But before either Roz or Billy could answer, the front door opened and, to Roz’s and Billy’s shock, Mick walked in.
Thank God, Charles inwardly said. “Mick!” he said out loud. “Come in!”
Mick, looking so sexy, Roz thought, in his dark-blue suit, slowly walked into the living room.
“Guess who this is?” Charles asked Mick, motioning toward Billy. But since he’d already told him who was taking his wife to dinner, he didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s Billy Lancer, Mick. The legendary producer.”
Billy was still stunned to be face to face with the man he hated most on the face of the earth, but he managed to smile and extend his hand. “How are you?” he asked him. “You’re Roz’s husband, right?”
Mick didn’t answer him, nor shake his hand. He looked at Roz instead. His beautiful wife that he missed so badly he hadn’t slept a wink since she’d been gone. “Where are the children?” he asked her.
Roz felt her heart squeeze just seeing Mick up close again. “Upstairs,” she said.
Mick looked her up and down. She looked just as he knew she’d look: like his angel. “Going somewhere?”
Roz could feel the pain in her heart try to reassert itself when he asked that question. She’d rather be with him that night, not anybody else. She loved him so much! But she wasn’t going to love him to such an extent that it meant she had to sacrifice herself. “To dinner,” she said. She started to add a business dinner, but she didn’t feel she had to explain herself.
But Mick did. “Why?” he asked her.
“Why?” Billy asked with a grin. “I would think that would be obvious. We’re old friends going to dinner together. You got a problem with that?”
Billy didn’t mean to lose his cool like that, but he couldn’t help himself. He truly hated Sinatra.
Charles and Jenay were both surprised by Billy’s harsh tone toward Mick, and Roz was especially surprised.
But it was enough for Mick to finally look at the producer. “She’s going to dinner with me,” he said to Billy. “Her husband,” he added. “You got a problem with that?”
Billy tried to smile, but Mick’s arrogance rubbed him the absolute wrong way! “I don’t think so, no,” he said. “And I don’t mean no, I don’t have a problem with it, because I do. I mean no, she’s not going to dinner with you. She’s going to dinner with me,” he said, and he said it emphatically. “Her longtime friend.” Then he looked at his date. “Ready, Roz?” he asked her.
But if Billy thought Roz was going to take his arm and shun her husband’s, he had another thought coming. Roz was staring at Mick. Then she looked at her friend. “I think I’ll have to take a raincheck, Billy,” she said.
Charles and Jenay inwardly sighed relief. That was what they wanted to hear! And although Billy was royally pissed, and wanted to kick her ass, he continued to smile. “A raincheck, hun?”
“Yes,” said Roz.
“Why? Because he showed up?” Then he had to catch himself again. Fucking Roz wasn’t the point. Making Sinatra suffer was. “Well alright,” he said. “A raincheck it is.” He grabbed the hat that he had taken off when he entered the Sinatra home. “See you in London, Roz,” he said as he began to walk away.
But Mick frowned. “London?” he asked.
Billy knew that would push the big man’s button. That was why he’d said it. “Why yes,” Billy answered Mick in a way that allowed his long ago acting chops to come to the fore. “Didn’t she tell you? I’m giving her the chance of a lifetime. A guaranteed two year run at the Old Vic theater in London, England. She’s moving there, of course. But I’m sure, being the wonderful, caring, sensitive husband you are, that you understand.”
Mick knew an insult when he heard one, and for some reason that fellow got under his skin. And his anger flared out of nowhere. To everybody’s shock, Mick took his fist and knocked the shit out of Billy. He punched him so hard and violently that Billy fell over the side table with a massive fall.
“Mick!” Roz yelled, shocked. Even Charles and Jenay were shocked. “What did you hit him for?” Roz asked as she hurried around the fallen table to assist Billy.
“Get his ass out of here!” Mick said angrily. “And I mean now!”
Charles hurried to Billy’s side, too, but not to aid him. But to save him from further harm. “Time to go, buddy,” he said as he helped Billy to his feet.
“What happened?” Billy asked, dazed and confused. It felt as if a train had hit him.
“A robbery tried to happen,” Charles said, “but my brother wasn’t going for it.”
Roz understood what Charles meant. She didn’t like Billy’s little “good husband” putdown of Mick either. But why was violence always Mick’s first response?
When Billy touched his face and saw blood on his hand, he frowned. And tried to rush Mick to hit him back. “Why you asshole!” he said angrily, with clenched teeth, but Charles and Roz held him back.
“He’s not the one,” Charles warned Billy. “Trust me, Mister Producer. You do not want to tangle with that man!”
“Let him bring his ass over here,” Mick said.
“Stop it, Mick!” Roz yelled at him.
“Yeah, you’d better get your boy,” Billy said.
“That’s it!” Charles said angrily. Was this Hollywood legend a fucking fool? He grabbed Billy by his coat lapel and hurried him toward the front door.
“Roz?” Billy was yelling as he was being forced out. “Call me, Roz!”
And then Charles pushed him out of his house. “Good day, sir!” he said, and slammed the door in Billy’s face.
Billy stood on the outside of Charles’s house stunned. He hadn’t been manhandled in over a decade. His driver/bodyguard got out of the limo and hurried to his side. “Are you alright, sir?” he asked him.
“Me?” Billy asked, walking to the limo with the driver struggling to keep pace. “I’m better than alright. I’m wonderful. Don’t you worry about me.”
When he got in the backseat of the limo and his driver closed the door behind him, his fury couldn’t be tamed. And he was shaking his head. “Don’t worry about me,” he said again in what was mumbling sounds. “He’ll get his. Man, will he. And for turning on me like that? She’ll get hers, too. She just signed her own death certificate.”
But inside, Mick was on Roz’s mind. She was upset, but she understood why Charles did what he did. Billy was a tough guy, too, but Mick would have killed him.
And Roz was angry by Mick’s inability to go high. He always went for the jugular. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked Mick. “You didn’t have to go that far!”
But Mick was still reeling about that so-called great role. “London?” he asked her. “You plan to live in London for two fucking years? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“It’s a guaranteed two year run, Mick. A run-of-play contract, that’s all. And it’s a great role.”
“And while you’re playing this great role, what about our children?”
“What do you mean what about them? They’ll be living in London with me.”
Charles and Jenay both knew that wasn’t going to happen. And Mick knew it most of all. “Like hell!” he said.
“I would have thought you would go with me,” Roz said. “I would have thought you’d be willing to sacrifice for me for a change. I’m always sacrificing for your ass.”
Mick got right in Roz’s face. “Charles,” Jenay said nervously. “Get him, Charles!” And Charles hurried to Roz’s side.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Mick said to his wife. “I’m the one in charge of our family. You, nor the children, are going anywhere.”
Roz frowned. “You can’t make that decision for me!”
“I just made it!”
“Boy, please,” Roz said angrily, pushing Mick away from her. “Get out of my face with that bullshit!”
But Mick grabbed her by the arm, prompting Charles to react. “Mick, be careful,” he said. “Thi
s is your wife you’re handling now. Not one of your thug friends!”
But Mick kept his grip on Roz’s arm. “What’s your relationship with that asshole?” he asked her.
Roz frowned. “What?”
“Are you sleeping with him?”
Roz couldn’t believe it. “Go to hell!” she said angrily. The nerve he had!
And Charles knew it was now or never. He had to break it up before they both went to places they couldn’t come back from.
“Okay, Mick, that’s enough,” he said, taking Mick and forcing him toward the exit too. “Time for you to hit the road.”
Mick and Roz were staring at each other, both in pain, as Mick was being forced out. Jenay hurried and hugged Roz, as tears began to fall from Roz’s troubled eyes.
But just as Mick and Charles made it near the staircase in the foyer, struggling with each other, Mick felt as if his heart was going to explode. He felt as if his beloved wife and children were being snatched away from him and there was nothing he could do. But he wasn’t the kind of man to just let it happen. He wasn’t that kind of man!
That was why he panicked, easily broke away from his brother, and bolted upstairs. “Duke!” he yelled with pain in his voice as he climbed those stairs two at a time. “Jackie!”
Charles, Roz, and Jenay ran up those stairs behind him. But Mick would not be denied. “Duke! Jackie!” he yelled, as he hurried from room to room, searching frantically for them.
The two children ran out of a room onto the landing, just as their mother and uncle and aunt ran upstairs too.
The two children, bewildered, looked at their father. “Let’s go,” Mick said. “You’re coming home. With me.”
But they looked at their mother too. “They aren’t going anywhere,” Roz said. “Stop this at once, Mick!”
“They’re my children, and their coming with me. Let’s go!” he yelled.
“Mick, don’t be ridiculous,” Jenay said. “You’re never home. How are you going to take care of these children?”
“I’m going to take care of them because they’re mine!” Mick hit his chest with his own fist as he said those words so forcefully that tears appeared in his eyes. “I take care of mine!”
Everybody was stunned. They’d never seen Mick so emotional. And Roz knew, right then and right there, that she was wrong. She wasn’t wrong by leaving him, and she wasn’t going back to him. He had hurt her too deeply, and she still had to decide what she would and would not take in her life for herself. But he hadn’t did a thing to their children. She was wrong to keep his children away from him.
“Go get your things,” she said to the twins. “You’re going with your father.”
Both of them seemed relieved by their mother’s decision. Not because they wanted to leave their mother. They didn’t. But they knew she would be just fine. Their father, both of them felt, needed them more.
They hurried into their bedrooms, grabbed the little they had, and hurried back out onto the landing. The sadness on that landing was devastating. But they were brilliantly smart twins. They knew their mother made the right call.
They went to Roz, who was fighting hard not to break down in front of them, and hugged her. “Come home soon, Mommy,” Duke said as he hugged her.
Roz wasn’t going to lie to him, so she just squeezed him tightly. And then Duke ran to his father, and hugged him.
Mick felt like shit taking those children away from their mother, but he wasn’t going to let her take them away from him either. Because he loved his children dearly, and they weren’t going to be living in anybody else’s home but their own.
But he also knew he loved their mother even more, and he wanted her home too. But there was too much hurt and anger within him to want her home right then. She had some thinking to do. But so did he. Billy Lancer was behaving like a jilted lover, not some long lost friend. And Roz was moving to London? For two long years? Was she insane?!!
He was so in love with his wife and so angry at his wife and so disappointed in his wife that he couldn’t hardly contain his emotions. That was why he knew he had to get out of there. He took his children, both clutching to him on either side of him, and walked them down the stairs.
“I’ll see them out,” Jenay said, and hurried down too.
Charles, heartbroken too, looked at Roz, and then opened his arms. And Roz went to him, and sobbed uncontrollably.
Mick and Roz didn’t see each other again until a week later, when they both attended the wedding and reception of Amelia and Hammer Reese. And by that day’s end, not only were Roz and Deuce nearly killed in that ambush, but Mick himself, the man viewed for decades as too big to fail, had failed. And was under arrest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Mick was lying beside her, smiling that wonderful smile he rarely shared with the world, and then he grabbed her on top of him and hugged her until she could barely breathe. And then they both laughed.
But then Roz suddenly opened her eyes, and realized, almost immediately, that it was all a dream.
She had dozed off while sitting on the living room sofa at their home in Philly, her legs propped up on the coffee table, waiting for word. Charles was seated beside her, his feet propped up too, while his wife Jenay was seated beside him, her head on his shoulder, fast asleep. Joey was seated in a chair, his head leaned back, his long eyelashes making it look as if he was asleep too. But he wasn’t. He was wide awake. Gloria was too, as she sat in the chair opposite his.
It was the day after the arrest that shook the world. And although Roz had been dozing off-and-on from sheer exhaustion, Charles had not slept a wink.
“You okay?” he asked Roz after she had awakened suddenly.
Roz exhaled and nodded. Then she realized why they were all sitting around in the living room, and she looked anxiously at Charles. “Any word?” she asked him.
Charles shook his head. “Nothing other than they’ll let us know.”
Roz frowned. “What’s taking them so long? All those lawyers, supposedly the best in the world, and they can’t do any better than this? We should have just hired Gemma!” Then she got up and began doing what she mostly had been doing since the ordeal began: pacing the floor.
Charles knew Roz was like Mick in a lot of ways, including their tendency to lash out when they were under pressure. And she had a point. Gemma Jones-Gabrini, Sal Gabrini’s wife, was a very good attorney, and it was always a good thing if a family member could represent you. But Mick had been arrested when too many years of never getting caught had led them all to believe it was never going to happen, and he had to have lawyers that were massively better than very good. They had to be impossibly great. Gemma was on the team, but she wasn’t leading it. And even she hadn’t phoned.
“What about Hammer and Amelia?” Roz asked. “Heard from them?”
“Yeah, they heard the news and called. Millie wanted to leave her honeymoon and take the first plane. I told her she’d better not. She can’t do anything. Shit, I can’t do anything! Why ruin her honeymoon?”
“Can Hammer do something?” Roz asked.
“He made some phone calls, but when I asked if he could pull some strings to get Mick un-arrested, he said that’s impossible. Now that they brought him in, his hands are tied. That’s why I told him to stay out of it going forward. If he can’t get Mick off, what’s the point? This family is not corrupting him too, just because we can.”
In the outside world, everybody thought Mick was the head of the Sinatra and Gabrini clans. But inside the family, everybody knew it was Big Daddy.
Then Roz had a thought. “You said he heard about it on the news?” she asked.
“That’s right,” Charles said.
Roz knew how those news reporters had all kinds of connections with law enforcement, and since Mick’s arrest had been breaking news all last night and into the next day, they might have reported more than even Mick’s family or lawyers knew. “Turn on the TV, Big Daddy,” she said to Charles.
>
Charles grabbed the remote from off of the side table and turned on the television. The channel had been left on MSNBC, but they were talking politics, so he switched to CNN. They were talking politics, too, but was finishing up the story. Then Mick’s photograph came on the screen.
“Last night the ground shifted,” the anchorwoman said, “and the reputed mobster many consider to be ‘the boss of all bosses,’ has been indicted. Mick “The Tick” Sinatra, the founding chairman and CEO of Sinatra Industries, was arrested on numerous counts of murder, money laundering, and racketeering charges. Considered too big to bring down, very few people saw this coming. But just like Al Capone many years before him,” the anchorwoman added, “his day has come too.”
The channel showed footage of Mick in handcuffs taking the perp walk down the steps of a government plane in what appeared to be a late night arrival, with what looked like an overkill of SUVs with sirens blaring, and regular patrol cars with sirens blaring, all waiting to escort him into custody.
“They’re treating him like he’s Jack the Ripper or somebody,” Roz said worriedly, and Jenay suddenly woke up.
“Or worse, if you ask me,” said Charles, as Jenay stopped leaning on his shoulder and set up right.
“What’s worse?” she asked.
Charles nodded toward the TV. “How they’re treating Mick,” he said, and they continued to listen to the newscast.
But the news had nothing new to report, either, just more retelling of how Mick, like most of the biggest mob bosses, evaded authorities for decades. They attributed it to the fear he instilled in those who could have snitched on him, but sarcastically joked how he had met his match because somebody snitched. And as they showed his head being lowered into one of the SUVs, and the door shutting him in, they added: “And he’s in police custody now.”
Charles muted the sound and tossed the remote on the coffee table. Then he ran his hands through his thick hair. “Damn!” he said. Even he was worried sick.
Joey shook his head. “I still can’t believe they did this to Pop,” he said. “How they gonna arrest Pop like that? And make him do the perp walk like he was some street thug they were locking up! Wait till I get my hands on those motherfuckers.”
Mick Sinatra: Needing Her Again Page 14
