When it first came out that a prominent real-estate agent had been murdered several weeks ago, Robert Kolker writes in New York this week, before that person was revealed to be Linda Stein, some in the real-estate community guessed the deceased might be super-broker Dolly Lenz, a fact Lenz backed up herself, telling the writer she got twenty calls from people that night, including her own son, asking if she was okay. That's weird, we thought. Wouldn't her own son know if she was dead or not? Oh … maybe not. "I would say I speak to my son 10 minutes a week," Lenz says in an Observer profile coming out later this week, tidbits of which are on their Website now. "I would say I spend an hour [a week] with my daughter." Even with her superb parenting skills, sterling reputation ("I’ve known Dolly for over twenty years, and systematically, whatever friendship she has, it dissolves," former Elliman president Paul Purcell told New York in 2005), and — as the Observer nicely puts it — "outsize" personality, Dolly can't imagine anything bad happening to her. "Never," she tells the paper. "I feel like I treat everybody 100 percent fairly, and I think at the end of the day that’s all they really expect." But maybe she shouldn't be so sure. When Stein died, “we were hoping it was Dolly,” one broker told New York with a giggle. Um, yikes.

The $748,319,000 Woman [NYO]
Related: Death of a Broker [NYM]