It rang again. Again it was Mick.
It rang again. Again it was Mick.
By the fourth time, Big Daddy had had it. “Roz, answer thatgotdamn thing!” he ordered her.
Roz didn’t want to, but she knew Mick would just keep bugging her. She answered. “What?”
“Hello to you too.”
“What do you want?”
“Given your tone of voice, I’m assuming Charles told you I’m in Rome on business.”
“What business? You said you unrigged the game.”
“Something else came up.”
“And what’s that?”
“A situation I have to take care of.”
“You can’t even tell me what it is?”
“It’s none of your business. That’s what it is. Now you know I don’t discuss that with you.”
Roz was getting so over this man’s bullshit it wasn’t even funny. “For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“A day? A week?”
“Maybe. Maybe two weeks,” said Mick.
Two weeks? Big Daddy was shocked. But the sad thing, he thought, was that Roz wasn’t.
“I’ll call you later,” Mick said.
“Don’t bother,” said Roz, and ended the call.
Big Daddy looked at Roz. He wanted to talk about it. But Roz put up her hand. “I can’t,” she said with disgust in her voice. “I just can’t.” And Big Daddy respected that.
They drove the rest of the way to Philly in deafening silence.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TWO WEEKS LATER
Roz’s birthday party and all the heads of the family were there with their wives and children. It was early afternoon on a nice, breezy Saturday. The family leadership sat at the big patio table while the younger set played games in the pool or soccer on the soccer field or tennis and basketball on the courts. Everybody was there.
Everybody except Mick.
Many people wanted to ask where he was, but after what they heard happened with Bella Caine and Rome, they decided against it. They didn’t know why they were in Rome together, just that they had been there together, and the rumor mill was in overdrive.
But they also knew Mick was due back in the country earlier that day after two weeks away, but there was no sign of him at the party. They assumed he and Roz were on the outs again. They assumed she kicked him out again. It was all assumptions and conjecture and rumor, but no hard facts. Only the birthday girl could give them that and she was too busy sitting easy at the head of the table, sipping her cabernet sauvignon wine, and very much on the verge of inebriation. So much so that she had the ladies laughing.
“This is a nice party,” she said in her Tipsy Roz voice. “Not very nice. Not perfect. But nice, you know?”
Even the men at the table, from Teddy to Mick’s big brother Charles “Big Daddy” Sinatra, to casino mogul RenoGabrini, to mob boss Sal Gabrini, to business titan Tommy Gabrini, found her humorous. Especially since she didn’t realize she was funny at all.
