Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life

by Mallory Monroe

  Tears tried to return to Roz’s big, bright eyes as she thought about Barry. They’d always had a very warm and cordial relationship, she thought. He was the one who helped her out when she needed to find Mick. He hired her for a few of his off-Broadway shows once upon a time. How did they go from that kind of relationship to him hitting on her in such a vile manner that it said more about his attraction to Mick than any attraction he held for her? Why did he call her to the theater for that? Why did he put her in that perilous situation? And where, she thought for the hundredth time, was Mick???

  She knew, of course, that Mick could be with Agnes at this very moment, comforting her, and wasn’t interested in hearing her side of the story. Barry had been his friend for years. They were closer than brothers, let Barry tell it. Now he was dead and the cops were saying it was because of her. Maybe Mick believed them, and didn’t want to believe anything else.

  But Roz couldn’t believe that. She and Mick had been together for nearly six months now and had the kind of relationship she used to dream of having. He treated her better than any other guy ever had. He laughed at her jokes, and told stale jokes himself, and they were so comfortable around each other. He never said that he loved her, or was even falling in love with her, and that did concern her. Especially since she was already falling and just might even be already there.

  She loved Mick Sinatra. She couldn’t deny it. She loved Mick. But he hadn’t sent high-powered attorneys to bail her out. He hadn’t come himself. Besides everything else, he was the man who owned the Carson-Benning Hotel, one of the finest hotels in the city. Surely he would have enough clout to at least get a word to her. She would rather believe that he never got her message, than believe that he got it, but didn’t care.

  “Rosalind Graham!”

  The jailer was unlocking her cell as he said her name, and Roz was already on her feet.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  But when she walked out of the cell, hoping that she was about to go home, another jailer shackled her in hand irons and foot irons. Her next hope was that they were taking her to her bail hearing and Mick was waiting there to bail her out. But that wasn’t it either.

  They took her down a long, dark hall, around a series of additional corridors, and then into an office. When they opened the office door, the light inside was so bright that she had to squint. Everything in that jailhouse so far had been dark and dreary. Her eyes had grown unaccustomed to light.

  There were a group of people in that office. Two men and a woman. When she was able to focus again, she realized that one of those men was Mick. He was standing furthest away from her, at the window. And as soon as she saw him, she knew she was going to be alright.

  When Mick saw Roz, and saw that she was shackled like some vicious animal, his jaw clenched and tightened and that cold look appeared in his eyes. Roz felt so beaten down that she, at first, thought he was looking chillingly at her. As if he blamed her too. But then he immediately looked, not at the man standing behind the desk, whose office they were apparently in, but at the woman.

  But she was stubborn. “Not until I find out what happened,” she said.

  But Mick’s jaw tightened again. He was stubborn too. “Now,” he ordered.

  Roz could tell the woman didn’t appreciate that order one bit, and wanted to tell Mick so, but she didn’t tell him anything. She looked at the jailers. “Unshackle her,” she said. “Now.”

  The jailers quickly did what they were told, and then were dismissed by the man behind the desk. Roz wanted to run to Mick, she needed to feel his big, warm arms around her, but he remained where he was. He was in business mode. She’d seen him that way before. Nothing got in his way when he was handling his business.

  “You’re Rosalind Anita Graham?” the woman asked her. She was a short lady, petite and red-haired. But it was obvious she was a woman with considerable influence.

  “Yes,” Roz responded.

  “I’m Margaret Hammer, the Manhattan DA.”

  The District Attorney, Roz thought. She was the ultimate decider. She was the one who could seal her fate. Mick had gone for broke. He had called in the big gun. Roz could only hope that he had as much sway with this DA as he had with everybody else she saw him in contact with.

  “According to Chief Salinger,” Hammer said, acknowledging the man behind the desk, “you were involved in an altercation with Mr. Barry Acker that led to his death.”

  Roz swallowed hard and glanced at Mick. Mick continued to just stand there, like a man on the verge of exploding. Like a man still making assessments. Roz looked back at the woman. “It wasn’t an altercation,” she said. “Barry, Mr. Acker, called me to the theater to discuss a possible acting role in his play. When I showed up, he told me to follow him to one of the private rooms upstairs to discuss that role. When we got up there, he said the part was mine, but only if I had sex with him.”

  Again Roz glanced at Mick. Only this time she saw a break in his armor: she saw his strong jaw clench. He was either believing her, not believing her, or angry as hell with Barry. She made the decision then to be as graphic as Barry was. “He said he wanted to do to me everything he assumed my . . .” Her what? Boyfriend? Could she call Mick her boyfriend at this point? He never referred to her as his girlfriend. And if he was all business now, did he even want them to know about the nature of their relationship? “He said he wanted to do to me everything this guy I’ve been seeing does to me.”

  “Sexually, you mean?” Hammer asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Sexually. And he was very graphic and very vile. So I told him what he could do with his wants, and I left the room.”

  “You angrily left the room?”

  “Yes, I was angry,” Roz admitted. “You should have heard the language he used. I wasn’t going to stand up there and let him talk to me like that.”

  “Go on,” Hammer said.

  “He followed behind me, yelling at me, telling me he would kill me if I told my . . . if I told the guy. I was going down the stairs when he grabbed my arm. I was trying to snatch away from him. I was terrified of him by that time. He was no longer the Barry I knew. But he wouldn’t let go. So I jerked away from him and jerked away from him. When I finally jerked away and turned to leave, he apparently thought he still had me in his grasp and reached for me. That’s when he lost his balance and fell down those stairs. I never once touched him when he lost his balance. I didn’t push him. I didn’t trip him.”

  “You didn’t try to help him either,” Chief Salinger said.

  Mick looked, not at the chief for saying such a tough comment, but at Roz. He looked hard at her. He needed to see what she was made of in the face of this kind of pressure.

  “No,” she said as she looked at the chief. “I have no interest in helping somebody who was trying to harm me. I didn’t push him, I didn’t do anything to help him along, but he was the one who was coming at me. He was the one who brought me there under false pretenses and was threatening to kill me. His ass deserved to fall.”

  Mick felt a kind of satisfaction that he could not suppress. That’s the way you do it, he thought inwardly, as if he was giving her a high-five. But then his brief look of satisfaction was gone. She was not out of jeopardy yet. He had spent hours upon hours setting up this meeting. He had to promise all kinds of political and financial support when the DA was up for reelection. He had to twist arms and make threats and call in favors he never intended to call in. He had to fight and claw like a dog in the streets to get to this point.

  And it wasn’t over yet. It could still go either way. The DA could still go along with the cops and sign off on their arrest warrant, which would almost certainly necessitate that Rosalind would go to trial. Or she could defy the cops and drop all charges. Politically, that would be the tougher route. But Mick had already made clear to her that it was the route she had better choose. But he never predicted what somebody else would ultimately do. There were still risks for his lady. She was still in jeo
pardy. There would be no high-fives or lasting satisfactory looks until those risks, that jeopardy, were over.

  “Prior to last night,” Hammer asked, “you would describe your relationship with Barry Acker as what? Cordial? Discordant?”

  “Oh no,” Roz said quickly. “Barry and I were very cordial! He selected me to act in his plays. He treated me with nothing but respect.”

  “But this makes no sense, Miss Graham. If he treated you so respectfully, what changed?”

  “My relationship with Barry,” Mick said.

  Everybody looked at him. Especially Roz. She thought he wanted to keep his role in this sordid affair private. But he was speaking up.

  “Your relationship with Acker?” the Chief asked. “What kind of relationship are we talking about?”

  Mick looked at the chief. “Barry Acker was a very good man. He was kind and he was loyal. But he was also bisexual.”

  Roz was shocked. She had never heard that before about Barry.

  Mick continued, undaunted by her shock. “He enjoyed the men as much as he enjoyed the ladies. He enjoyed his wife as much as he wanted to enjoy me.”

  “He was sexually interested in you,” Hammer said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes,” Mick said. Barry was no more bisexual than Mick was, but Mick would have claimed to have slept with Barry Acker if it would set Rosalind free. That was the way he played ball. He didn’t play it soft and easy so that people could have a great opinion of him when all was said and done. He played hard. To win. To win Rosalind’s freedom. “That’s what I mean,” he added.

  And in the end it ended up being enough. The DA announced to Chief Salinger that this was nothing more than a case of an accidental fall by a disturbed man. No crime had been committed. She could not go along with the arrest warrant and Rosalind Graham, she announced, was free to go.

  The ride back to Roz’s apartment was a slow one. The traffic was thick, nerves were frayed, and Mick and Roz sat side by side as if they had just endured a dangerous battle that could have taken them out. Mick had his arm around her waist, and they sat close, but Roz felt as if they were miles apart. Because Mick seemed more troubled than she was.

  When the gulf became unbearable, Roz looked at him. “I didn’t push him,” she said to him.

  “I know that,” Mick responded. “That was never at issue.”

  “Then what’s at issue? I know you loved Barry.”

  “I respected Barry. Love had nothing to do with it. I don’t blame you for what he did to himself. Given what he did, even if you did push his ass, I still wouldn’t blame you.”

  “I didn’t push him,” Roz wanted to make that abundantly clear. “But something’s still bothering you. What is it? What is the issue?”

  Mick exhaled. “You’re the issue,” he said.

  Roz’s heart dropped. “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “But you said you believed me.”

  “I do. Of course I do!”

  “Then why would I be the issue?”

  “When we get to your apartment, you’re going to have to do something you do not want to do. You will pack your bags and move to Philadelphia with me. You don’t have to live with me if you prefer not. I’ll get you your own place, your own car, your own anything you want. But you’re leaving here.”

  Mick looked at her. She could see the determination in his eyes. “I will not allow you to live this far from me ever again.”

  Roz actually loved the sound of that. “You make it sound as if we’re worlds apart,” she said. “You’re less than an hour away by plane.”

  “That hour felt like fifty years last night,” Mick confessed. And he confessed it so heartfelt that Roz felt it to the roots of her hair. She knew exactly what he meant.

  She stared into his hard eyes. Publicly, there wasn’t a soft side to this man. But she didn’t know him publicly. She knew him far deeper than that. “Thank you for handling things for me, Mick. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have you out here working to get me out of there. Without you I could have rotted in that place. And I realized, as I sat in that filthy cell, that life could turn in a flash so dramatically. I realized what you meant about kill or be killed.”

  Mick studied her as she spoke.

  Roz continued. “I realized how people can put you in a spot you never wanted to be in, but you either fight out of that hole or get buried in it. I’m glad you did what you did. I’m glad you convinced Margaret Hammer to hear my side of the story.”

  “I’ve known her a long time,” Mick admitted. “She’s a politician through and through. She’s not the shrewdest DA I’ve ever known, but she has a sense of fairness about her.”

  “But what if she wouldn’t have gone along with what you wanted?” Roz asked. “What if she would have gone along with the police and filed those charges against me?”

  Mick hated to be blunt, but he knew no other way. “Then I would have given her an offer she wouldn’t be able to refuse, Rosalind,” he said.

  Roz stared at him.

  “I play dirty,” he went on. “When it comes to me and mine, I do not play by the rules.”

  Roz would continue to play by those rules. That was who she was. That was how she was raised. But she was glad she had somebody like Mick, who wasn’t above skirting them, in her corner. “Good,” she said.

  Mick looked at her with a smile. “Good? Why you’re a regular little gangster lady, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all,” Roz said, managing to smile too. “But it doesn’t hurt to have a Ray-Ray and a Big Joe in your corner, hear what I’m saying?”

  Mick laughed. “I hear you,” he said. And he did. He heard loud and clear that this lady here was exactly the kind of lady he needed.

  Then Roz thought again. She looked at him. “She was in your pocket all along. Wasn’t she?”

  Mick wondered if that would change Rosalind’s perspective. “In a manner of speaking, yes,” he said.

  Roz shook her head. “And there she was acting as if it was such a hard decision for her, when it was all a big act.”

  “Margaret Hammer is a public figure. All of those clowns are actors.”

  “It was Hammer-time,” Roz said with a grin, and Mick smiled. “All she needed were some pirate-looking Hammer pants, and all she needed to do was start sliding side to side, shaking her hips, and we would have had a show for real. A showstopper no less!”

  Mick laughed, and pulled her closer. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “I know. But lovable, right?”

  “Oh yeah,” Mick said. “Totally that.” Then he stared at her. “Are you really okay?”

  “I will be. I just hate what happened to Barry. I wish none of it would have happened.”

  Mick kissed the top of her head. “I know, babe.”

  “He seemed as if he was obsessed with you. You should have heard him. Maybe that bisexual thing isn’t far off.”

  “Who knows what was in his mind? I just thank God you’re safe and sound and back with me. Which brings me to my issue again. You still haven’t addressed my issue.”

  Roz leaned her head against his shoulder. “Yes, I have,” she said. “You just weren’t listening.”

  Mick looked at her. “Meaning?”

  Roz exhaled. Change always brought about an upset for her. “Looks like I will be moving to the city of brotherly love.”

  But Mick didn’t jump for joy yet. “Not by choice?” he asked her.

  Roz looked at him. “Yes,” she said with a smile. “I need you, Mick. Being with you is where I want to be.”

  Mick pulled her into his arms. And he frowned. Because he knew he had to verbalize what he had been feeling for some time now. “I need you too, Rosalind,” he admitted with what sounded like pain in his voice. But it wasn’t pain. It was emotion. It was the first time Mick Sinatra had admitted something that vulnerable, that exposing, in his entire life.

  Roz understood the significance. That was
why she was wise enough to remain silent, to let his heartfelt words, to let his monumental words, speak for themselves.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A week later and the house hunt was on. Mick had to work, but he gave Roz the Bentley and told her she should take her two friends along for company. But Roz never took friends along when she was handling her business. She flew solo.

  At least that was how she thought she was flying. But just as Mick had a detail of inconspicuous men on her while she was in New York these last months, he had an every greater detail on her now that she was in Philly. Even Leo, his chief of security, was surprised by the amount of coverage Mick wanted.

  They were in Mick’s library the night he and Roz returned from New York. Mick was beyond exhausted, and Roz had gone to bed. He called Leo over, even though it was in the middle of the night, because this matter, he felt, couldn’t wait. Leo understood the urgency. What he couldn’t understand was the number of men Mick wanted deployed.

  “But boss,” he said, still trying to wrap his brain around such a number, “that’s more security than we have on you.”

  Mick was shirtless and leaned against his desk, with his muscular arms folded and one hand rubbing his chin. He even had on flip flops. But his eyes belied the casualness. “Are you suggesting we don’t have the manpower?” he asked his chief.

  “Oh, no,” Leo said. “We have the manpower. We always have that. But . . .”

  “But what, Leo? Speak your mind.”

  “You won’t mind?”

  Mick always wondered why even his closest men viewed him as some kind of dictator who would dispose of them for speaking the truth. He didn’t think he was that man. Yet everybody around him, except Rosalind, behaved as if he was. “No,” he said. “I won’t mind. I want you to tell me.”

  “You’ve been with a lot of women in your life, sir,” Leo said. “A lot of fine ladies. The mothers of your children are all fine ladies.”

  “But?” Mick asked.