Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

during these flights of fancy. He was movie-star handsome with a wide smile that displayed perfect white teeth, dark hair cropped close to his head, his complexion dusky, his eyes clear and filled with understanding and wisdom beyond his years. He’d never heard of Charles Atlas, but this skinny teenager was the epitome of Atlas’s skinny kid on the beach who was tired of having sand kicked in his face—and did something about it. It was all, of course, fantasy until …
    â€œI think it’s time that you fight back, Nicholas,” his father said one night over dinner. Nic had returned from school that afternoon with bruises and another pair of glasses to be repaired.
    The statement surprised Nic. Although his father was a mild-mannered CPA who never worked at a level beyond that of a glorified bookkeeper, he stood firm in his principles of justice and right. Had he been born in an earlier era, he might have been a Communist. His mother was a flighty woman with a ready laugh, who worked a variety of part-time jobs to help pay the family’s bills. They doted on their only child and encouraged his academic efforts. And it sickened them to see him return from a day at school bloodied at the hands of less gifted students.
    â€œWe’re not suggesting, Nicholas, that you become a fighter,” explained his father. “Far from it. But there’s no reason for you to be at the mercy of these morons whose brains are smaller than yours and whose futures are dim. I want you to get in shape and give as much as you have been getting.”
    â€œAnd won’t they be surprised when you fight back and they end up on the ground with a bloody nose?” his mother added with a gleeful smile that led Nic to believe that she looked forward to witnessing his next fight.
    They signed him up at a local YMCA and purchased some rudimentary exercise equipment that was installed in their unfinished basement. Nic attacked his new workout regime with the same vigor as he tackled his studies, and the results soon became obvious. Not that he became muscle-bound; his basic skeletal structure wouldn’t support that. But muscles did begin to define themselves, and his strength increased. At the same time his confidence grew, bolstered by the knowledge that should someone pick on him again, he’d be ready to offer resistance—to give as good as he’d been getting.
    His social skills were bolstered also. Until becoming a gym rat, he’d been awkward around girls in the school and was aware that some of them, especially those in cliques, made fun of him behind his back. That changed in his senior year, when a pretty blond classmate who belonged to one of the popular groups began to show interest in him. She’d grown to appreciate his academic achievements—she’d shucked off some of her previous silliness and had begun to embrace her studies with an eye toward college—and was open in her admiration of his intelligence. “You’ll easily be our class valedictorian,” she told him more than once while they studied together in the library after school, where he happily helped her with some of her more challenging science subjects.
    Although they could hardly be considered boyfriend and girlfriend, they did catch an occasional movie together or end up in a local luncheonette enjoying ice cream sundaes. None of this went over well with a senior on the football team who had a crush on the girl and who took ribbing from teammates about how “that creep Tatum” was stealing her from him.
    One night as Tatum returned home after a workout at the Y, his rival suitor, accompanied by three friends from the team, accosted him on a dark street. As the football player taunted Tatum and warned him to stay away from the girl, a sense of fury welled up in him that he’d never experienced before. The football player poked him in the chest, then shoved him harder, causing him to