The Darlings by Cristina Alger Page B

smirked at first, but then whispered, “Julianne just redid the house,” in the tone she used when he was being rude. “Just tell them you like it.” Merrill and Lily had always been quietly respectful of Morty, perhaps because he was one of the only people to whom their father deferred.
    Julianne was a self-proclaimed interior decorator, though this was a subject of some controversy among Morty’s close friends. As far as Paul was aware, Julianne had never decorated any interior that didn’t belong to Morty, though these alone provided her with ample canvas. The town house was her first top-to-bottom job. Previously, Morty had limited her to smaller projects with reasonable budgets, like a pool house or a guest room. Julianne’s taste was ornate and obvious, heavy on gilding and marble, and in direct contrast to Morty’s bland aesthetic. She had been begging him to do the town house for years. The project must have taken her months, and Paul couldn’t imagine how much financing.
    The Reises were like many couples in New York. Morty met Julianne at a charity event, shortly after his first wife left him. Julianne was pretty in an obvious way, the kind of beauty that read better from across a room. She had large, wide-set eyes and high cheekbones; her auburn hair was highlighted and coiffed into a veritable mane that she wore layered around her shoulders. Her body was phenomenal, tanned and cross-trained within an inch of its life. She was taller than Morty, and her thinness gave the impression of a B-list actress or model. Julianne was the kind of woman Paul’s mom would call “a showstopper,” the kind of woman who was a dime a dozen in Manhattan.
    At first blush, Morty and Julianne seemed like a mismatch. Morty was a recluse and a schlubby dresser. He loved to make money but he didn’t particularly care to spend it; he wasn’t cheap, but he didn’t seem to derive much pleasure from personal acquisition, either. Among his possessions, he seemed only to care for his extraordinary car collection. He wore off-the-rack suits from Bloomingdale’s and shirts bought in bulk online. He had no hobbies except for collecting cars, and rarely traveled except on business or to one of his four houses. His houses were all built like fortresses, with state-of-the-art security. He opened them to guests infrequently, typically only when Julianne demanded it. Carter had seen him disarmed by only one person: Sophie, his first wife. He had loved Sophie deeply. When she left, he had sunk into a terrible depression, one that had lasted for months. He wasn’t the type to take solace in a trophy wife, and Julianne seemed to bring him headaches more than anything else. Now that Sophie was gone, Carter sensed that Morty really enjoyed only two things: working and being left alone.

    Paul tried to remember where Julianne was now. The Reises were so often apart that he thought of them as loosely affiliated but separate entities.
    Aspen?
Paul thought.
It was earlier there. She might be skiing
.
    Paul wondered if she knew that Morty was dead.
    Someone should tell her; someone she was close to, preferably. But anyone really, before she saw it on the news
.
    There was no movement in or out of the town house. At the bottom of the screen was the caption: 23 East Seventy-seventh Street, Home of Morton Reis. Paul half listened as a reporter described Morty’s business: “Reis Capital Management opened its doors in 1967, trading mostly penny stocks in the over-the-counter market . . . Firms like RCM made their bread and butter by capturing what’s known as the ‘spread’ or gap between the offer and selling prices on these stocks . . . It wasn’t until a regulation change in the 1970s that RCM was able to capture market share on the New York Stock Exchange and began to trade in more expensive blue-chip stocks . . .”
    The reporter’s head