Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life (14 page)

And she
began to walk away.
 
But Mick pulled her
back.
 
He should let her go, he
knew.
 
For her sake.
 
But he couldn’t.
 
“Not so fast,” he said, holding onto her
hand.
 
“You know I’m okay.
 
I need to know you’re okay.”

Roz wanted
to smile, but she couldn’t get past the fact of the matter.
 
“If you would have answered your phone,” she
said, “you would have known sooner.
 
But
I’m good.
 
Thanks for asking.”

Mick stared
at her.
 
She was a long way from where
she was claiming to be.
 
He knew.
 
He was a long way too.
 
“Come with me,” he said and, still holding
her hand, headed for the entrance.
 
The
same Doorman who had questioned if Roz was harassing him, quickly opened the
door for them.
 
They walked in.
 
As soon as they did, a man who appeared to be
some high ranking hotel official, hurried to their side.
 

“Mr.
Sinatra.”
 
He then looked at Roz and
nodded.
 
“Ma’am.”
 
Then he looked at Mick again.
 
“Is there anything I can help you with, sir?”

“The
gentleman who opened the door for me?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Fire him,”
Mick said.

“Yes, sir,”
the official said so fast it amazed Roz.
 

Although
Mick continued to escort her across the lobby, she looked back.
 
The official was motioning for the Doorman to
come to him.
 
Roz looked at Mick.
 
“Why would you want him fired?” she asked
him.
 
“Just because he thought I was
harassing you?”

Mick looked
at her as if she should not even questioned it.
 
“Yes,” he said.
 
“What part of
that is a problem?”

“I
understand he was rude, but to ask them to fire him?
 
He might have mouths to feed, a family to
support.”

“He should
have thought about those mouths before he mouthed off about you.”
 
Mick stared at her.
 
He knew his lifestyle was going to be hard
for her to digest, but something this minor was disconcerting to her?
 
“Stop the problem as soon as you see it,
Rosalind,” he said, “or you will have a problem on your hands.
 
Come on,” he said, placed his hand on the
small of her back, and escorted her past the public elevators to a private
elevator where another hotel official was waiting.

“Mr.
Sinatra,” the official said as he swiped his keycard and the elevator door
opened.
 
“Have a nice evening, sir,
ma’am.”

“Thank you,”
Roz said with a smile, but Mick said nothing as he and she stepped onto the
elevator, and the door closed shut behind them.

Roz leaned
against the elevator wall and looked at Mick.
 
They treated him as if he was the king of the world and he treated them
as if they were just the help.
 
The
invisible help at that.
 
Since she was
more likely to be in the help category than Mick’s category herself, she was
bothered by it.

Mick could
see that she was bothered.
 
“What did I
do wrong this time?” he asked.

Roz did not
back off.
 
“The people who work at this
hotel show you great respect.
 
You ought
to show them some respect in return.”

“I sign
their paychecks,” he said.
 
“That, I
think, is respect enough.”

Roz stared
at him.
 
“You sign their . . . You own .
. . Are you telling me that you own the Carson?”

Mick studied
her.
 
Would she now show more interest in
him when she realized his wealth was well above ordinary wealth?
 
Would she act, as his other ladies always
did, as if she just hit the jackpot?
 
“Yes,” he said, and kept his eyes on her.
 
“I became majority owner eight years ago.”

Roz nodded
as if it was no big deal, and she even smiled, but she was blown away.
 
The Carson-Benning was one of the oldest and
most luxurious hotels in New York.
 
Right
up there with the Four Seasons, the James, the Waldorf-Astoria.
 
And he owned it?
 
The man she was worried sick about
owned it
?
 
Instead of getting more excited, or seeing
dollar signs for herself, Roz couldn’t help but feel at least a bit more
intimidated.
 
She knew Mick was out of
her league. She already knew that.
 
But
now she knew they weren’t even in the same ballpark, on the same street, in the
same town!
 
She flapped a side swing of
hair behind her ear.
 
She was a little
off-kilter now, but she was determined not to show it.

Roz should
not have felt happy at this moment.
 
This
big beautiful man holding her hand right now and escorting her to his hotel
room was the same big beautiful man who wouldn’t return her phone calls.
 
He was the same beautiful man who owned the
hotel his room was situated in to begin with.
 
But she did feel happy.
 
She felt
a kind of joy the few times she’d been around Mick that no other experience
could match.
 
But she was also no
wide-eyed kid.
 
These were early days
still.
 
She remained cautious.

Mick kept
his hand in hers as they rode up in the private elevator to his suite on the
top floor. And when the elevator opened into that suite, Roz was not surprised
that it would be the best suite in the building.
 
Beauty didn’t capture it.
 
The furniture was big and bold, but the color
palate was soft cream and soft browns.
 
And it all worked together beautifully.
 
Mick had taste.
 
There was no
doubt in her mind about it.

Mick also
still held her hand.
 
And suddenly her
heart felt faint.
 
If he escorted her
straight to his bedroom, she would know that was the only reason he brought her
up here in the first place.
 
Not to
talk.
 
Not to explain why he didn’t come
back to her.
 
But to get another
hit.
 
The fact that she had showed up
eliminated any pretense that she wasn’t interested in him.
 
What man wouldn’t take advantage of
that?
 
But Roz had high hopes for
Mick.
 
Why she had such hopes was a
mystery.
 
But her hope could not be
denied.

And when he
sat her down on the beautiful living room sofa, and poured drinks and sat down
beside her, her joy could not be denied either.
 
She believed she would have turned him down if he would have proposed a
roll in the hay right away.
 
At least she
wished she would have enough self-respect to say no.
 
But he didn’t put her in that position.
 
She sipped champagne and crossed her legs.
Mick sat in the flanking chair, crossed his legs, and sipped champagne
too.
 
He looked so tired and drained, Roz
could not help but comment.

“Long day?”
she asked.

“Yes.”

Then Roz
suddenly had a horrible thought.
 
“I sure
hope it didn’t begin late last night when you left my place.”

That was the
beginning.
 
Mick had not been to sleep
since.
 
He had a vast empire, and it was
mostly legit, but it was built on crimes.
 
When you were buried in it as deeply as Mick was buried in it, it took a
lifetime to dig out.

And then
there were nights like last night, where the house of cards were trying to
cave-in all at once, and he had to spend his every waking moment preventing the
fall.
 
From Pennsylvania to Florida he
was in damage control.
 
Not because the
Feds were closing in, but because they would have knocked the whole thing down
had the agent that rat bastard Tonk Maggio had snitched to had not been crooked
as a curve and in Mick’s pocket too.

After a
night like that he couldn’t go back to sleep even if he wanted to.
 
And he didn’t.
 
He was not the kind of man who did what he
did, and had no second thoughts about it.
 
He had nightmares about it.
 
But
he had no illusions about it.
 
He was
dealing in dirt, not because all the bad guys were picking on him, but because
he was dirty.
 
Because he was a bad guy
too.
 
Tonk Maggio’s number was up last
night.
 
One night his number was going to
come due.
 
His father once said that his
brother Charles was going to die a beloved old man.
 
Mick, his father said, was going to die a
lonely old man.
 
He was too mean to ever
be loved.
 
Mick realized long ago that he
was living up magnificently to that prophesy, and then some.

But telling
Rosalind about his sordid life and the fact that he had to stay up all night to
sort through it would be too much for any rational being to handle.
 
Especially one he actually liked.
 
“I’m alright,” was all he would say about
it.
 
“What about you?
 
Did you teach today?”

Roz
nodded.
 
“Oh, yeah.
 
Teaching pays the bills nowadays.”

“Eventually
you’ll make some decisions, yes?”

“I’ll have
to.
 
My brother’s still bugging me about
partnering up with him, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet.
 
But yes, I’ll have to make some decisions
soon.”

“Is your
brother your only sibling?”

“No, I have
a sister too.
 
We aren’t all that close,
but yeah.
 
What about you?
 
Do you have any siblings?”

There was a
slight hesitation, and Roz could tell Mick was not comfortable speaking so
personally.
 
But he asked her.
 
His family background was fair game too.
 
“I had a sister, we called her Sprig, but she
died.
 
I have a brother,” Mick ultimately
said.
 
“A big brother.
 
Charles Sinatra.”

“Oh,
okay.
 
Is he from around here, or---”

“No.
 
He’s from Maine.
 
He lives in Jericho, Maine.
 
Where we were born.”

“Jericho,
Maine,” Roz said.
 
“Never heard of it.”

Mick didn’t
skip a beat.
 
“Thank your lucky stars,”
he said.

Roz
smiled.
 
“Are you and Charles close?”

Mick didn’t
hesitate this time either.
 
“No.
 
Not at all.”

Roz waited
for more, but no more came.
 
“Your folks
still living?”

Another
flash of something in Mick’s eyes.
 
He
didn’t even speak this time.
 
He just
shook his head.

“Mine are
alive and well,” Roz said.

Mick seemed
pleased to hear this.
 
He looked at
her.
 
“Are you and your parents close?”

“My father
and I are.
 
He’s a musician.
 
He travels around the country playing
different gigs.
 
He always stays with me
when he’s in town.”

“Perhaps he
is the reason you have your show business thirst.”

Roz
nodded.
 
“That’s what he figures
too.
 
I don’t know.”

“What about
your mother?”
 
Mick asked.
 
“Are you and she close?”

Roz shook
her head.
 
“No.
 
We don’t get along at all.”

Mick
understood family hurt and pain, and he wasn’t about to go there with her.
 
He had too many rocks unturned in his own
life to be turning over someone else’s.
 
“Any more auditions on the horizon?” he asked her: safer ground.

“Yes,
actually,” Roz said.
 
“And I’m very
hopeful about them.
 
But we’ll see.”

“Your hope
springs eternal.”