Page 3 - Like No Business I Know

Rejuvenol

“Wrinkle cream,” she pronounced. “The best ever. I’m using it
myself.”
Probst squinted through his spectacles at her face. Yes, he could
discern a difference. The basal-cell carcinomas polka-dotting her
thrice-lifted face appeared to float on a much calmer sea than he
remembered.
“The company producing it is nothing,” she continued
hurriedly, “a converted warehouse in Jersey City. In the last fiscal
year they shipped only 2500 units. I had them investigated,
Myron—you know my methods. It wasn’t loan sharks slowing
them down. No Mafia ties. No ties to anybody or anything. The
guy running it was a medical technician on Long Island until three
years ago. No business sense, so he was waiting for an offer. I got
to him first with the most. Or so he thinks.”
Probst wondered silently how the competition had been
stymied, the naive victim set up for the kill. But he was a scientist,
so he said, “I see. We’ll take over production and he’ll collect a
royalty, like the inventor of the time-release douche we—”
“No, Myron, it’s much, much better than that.” She smiled like
an indulgent wolf at his lack of entrepreneurial expertise. “We
have the whole thing. All the rights. Complete ownership. He
thinks he’s getting away with murder. We’ll gear up and recoup the
investment in eighteen months; then it’s pure profit until the next
big breakthrough—I estimate another five years, at least. It’s an
unusual deal, but Stouffer and Sockett checked the whole thing
out. It’s in the bag.”
Myron Probst frowned. Unusual? In this business?
Gilda Fishel leaned back in her hydraulically self-adjusting
swivel chair and steepled her short stubby fingers.
“Young Mister Frintzwilder was so scared of big, bad Chic
Salons that he paid more attention to protecting his precious
secret formula than to analyzing the offer we made. Myron, I
didn’t get to be top-shelf in cosmetics without hiring the best
lawyers and accountants in the country. And chemists, of course.”
He blushed, gratified by the compliment.
“So, we can scrap the research on petrochemical collagen
solvents and get right down to work on scaling up the recipe for
Rejuvenol?”

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