elroy Pope. She listened to Pope's suggestions for the opening show, flattered that he asked her opinion about this supporting player and that. Chance had given him an open checkbook for the first week's show, and the names Pope mentioned took Judy's breath. That she should be headlining such a list was hardly believable. She knew of course that she would not be except for Chance. She caught Pope watching her, and judged that there were doubts in the man's mind. There were doubts in her own, too.

  So she worked with the orchestra, worked harder than she had ever worked in her life, and her nerves, jumpy at best, frayed and drew taut and her reliance on heroin increased.

  For two weeks she saw Chance only when he dropped into the supper room during rehearsals. Chance was bound the opening should go smoothly. Standing in the wide carport, he felt a touch of magic that what only weeks before had been a rutted, barren strip, littered with the odds and ends of construction, should now be a carefully tended garden.

  He walked back across the lobby. To the right, in the big gambhng rooms. Doc was still at work v^th the crew and shills.

  A flying staircase led upward from the lobby level, one wing in the end of the gambling room, the other at the far end of the lobby. It rose to a balcony overlooking both the gambling room and the lobby. Chance's office was off this balcony.

  The office windows opened above the patio and afforded a view of both wings of the hotel. From here he could see almost all the activity in both the gambling room and lobby below, and also the patio.

  Chance went in and sat at his desk, passing a hand tiredly across his eyes. The immensity of detail connected with opening the hotel was appalling. If he hadn't Leon and Doc and the two new assistant managers to depend upon, he reahzed that they would never open.

  The two boys were working out fine. They had had their training in a Miami hotel whose rates started at thirty dollars a day and soared upward. Younger was from the Harvard School of Business Administration, the other had never finished high school. Neither had ever been in a gambling house before coming to Vegas.

  He had full confidence in the whole staflF. If he should leave tonight, the hotel would still open on schedule.

  The squawk box on his desk buzzed and he answered to hear Younger's voice. "I hate to bother you, but there are some men who insist on seeing you."

  ^AVho?"

  "One of them is Mr. Cellini." Younger's voice did not sound natural. He had been in Vegas long enough to find out who Cellini was.

  The muscles at the pit of Chance's stomach knotted. He said, "Have them come up," and closed the switch.

  CeUini led the way into the room. There were five men behind him and Chance thought that if he had not already guessed who they were he would have known from their appearance.

  There was something about a gangster that no amount of tailoring or face-lifting could erase. It was an intangible, the restless way they looked around the room as if expecting danger to slip from behind the pictmres on the wall. It was the way they sat, three on the couch, two in chairs beside the windows. They never quite relaxed.

  They did not look alike. Two were small, one had an unmistakably Itahan face, the others were nondescript.

  Cellini did not sit down. He waited until the others had placed themselves, like a jury sitting on a case, and then he walked forward. "Surprised to see me?"

  "Not particularly."

  The words disconcerted Cellini. Chance was enjoying himself, but nothing in his face showed the enjoyment.

  "You should be." Cellini was much more polished than he had been in Cleveland. He was older, and power had brought smoothness. "You're in trouble, Chance, and the sooner you realize just how much trouble you are in, the easier it will be for us to talk."

  Chance said, "Maybe you should tell me." He wished now that he had an audience, someone who could appreciate this moment. It was strange that his thoughts went back to Danzig, or perhaps it wasn't, for he was certain in his own mind that Cellini was Danzig's murderer. Maybe in a small way he was repaying Danzig for what had happened to him. But v/hy should he feel that he needed to repay Danzig anything?

  Cellini's prominent eyes measured him, and Cellini made no effort to hide his hate. "You've got nerve"—he said it flatly—"or you're too stupid to realize what has happened/'

  Chance shrugged.

  "Meet your partners. You will see a lot of them." Cellini indicated the small man at the end of the couch. "Johnny Rossi. He's out of Cleveland. You remember him?"

  Chance didn't. He saw Rossi smile, exposing three gold teeth.

  "And Micky Aldhouse. He's from Cleveland, too."

  Aldhouse was carefully tailored. He had the face of a horse and a thickened ear, suggesting that he had fought or wrestled. He did not even bother to look up when Cellini mentioned his name. He had drawn a small gold nail file from his pocket and was cleaning his nails.

  "They are your partners." Cellini's voice rose as though to force some reaction from Chance. "So are Paul Grossman and Lolly Maccano and Duke Wells. They're from Detroit." He indicated the three with a sweep of his pudgy hand.

  Chance waited. In aU his experience he had never seen as choice a collection of hoodlums. "So these are Mr. Smith's chents."

  "They're his clients, and so am I. You didn't know I had a nice slice of your hotel, did you?"

  "I suspected it."

  Cellini bit his lip. The interview was not going according to plan. He had expected to shock Chance with surprise, to have Elson rage at being trapped.

  "You suspected it? I don't beheve you."

  There was a faint smile on Chance's hps. "You never have understood me, have you, Ralph? Every time you've tangled with me, you've gotten hurt. You never learn."

  "Don't I?" Cellini was losing control of his t
emper. "Maybe you're the one who doesn't learn, wise guy. We came up here to tell you something you don't know. We've bought out the Blatt Brothers, or rather we are the Blatt Brothers. Our money runs their company. With the bonus stock on their contract, we have fifty-five per cent of this place."

  Chance's smile was wide. "You know, Ralph, it's almost a relief to have things out in the open, to know exactly where I stand. I'm surprised that you haven't showed up sooner. I'm only curious now to know what you want."

  Johnny Rossi laughed. "He's a cold one, Ralph. You said he was and I didn't beheve it."

  Chance glanced at Rossi, then back at Cellini.

  "Let's have it, Ralph."

  Cellini was in no hurry. He had waited a long time for this, to get Elson where he wanted him. He did not like to be robbed of the fullness of his triumph.

  He said, "We let you go ahead and build this place. Now, we are taking over. We already have our crew downtown. The gambling is ours and our men will handle it. It is to be leased to us, the hotel company gets ten per cent of the take."

  "Generous."

  Cellini swelled. He would have hked to lean forward and strike the smile from Elson's face. "Don't be cute. We will take over the restaurant and the bars, also on a ten-per-cent cutback to the hotel corporation. I'll run the restaurant and the bars, Johnny Rossi will handle the gambhng. For the time being, you can manage the hotel, but Grossman will be sitting at your elbow to see that you make no mistakes.

  If you play along nicely, we'll leave you as hotel manager. If you get out of line, you go out on your ass."

  Chance said, "Are you all through? Is that the way it sets up?"

  "That's the way.'* Cellini tried to sound confident, but Chance did not act brokenhearted. Chance did not act as if his world had suddenly come to an end.

  "You asked for it. You've been fighting us for years. I could have had you knocked oflF a dozen times, but that isn't the way we operate any more. We'd rather keep you and use you and rub your Goddamn nose in the dirt."

  This was the moment Chance had waited for ever since his conversation with Horace Smith. He laughed, no humor in the sound. Even Aldhouse had put away his gold nail file and was watching. He had the full attention of everyone in the room.