Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (26 page)

“Michello,
what is going on here?
 
This is an
outrageous power grab and the families won’t stand for it!”

“A power
grab?” Mick asked as he and the Dons headed toward the desk.
 
Leo remained at the door.
 
“And what do you call your dock ambush?
 
A get together?”

Provensano
wanted to deny any involvement, Mick could see that terror in his eyes.
 
But he didn’t.
 
He knew not to play Mick that way. “So you
knew about that?” he asked.

Mick
appreciated that Provensano respected him at least that much.
 
“I knew about it.”

“Your
snitches were double agents?
 
Is that
what happened?”

“No,” Mick
said.
 
“But yours were.”

The three
Dons looked at Mick.
 
They had no clue
Mick had infiltrated Provensano’s network.
 
They had no clue Mick had planned any of this!
 
The idea that some of them had doubted him
seemed absurd now.
 
Mick, they realized,
knew what he was doing.

“So what are
you going to do?” Provensano asked.
 
“Kill me because I play the game too well?
 
Kill me and start a war?
 
Is that what you are going to do, Michello?”

Mick stared
at him.
 
“No,” he said.
 
Then he looked at Teddy Stefani.
 
“But Teddy will.”

Provensano
smiled. “Teddy Stefani, are you kidding me?”

“Teddy will
be the leader of Poltergeist when I drop out,” Mick said.
 
It was high time, Mick though, that Teddy
started acting like one.

And Teddy
did.
 
With pleasure.
 
He riddled Provensano with bullets.
 
He didn’t stop until Provensano was not only
dead, but had fallen to the floor.

But if Mick
thought he was turning over the reins to Teddy without dissent, he was vastly
mistaken.
 
Because Vito DeLuca and Carp
Bianchi looked at each other.
 
They were
not ready to let go.
 
Mick’s ability to
plan ahead, to think and then rethink contingencies, to execute flawlessly with
every changed strategy, had not gone unnoticed.
 
Mick was not getting away from them.
 
He wanted out, but they were shutting the door.
 
Mick Sinatra was their golden goose.
 
Mick Sinatra was a victim of his own success.

By the time
Mick arrived at his big, quiet home, he could barely stand.
 
He dropped his keys on his foyer stand, went
to his bar inside his library, and poured himself a stiff one.
 
He went upstairs, drank down his remaining
liquor, and got in the shower.
 
By the
time he got out, and dried himself, he fell naked on top of his bed.
 
By the time he pulled out his cell phone to
call Rosalind, he couldn’t stop wondering about his choices.
 
He wasn’t a kid anymore.
 
How many more long days like this, where he
not only had to orchestrate an ambush at Provensano’s house, but had to stop an
ambush at the docks, were he going to be able to endure?
 
Business shouldn’t be so dangerous and
treacherous.
 
Then he smiled.
 
Maybe he just missed Rosalind, maybe it was
all about the pleasure of life rather than the business of it, and he was
conflating the two.

He called
Rosalind, but she didn’t answer her phone.
 
He then phoned the men he had secretly guarding her, only to be told
that they left after she went home for the evening.
 
Mick tried her phone again, home and
cell.
 
But still no response.

Now he was
getting worried.
 
This was not like
Roz.
 
She always answered her phone
unless she was teaching her class.
 
And
she wasn’t teaching any class this time of night.
 
He checked his cell phone messages.
 
He had none.
 
No text, no voice mail.

It wasn’t
until Mick checked his home phone, did he realize he had a message.
 
His cell phone was off during his Provensano
run, and she might have tried to leave a message then.
 
When he checked his home phone message, and
realized it was indeed from Roz, he felt better.
 
But only until he heard the message.

“Mick, it’s
me,” she said.
 
But he could immediately
hear the distress in her voice.
 
And when
she said, “I’ve been arrested,” his already intense eyes opened wider.
 
Mick was a very muscular man, and every one
of those muscles tightened when she said those words.

But his
heart nearly dropped when she added: “They say I killed Barry Acker.
 
They said I
 
. . . They said I was responsible for his death.
 
I’m in trouble, Mick.
 
I’m in trouble.”

Mick’s heart
nearly stopped.
 
He’d been in more
harrowing situations than most men could dream about.
 
But this news, about Barry, about
Rosalind
, cut him to the core.
 
There had to be some mistake!
 
But Rosalind needed him.
 
That was all he could think about.
 
Rosalind.
 
He got up quickly, dressed, and ordered his pilot to get his plane
ready.

Roz felt as
if she had lived her entire life in a night.
 
As she sat in the filthy cell and listened to others in other cells
complain about the jail conditions, rather than
their
own condition, she felt as if she was living in the Twilight
Zone.
 
It had been nearly twenty-four
hours since her arrest.
 
Twenty-four long
hours since that actor pronounced Barry Acker dead and looked up at Roz.
 
Twenty-four hours since she left a message on
Mick’s voice mail, and hadn’t heard a word back from him.

She lifted
her legs onto the filthy cot and leaned her head back.
 
In the jumpsuit they made her wear, in that
stank cell they made her sit in, she felt like the common criminal they made
her out to be.
 
But she knew it was an
accident.
 
She knew she never pushed
Barry down any stairs, as they were alleging, or did anything to assist his
fall.
 
He fell on his own.
 
He tried to harm her, but harmed himself
instead.
 
How was that her fault?

But Mick didn’t
know her side of the story.
 
All he knew
was what the cops were probably telling him or Barry’s wife Agnes, who arrived
at the theater as they were taking Roz away.
 
Agnes tried to snatch Roz’s hair out, and would have if those cops
hadn’t provided the buffer.
 
Murderer
, Agnes had called her.
 
You
killed Barry
!
  

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
jeopardy.
 
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.”