Dumfrey turned red. “It’s incredibly valuable! Stupendously valuable! Stupidly valuable! Its value cannot be described!”
Suddenly, Dumfrey collapsed, as though the words, leaving him, had left in their place a huge hole. He staggered backward, and Smalls stepped forward to support him.
Sergeant Schroeder spread his hands. “Let’s just say one thousand dollars. Fair?” Dumfrey nodded weakly, and Officer Gilhooley made a scribble on his notepad. “Any idea, Mr. Dumbfin, how the perpetuator got it?”
“I locked the front doors myself at nine last night,” Mr. Dumfrey said with as much dignity as he could, considering one of Smalls’s massive arms, big as a gorilla’s, was still wrapped around his belly. “I was alerted this morning by Mr. Potts, the janitor, that they were unlocked.”
Sergeant Schroeder signaled to Officer Gilhooley, who walked to the front doors and squatted so he was eye level with the door handles.
“No sign of a forced entry,” Officer Gilhooley said at last, straightening up.
Sergeant Schroeder sighed. “And who was the last man to see the—ahem—head in its rightful place?”
There was a shuffling from the back, and Potts pushed his way forward. As usual, he wore a dirty cap pulled low over his eyes, and his jaw moved back and forth, back and forth, as though he were chewing on something invisible.
“That’d be me, sir,” he said in his gruff voice.
“And who are you?” Sergeant Schroeder asked.
“Potts is the name,” he said. “I’m the janitor here. Did my final sweep of the place at ten o’clock, just like normal, afore I gone to bed in the basement. Weren’t nothing unusual then.”
“And you heard nothing in the middle of the night?” Sergeant Schroeder pressed. “No sounds of breaking glass? No footsteps?”
It might have been Thomas’s imagination, but he thought that Potts smirked. “I always take a little nightcap afore bed, sir, if you catch my drift. If a dozen angels came down and danced around like chorus girls, I wouldn’t have heard nothing.”
Thomas’s eyes met Pippa’s across the crowd, and then Sam’s. Max was frowning. He knew what all of them were thinking: Potts had been awake, and much later than 9:00 p.m. In fact, he’d been out of bed. So why wouldn’t he say so now?
There was a short silence. Sergeant Schroeder coughed and nodded to Officer Gilhooley, who discreetly replaced the notepad in his pocket.
“Here’s the thing, Mr. Dumbfort,” he began.
Mr. Dumfrey had recovered sufficiently to correct him. “Dumfrey.”
“Dumfrey. Right. ’Course.” Sergeant Schroeder exchanged a small smile with Officer Gilhooley, as though they were sharing a private joke. “I’m sure this, er, head means a lot to you.”
“Not just to me,” Dumfrey said. “To the world! To civilization at large! To the public! The great, the hungry—”
Sergeant Schroeder raised a fleshy hand, cutting him off. “Be that as it may,” he said with great emphasis, “you gotta be realistic. We had three homicides on my beat this week alone. Yesterday, a fisherman turned up a body wearing a pair of cement slippers. We got five muggings, a home breakin, twenty-two incidents of pickpocketing, four lost cats, twelve barroom brawls, and ninety-one incidents of aggression toward the law. Not to mention someone breaking into Mario’s Deli on Forty-Eighth Street and stealing a whole crate of Genoa salami. The city’s full of sneaks and crooks and thieves and scammers. Do you catch my drift, Mr. Dumpty?”
This time, Mr. Dumfrey didn’t bother to correct him. “I’m not sure I do,” he said coldly.
Sergeant Schroeder’s eyes glittered like small dirt-colored marbles in the pink flesh of his face. “All right, I’ll say it plainer. The police, Mr. Dumpling, have much more important things to do than to look for your head.”
And with a curt nod, he spun around on one of his polished heels and began trotting toward the door. Officer Gilhooley loped after him obediently, pausing just as he was passing through the door.
“Sorry for your loss,” he said in practically a whisper.
“Gilhooley!” Sergeant Schroeder’s voice bellowed from outside. And quickly, with a small start of surprise, Officer Gilhooley shut the door.
No one said a word. Even the museum, usually so full of drips and creaks and groans, seemed to be holding its breath. Thomas felt that the silence was more awful than anything. It was as though they were all standing in a tomb.
It was Mr. Dumfrey who spoke first. “Ruined,” he said. “We’re ruined.”
“I’m sure it’ll be all right, Mr. D.,” Sam said quietly, and others immediately piped up with their support.
“Ugly thing,” croaked Andrew, with an emphatic rap of his cane.
Phoebe nodded vigorously, her many chins nodding with her. “Hideous!”
“Gave me the chills,” admitted Hugo. Danny reached up to pat the elephant man’s hand sympathetically.
“We’ll do fine without it!” Caroline said.