Page 107 - Just Deserts

Stiff Competition

with the poisoned copy. But every copy of the book had come out
the New Jersey plant shrink-wrapped; nobody could believe that the
tampering had not occurred during the printing process. A great
public outcry arose against the perpetrators of the ‘Stiff Competition’
deadly practical joke. An investigation of LibrAries was conducted by
a joint team of federal and local law enforcement personnel, seeking
to calm the book-buying public by making a quick arrest.”
“With ninety-nine potentially poisonous winning copies still out in
the chain of distributors, sub-distributors and retailers, LibrAries was
forced to halt its printing of the book, and set up a procedure for
accepting returns of all copies already shipped. Each of them had to
be examined by a skilled toxicologist wearing protective gear, at the
publisher’s expense.” Grainy footage of men wearing hoods and
heavy gloves was shown. They sat at a table in a sealed room,
scraping and testing one book at a time from a huge stack. “Many
people were so outraged by the turn of events that they demanded
their money back, even though they had not been poisoned. Some
even tried suing the press, the publisher and the author. Cockleberry
had no choice but to settle up with these people as quickly and
quietly as possible; he could not have afforded to go to court with
them all.”
The face of Polly Glotz, dominated by tinted contact lenses and
layers of lip gloss, returned.
“And that was where we left the story, Dick. After his release
from the emergency hospital Thurston Furd, who triggered the entire
scandal, disappeared. WROT has not been able to learn anything
concerning his whereabouts. LibrAries lost all the money it had made
on ‘Stiff Competition’ as well as a lot of good will. Today, however,
the Justice Department has handed down a stunning indictment of
Andrew Cockleberry’s entire operation. In a copy of that indictment
obtained by your WROT news team, the government alleges that
LibrAries had in fact printed and sold thousands more copies of ‘Stiff
Competition’ than it had reported on its business records. This fact
would not have been known without the tampering investigation.
The audit also revealed that no other winning copies had ever been
released; those ninety-nine books, worth almost a hundred thousand

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