Read Online The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith - Free Book Online

door, then kicked the paper into her apartment and closed the door behind her.
    Fuck her, she said to herself. She never liked that bitch anyhow, the co-op’s president, a nosy-body.
    She did it just for spite, she knew, because Brenda rarely looked at the Times. It was too ponderous, and too big to handle easily.
    Despite her weight, Brenda was a small woman, with small hands. The Times always wrinkled and tore when she attempted to go through it.
    Secretly, she preferred the Post. A guilty pleasure.
    She went into the kitchen and deposited the box of eclairs in the remgerator, after taking a furtive lick of chocolate from one. She walked back into the living room, kicked off her shoes, and dropped ungracefully onto the downy sofa. Picking up the newspaper, she began to flip through the pages, not really reading.
    And then she saw it, an ad announcing the underwriting of Morty the Madman stock. Morty the Madman was going public.
    Brenda couldn’t believe it! Her hands were shaking, rippling the big pages of the New York imes spread out before her. She had almost missed it, but there it was. A whole page. How much did that cost?
    Brenda wondered. just like Morty, if it showed, spend big bucks. But maybe this wasn’t even paid for by Morty. Brenda, who was shrewd, and gifted with cartloads of common sense, knew that she hadn’t a clue about how big business worked. But neither did Morty. Christ, the little pisher was in the big time now. She began to study the page more carefully.
    The offering was enormous, handled by Federated Funds Douglas Witter.
    That was Gil Griffin’s firm, she knew. So now that he’s divorced and bought me off for a few shekels and this crummy apartment, Morty goes public. I signed over my stock to him for nothing. After he cried poverty and complained about loans and mortgages eating him up alive.
    And I got bubkes for alimony and child support. Nice. And strangers are getting rich off this right now, while I’m sitting on my big fat ass, waiting for the puny maintenance check to come in, hoping it won’t bounce.
    Brenda moved quickly. She put on her shoes and, not bothering to lock the door, ran out to the newsstand at the corner and came back with the Wall Street Journal. Now, sitting on the edge of the sofa, she began to look through it carefully, page by page. There on page nine she found a four-column story.
    It appeared that Morty’s offering was regarded as an event as important as the Second Coming. That a household name, a retailer, could expand so rapidly by offering the consumer what he wanted at a price he could afford was apparently considered a miracle of modern business. What am I missing here? Brenda thought. His giant leverage allowed him to buy low and sell only slightly higher, and his genius lay in passing on such a large share of his savings to customers, gaining him both huge volume and an enormously loyal customer base.
    His inspired Morty the Madman commercials, albeit masterminded by ParadiselLoest Advertising, made him and his stores an American icon.
    Genius?
    Inspired? Was that really Morty the Journal was writing about? What bullshit!
    The man could handel, she’d give him that, but most of the time Morty didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. What was wrong with this picture? She looked at the byline. Asa Ewell, whoever the fuck that was. His mother actually named him that?
    Yeah, I should tell old Asa baby about how Morty managed such low prices before he had all that leverage. Morty had sold TVs, stereos, and VCRs hot off her daddy’s trucks for years. She’d been his bookkeeper, so she ought to know.
    Passing on such a large share of his savings my sweet ass. He laundered the money for the mob. What would Asa Ewell say to that?
    She shook her head. What a moron.
    She looked back over the piece. Expansion brought with it state-of the-art inventory control and high-tech market analysis, using the most advanced point-of-sale MIS technology yet installed in