They followed. The crowd thinned out a lot, but it did not thin absolutely. Gregor was half surprised that Ray Berle and Tony Monteverdi didn’t shoo them all off.
He walked first down one corridor and then the other and stopped when he got to Martha Handling’s chambers.
“All right,” he said. “Two things. One is that although Father Tibor isn’t particularly old, he is not in the best shape, courtesy of many years of abuse in a dictatorship. When he saw the murderer going down the hall, the murderer was probably already nearly to the next corridor. Tibor walks slowly. The murderer, on the other hand, is young. He was fast. Very fast. He walked through this door and found Martha Handling occupying it. He closed the door behind him. The gavel was on the desk, probably in the stand that was there and empty when the body and Father Tibor were later discovered. The murderer picked up the gavel and smashed the woman’s head into the mess you all saw. He did it quickly. He did it viciously. And just as he was finished, Tibor—who had been following him and saw him go through the door to Martha Handling’s chambers—came in and found him finishing up.”
“And you think you can prove that,” Ray Berle said.
Gregor opened the door to Martha Handling’s chambers and shooed them all in.
“You’ve got only one other alternative,” Gregor said. “It was either that, or somebody else walked in on Tibor, and Tibor went on pounding the woman’s head in for nearly a minute and a half before he noticed anybody was there.”
“You’re the one with only one more alternative,” Tony Monteverdi said. “You’re trying to tell us that Father Kasparian here walked in to find somebody bashing in the head of a woman and responded to that by—what? Arranging to fake a video of the murder? Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious,” Gregor said. “And it’s not as strange as you think it is. It’s exactly the kind of thing Tibor would do, if the circumstances were right. The murderer is young, as Tibor told me himself. He has his entire life ahead of him. He has people who love him and would be hurt if his life were ruined. And, what’s more, Tibor is sure he knows this person, that what he’s seen must be an act of temporary insanity, a blowup that got out of control. And he wants to save this person’s life. Martha Handling’s cell phone is on her desk. So is the cell phone she uses to make the calls to Administrative Solutions and to other people she knows who are part of the bribery scheme. The murderer picks up this phone, and they stage the murder video—which wasn’t all that good once you started to really pay attention to it. It doesn’t show the body on purpose, of course, because Tibor wasn’t hitting the body. But that video has sound, and if you turn it up, you can hear the gavel hitting the floor, a hard wooden crack, not the squish the body would have made. But Tibor had promised to help him. And the murderer thought it would be more than just the video and the cover-up. He thought Tibor would plead guilty. And when somebody pleads guilty, all investigation stops. It didn’t occur to him that in Tibor’s addled brain, covering up a murder would be acceptable, but lying would not.”
“That one—” Tony Monteverdi pointed at Tibor. “—must be a world-class loon.”
“I have not admitted to this,” Tibor said. “I go back to my right to remain silent.”
“They made the movie. The murderer left the room and went into one of the corridors to send the movie to Facebook. And then the murderer came back, supposedly following an odd noise, which was part of the cover-up, too, because it was the only way the murderer could explain all the blood he had on him. I don’t think either he or Tibor expected that anybody else would come in, but of course there were a ton of them, and Janice Loftus got there first. As it turned out, that was actually good news. It made the cover-up story all the more plausible. From then on out, the murderer told his story absolutely truthfully, except he started it the second time he came into this room.”
“And you think my Petrak did this,” Sophie said. “You think he’s a psychopath. You think I wouldn’t know that he was a psychopath. He lives in my house. I would have noticed if he was a psychopath. I’d have picked up something.”
“You’d be amazed at how often nobody does,” Tony Monteverdi said.
“You honestly think my Petrak did this,” Sophie said. “You’re an idiot. You’re a complete fool.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Russ Donahue said. “Of course he doesn’t think Petrak did this. He thinks I did.”