Page 19 of Teddy Sinatra: Go Your Own Way
She got out of bed right behind him. She wanted answers too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As soon as the door opened and Kimmie saw Jackie walking up the foyer, she ran to her. But Jackie began laughing and running away from her niece. Kimmie started laughing that innocent childhood laugh and began running behind her young aunt. First around the massive foyer, around the waterfall statue in the middle of the foyer, and then down the hall to the game room. It was how Jackie always welcomed her favorite relative, and her favorite relative just loved it.
But Duke, who had opened the door, shook his head. “Women,” he said. But when Teddy nor Nikki laughed the way they usually would have, he knew something more was at work than his half-brother and sister-in-law coming over to meet with Dad. “What’s with you two?”
“Is Pop at home?” Teddy asked as Duke closed the door. Teddy just wanted to get this over with.
“Yeah he’s home. We got back a few hours ago. What’s up?”
“Tough meeting ahead,” Nikki said.
“I figured that much when Pop cut our vacation short. Did you know he had this massive mansion on the French Riviera?” he asked Teddy.
But he didn’t wait for a response. “And then Big Daddy showed up. And then Uncle Frankie. I knew then something big was up.”
Although Frankie “The Monk” Paletti was kin to the Sinatras only by marriage, and was Teddy’s best friend, there was such an age gap between Teddy and his half-siblings that Duke and Jackie viewed Teddy more as a second dad than as a brother, and they viewed Monk more as their uncle than their cousin-in-law.
But Nikki was still trying to decipher what Duke had just said. “Monk Paletti’s here?” she asked him.
“He sure is. He showed up just after Big Daddy got here.”
Nikki looked at Teddy. “I knew Big Daddy would be here as a mediator. Roz already told me she was going to call him in. But why would Monk be here?”
“I asked him to come,” said Teddy. “We need somebody on our side. Big Daddy always takes Pop’s side in the end.”
“That’s not true and you know it. He takes the right side as he sees it. He gets on your father’s case all the time.”
“But I still felt we needed somebody who would understand our side of this situation. Somebody Pop and Big Daddy respects. That’s why I wanted him here too.”
Nikki felt as if this was getting out of hand. Because once again he was making decisions without bothering to so much as mention them to her until he had to. That had to change.
“Where are they?” Teddy asked Duke.
“In Daddy’s office,” Duke said.
But the way Duke saidDaddyonly demonstrated to Nikki the kind of intimate relationship he and Jackie had with Mick that Mick never accorded his older children like Teddy. She knew it was because all of Mick’s adult children had different mothers that never lived with Mick. Roz not only lived with him but managed against all odds to get him to put a ring on her finger. And on top of that, Roz was a tough broad who wasn’t going to let Mick neglect her two children the way he neglected his older children. That was the main reason. But Nikki knew the intimacy Mick had with Duke and that Teddy never experienced with Mick had to hurt.
Teddy looked at Nikki. “Ready?” he asked her. But his eyes showed doubt that he himself was ready.
But Nikki nodded her head. “I’m ready,” she said, and they made their down the corridor to Mick’s office.
When Teddy opened the door and they walked in, a somberness slapped them in the face like a sledgehammer. Mick was leaned against the front of the desk, his big arms folded, while Roz was seated on the front of the desk beside him. Teddy could tell they’d been fucking by the way Roz held her legs tightly shut. As if Mick had put another hurting on her. As if he had no clue how to finesse even that, and she was still feeling the sting. But over the years, it was always a tell-tell sign to Teddy that Roz had tried to de-stress Mick before their meeting. To make it easier all around. But from the look on his father’s face, it didn’t work.
Charles “Big Daddy” Sinatra, Mick’s big brother, was seated in a chair beside the desk: Already on Pop’s side, in Teddy’s estimation.
Frankie “The Monk” Paletti, who ran the Bonaducci crime family and elevated it to the third most powerful syndicate in the world behind Mick and Teddy’s outfit, and Sal Gabrini’s, was seated in one of the three chairs positioned to face the desk. Or to face the firing squad, if you asked Nikki. He wore his standard business suit and gentleman’s hat: always styled like a gangster straight from the Humphrey Bogart/Jimmy Cagney era. But that was Monk Paletti: One of a kind.
He left his busy schedule and came from Jersey to be there for them, and they appreciated that. But when they walked around and sat down in those other two chairs beside Monk, neither one of them bothered to speak or greet Monk or anybody else. The tension was just that heavy in the room.
Teddy waited for his father, or at least his uncle, to ask him questions, but he could tell they both were too pissed off to speak. They wanted him to tell it to them. Even his stepmother Roz seemed pissed. And rightly so: It was his bad decisions that forced Mick to cut their long overdue vacation short and return to Philly.
Teddy glanced at Nikki. Nikki’s eyes agreed that he should begin, and he did. “I gave the order for the ships to sail,” he started saying, but he was quickly cut off.
“Don’t you dare start at the end,” Big Daddy said. “Start at the beginning. What’s been going on at those docks that was apparently so insignificant that you didn’t think Mick needed to know, but then all this death and destruction happens?” He was looking from Teddy to Nikki and back to Teddy. “You got to explain that to me.”
Teddy still felt he needed to remind the family constantly that he,not Mick, was running the day-to-day operations of Mick’s syndicate, and that his power was supposed to be absolute. “Pop made me the undisputed boss of the Sinatra syndicate,” he began.
