CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
FOUR DAYS LATER
“I don’t like being late.”
“We aren’t late, Duke, for crying out loud.” Teddy couldn’t believe his kid brother. “Why do you keep going on about being late? What are you talking?”
“Let’s just do this.”
Teddy, who appeared irritated himself, looked at Jackie. “What’s with your twin tonight?”
“He’s nervous for Mommy,” Jackie said. “This is supposed to be her big comeback performance and he wants everything to go right.”
“How many times do I have to tell you people that Roz never left? You have to leave to have a comeback. She’s been doing shows all along.”
“But not as the lead,” said Jackie. “This is her biggest show in years. It’s a big deal, Teddy.”
Teddy leaned back and exhaled, tired of his kid brother and sister going on about a comeback, as the driver of their SUV pulled over to the curb.
Their bodyguard, one of the capos in the Sinatra syndicate, got out from the front passenger seat and stood at the back passenger door.
Truth was, Teddy had jitters too. Because he knew better than his younger siblings how much this performance meant to his father’s wife.
Roz and Teddy were extremely close. Roz was close to Nikki too, but she told her deepest, darkest secrets to Ted.
Nikki, who was also in the SUV and texting on her phone, looked up.
“Who were you texting so vigorously?” Jackie asked her.
“My baby girl is in Florida with Gloria. I wanted to see what she was up to.”
“Is she up to no good?” Jackie asked with a grin on her pretty face.
Nikki laughed. “Probably! But no, she and Gloria are having dinner at some fancy restaurant with Alex Drakos. He wanted to talk to Glo about her relationship with his brother Oz and where did she see their marriage going.”
“Where does she see it going?” asked Jackie.
“Nowhere,” said Teddy. “It’s been going nowhere for years.”
Jackie shook her head. “That’s why I’m never getting married. Marriages in the Sinatra and Gabrini families never work out right.”
“What do you mean?” asked Teddy. “Our family has a low divorce rate.”
“Just because y’all decide to stay together doesn’t mean you have great marriages. I see how bad they are. And all of them are bad.”
“I don’t know about all of them,” Teddy said as if he and Nikki weren’t in that category. But Nikki, knowing better, said nothing.
Until their driver pulled up at the theater, and what she’d been looking for wasn’t there. “I don’t see it,” Nikki said.
“You don’t see what?” a confused Duke asked her.
“Your father’s Escalade. I don’t see it.”
When Teddy didn’t see his father’s big Cadillac Escalade in the row of cars at the Broadway theater’s entrance either, he exhaled. “He better not pull this shit tonight,” he said as he pulled out his phone and pressed his father’s number. As usual, there was no answer.
Then he phoned Artie DeGinnava, his father’s driver. “Hey Ted, what’s up?”
“Where is he?”
“Still inside his hotel.”
“Has he forgotten that Roz is going on in less than an hour?”
“He knows.”
“And?”
“He’s still in his hotel.”
“Why didn’t you go up there and get him, Artie?”
“Because I wanna live,” said Artie. “He’ll be down when he gets down. That’s how your old man rolls. What I look like rushing him along? He’ll throw me out that penthouse window I try to pull that shit on him.”
Teddy knew it was true too. As the head of the SCF, which was better known by law enforcement as the Sinatra Crime Family, of which his father founded when he was not that much older than the teenager Duke, he knew the perils of getting on Mick the Tick’s wrong side.
And Nikki, as Teddy’s underboss, knew the perils too.
That was why, when Teddy ended the call, she reminded him. “You don’t ask Artie to do something that dangerous, Teddy.”
“Somebody’s gotta keep Pop in line. Me, Big Daddy, and Roz can’t be the only three people on the face of this earth willing to do it. It’s insane how everybody’s so terrified of that man.”
Nikki didn’t respond. Although she was the second-in-command behind Teddy, and the first black and female ever to be underboss in any of the crime families in the U.S.
, she was terrified of Mick Sinatra too.
And her reasoning was simple: She’d never met another human being like Mick the Tick who seemed to have no limits.
But Duke was terrified for a different reason. “Daddy’s got to show up this time,” he said. “He’ll break Ma’s heart again if he doesn’t show up this time.”
Teddy and Nikki glanced at each other. As the first married couple to be the boss and underboss among the crime families, they both knew exactly what Duke meant about breaking Roz’s heart again.
They had an intervention at that restaurant over that very issue.
And all of this I’ve got another son stuff added on top of it.
This could be the last straw for their marriage if Mick was a no-show the way he was in the past on many of Roz’s opening nights.
Duke was right. He had to show up for this one. “I’ll go get him,” Teddy said. “You guys go and wish Ma well. Tell her Pop and I will be there by the time that curtain rises.”
Duke and Jackie got out.
But Nikki looked at Teddy. She was worried because whenever those two alpha-males got into any argument, sparks didn’t fly – but fists did. “Want me to go?” she asked.
Teddy considered the option. Not that Nikki was close to his father: nobody was close to Mick Sinatra.
But she and Mick did have a special bond.
He was hard on Nikki, too, but not nearly as hard as he was on Teddy when Teddy was the underboss.
But it was his responsibility. “No. You stay with the twins. I’ll get him here. ”
Nikki was inwardly relieved. “Don’t argue with him,” she warned her husband. “You can’t make him do anything.”
“You think I don’t know that?” There was bite in Teddy’s voice. He was tired of playing referee between his father and stepmother. He and Nikki had their own issues. He wasn’t trying to be all up in somebody else’s issues too.
He settled back down. “I’ll be back,” he said, Nikki got out, and the capo closed the door.
Nikki and the twins watched as the SUV whisked Teddy away. Then Jackie looked at Nikki. “Don’t let my brother talk to you any kind of way. You’ll end up crying yourself to sleep at night like Ma does too many times.”
Nikki looked at Jackie.
“You deserve better than that,” Jackie added, and then began hurrying to the entrance to catch up with her brother and their bodyguard.
Nikki knew she and Teddy had some reckoning of their own to do, but was it showing? She started to hurry over to Jackie to ask her, but her phone rang and it was Gloria, Teddy’s other half-sister. Since Gloria was babysitting Nikki and Ted’s daughter Kimmie, she answered quickly.
But all was well. Glo just wanted to say hey to Roz and to wish her good luck. “I’m on my way inside now,” Nikki said as she hurried behind Duke and Jackie. “I’ll give Roz the phone when I get to her dressing room.”