Entering the hotel had been the hard part. Once he walked through the lobby doors and sat down, they only thing he had left to do was wait. But going in, that had been the killer.
 
He checked his watch—forty-five minutes had passed. Looking around himself self-consciously, he adjusted himself in the pellet-stuffed armchair and fluttered the edges of his two-day-old newspaper absently with his fingers. He willed himself to keep reading, but the news had not changed since the last time he perused its pages, and he had grown bored with it long ago. Tomorrow’s paper would be more interesting, particularly the story about the elderly man found dead in his two-story brownstone in Burr Ridge. That is, if everything went according to plan.
 
He checked his watch again—the watch his father had given him for his twenty-seventh birthday three years ago, along with an eviction notice and an uppercut to the jaw. Casting the newspaper aside, he frowned into his lap. He thought vaguely of going into the gift shop for a magazine, but he knew that the Hotel Skyview Internationale did not have such a store, and if it did, it would have been spelled shoppe and sold only shoddy replicas of the sacred heart of Jesus and poorly made Chicago sweatshirts.

The sky was beginning to darken through the hotel lobby’s windows, on which he could see prints of children’s hands and snotty noses. The desk clerk—the concierge, he thought blithely—stared at him too long and too hard, and he began to get nervous. Crenshaw would be here soon, and then he could leave, return to his apartment on the south side, begin packing. A two-story brownstone in Burr Ridge would soon be opening.

 To keep his mind occupied he thought of things he hadn’t in a long time—his mother’s red-checked dress, his baseball glove, his next door neighbor Annette with whom he had played Mickey Mouse Club and pirates and doctor, doctor being his favorite. He thought of the tree he had fallen out of when he was eleven and his mother’s worried face as she drove him to the hospital. He thought of her pie.

 He thought of the day his mother drove away in their blue and white 1982 Citation and never came back. He thought of the note she had left him: Sam, good luck. He thought of what it was like to live with a man who hated his life, who drank, who picked fights with neighbor men and attacked his son’s legs with a baseball bat when he was fifteen.

 Most of all, he thought of his father’s smile, with its gleaming gold tooth.

 Shaking his head to break this reverie, he looked up to find that the sky was completely dark now, and he was not alone.

 "Hey," the man said. He sat opposite Sam Hilbek in a similarly uncomfortable black chair, its arms shredded, stuffing exposed. Hilbek believed it was a good chair for Crenshaw.

 He yawned. "How long have you been here?"

 "Long enough for us to get caught."

 "Did you do it?"

 "Shut up." Crenshaw looked around himself warily. "Yeah."

 "Like a suicide? Like I told you?"

 "Yeah."

 "What did you use? The butcher knife?" Hilbek nearly smiled at this idea—his father dead by the same butcher knife he had once threatened his mother with.

 "No—too big. No one would use something that unwieldy." He leaned in and Hilbek followed. "The paring knife." He looked around. "He was asleep in that big chair, the one with the eagles on it. Like you said he would be."

 "Yeah?"

 "So, I just grabbed his wrist—" Crenshaw made slitting motions horizontally across his forearm. "I even made the procrastination wounds."

 "Hesitation wounds." Hilbek had read about hesitation wounds in a medical book he had borrowed from the library-- most suicide victims have hesitation wounds, caused by their initial attempts to stab themselves. And the more this looked like a real suicide, the better. "Did you leave the note?"

 "I’m not a moron, Hilbek. Of course I left it." Hilbek had engineered this part of the plan, too: Dear world, you win. Crenshaw smiled, revealing a brown and yellow cavalcade of overlapping teeth. "And I got something for you."

 "Oh?"

 Crenshaw’s smile grew wider as he dug into his pocket, producing a small object wrapped in blue tissue. "Open it."

 Hilbek’s stomach turned itself inside out as he fingered the package warily, feeling its hardness. Closing his eyes, he ripped the tissue away, revealing what he had most feared—his father’s gold tooth.

 "That’s how you know it was done," Crenshaw said. "That’s proof."

 "I didn’t ask for proof, I didn’t want proof!" Hilbek stood up, flinging the tooth to the ground.

 "Shut up, man, you’re going to get us noticed!" Crenshaw hissed.

 Hilbek sat down, his forehead resting on his knees. "You stupid moron," he said at last. "How is it going to look like a suicide if his Goddamned tooth is missing? Huh? Huh?" Crenshaw looked at his feet. "You have to go back there and put it back in. You have to put it back."

 "I can’t just put it back. It’ll still be loose in the socket. They’ll still know."

 "Then why did you do it, man? Jesus!"

 Crenshaw was nearly crying now. "I don’t know, man, I don’t know! I just saw it there—the old man opened his mouth—and I saw it in there—and it just made me so mad—he opened his mouth, and I had to take it away from him."

 "Jesus Christ," Hilbek said. He threw the tooth on the table. "You get rid of this."

 "No way, Hilbek." Crenshaw crossed his arms over his chest, shook his head. "No fucking way."

 "Look, I didn’t even ask you for this! I didn’t even want it."

 "You keep it. Drill a hole through it, wear it around your neck, I don’t care. Melt it down, make it into a Goddamned ring or something. I did all your dirty work. I’m finished."

 "But I didn’t even—"

 "No way." Crenshaw stood up. "I’d get out of here if I were you," he said. "And I’d get rid of that tooth."
 

 The cab fare to O’Hare was about twenty dollars, and for a moment Hilbek contemplated dropping the tooth into the cabby’s hand as a tip. He turned it over in his pocket, feeling the points where its roots had once been connected to his father’s square jaw. Almost unconsciously, he removed the tooth and looked at it again—it was blood-spattered and jagged at the bottom. If he left it for the cabby, he would be discovered in no time.

 There had been no reason for him to come here. He had wanted to get lost—to disappear into the zoo of people that swarmed around him. Because soon he would have to return to his apartment on the South side, and the police would be calling, saying his father was dead and someone had stolen his gold tooth, the tooth he had in his pocket.

 Ducking into a bathroom, Hilbek relieved himself, urine splashing gold against the porcelain white of the urinal. He washed the tooth with soap and water, scraping away the last of the blood. At the very least, he wanted the police to have to dig into his father’s dental records; having a blood sample would be too easy.

 Further wandering uncovered a bank of pay phones, fairly isolated from the rest of the busy terminal. A Hare Krishna stood nearby, head shaved, poppies in hand. Hilbek brushed past him and picked up the handset of the nearest phone, dialing Dawn’s number from memory.

 "Hello?"

 "Dawn," he said, relieved to hear a familiar voice.

 "What’s up, buttercup?"

 He felt the tooth in his pocket. "Absolutely nothing."

 "Where are you?"

 He faltered—had the police called her already, were they waiting there, were they tapping the phone? "Why?"

 "I just want to know when you’re coming home."

 "Soon."

 "My parents called today."

 "Oh?"

 "They want to know how big the wedding’s going to be."

 "What wedding?"

 "Our wedding."

 "I see." He couldn’t help but smile. "When were you going to tell me this?"

 "Shit—" He heard her fumble with the phone. "I have another call."

 "All—all right. I’ll see you in a little while then, huh?"

 "Yeah. Gotta go." With a click, she was gone.

 Hilbek lingered by the phone for a few minutes more, wanting desperately to call her back. It was impossible that the police had already found his father—wasn’t it?

 The Hare Krishna smiled at him as he walked past, offering a poppy. Hilbek took it and stuck it in his breast pocket, dropping three quarters and the tooth into the Krishna’s hand. It took every muscle in his body to keep propelling him forward.

 He got only twenty feet before the Krishna came trotting after him, holding the tooth above his head. Hilbek tried to walk faster, but the Krishna caught him, folding the tooth into his palm.

 "You lost this," he told Hilbek in a soft voice.

 "No, see—it grew back." He ran his tongue over the tooth where his father’s gold one would have sat. "I don’t need that anymore."

 "It’s too much. You keep it." He bowed slightly to Hilbek, awed by his generosity, and resumed his post. Hilbek replaced the tooth in his pocket and walked on, its weight grinding him down.
 

 The cab fare to the Magnificent Mile was another ten dollars; the cabby had taken a roundabout route, sensing Hilbek’s distraction—at least, that’s what Hilbek believed. He gave up the money grudgingly, replacing his wallet in the pocket with the worthless gold.

 He didn’t really know why he was here; when he was thirteen years old, the year after his mother left, Hilbek had lost his last baby tooth here, and, in an effort to keep this from his father, who would have accused him of doing in to inconvenience him, he had swallowed it. It had disappeared so easily, drifting away in a tomb of excrement under the streets of Chicago. It occurred to him to do the same thing now, but the idea of putting something that had been in his father’s mouth for so long repulsed him, made him fear infection with his father’s mind disease.

 He went into a poster store and browsed, looking for something to brighten Dawn’s apartment. She had been a dancer in her younger days before becoming a clerk at Mesirow Insurance, and he toyed with the idea of buying her a Degas print, one of all the ballerinas lined up at the barre. Instead, he found only portraits of half-naked women and movie posters bedecked with well-coifed so-called sensitive men, men who were undoubtedly not carrying the gold tooth of their murdered father in the left front pocket.

 Outside, he bought a hot dog from a vendor and ate it, surreptitiously wrapping the tooth in the hot dog’s paper all the while. When he finished, he tossed it into the street and walked away. He imagined the paper making its way to the junkyard and being tossed onto a pile of burning tires and empty cereal boxes, and smiled. Perhaps a junkyard dog would find it and take it as its own—then it would be back where it belonged.

 Hilbek was so lost in his reverie that he did not hear the hot dog vendor running after him and started violently when the man clapped him on the shoulder. In his left hand was the hot dog wrapper.

 "What do you think you’re doing?" the vendor asked, tapping his foot impatiently on the sidewalk. He was a large man, bald and smashed-in looking, like a crumpled drinking glass. Hilbek was afraid of him.

 "What?"

 "What do you think you’re doing, throwing your shit on the ground? Right in front of my stand?"

 "There wasn’t a trash can around—"

 "Doesn’t matter. You got pockets. You carry it until you find a trash can." He pushed the paper back into Hilbek’s hand and returned to his hot dog stand, casting one ominous glance over his shoulder at him. Hilbek replaced the tooth in his pocket and walked on.
 

 When one thirty came and went, Hilbek was standing in front of a pawn shop in an alley, near the alley he had first met Crenshaw in. There had been a long period when Hilbek had laid on a bench in a bus stop, staring at the sky and lamenting his fate. He would be a prisoner soon, and he was small, brown and small, like a mouse or a piece of waste, and he would not last long in prison.

 Hilbek left when people began gathering at the stop, people who might be able to recognize him in a lineup, people with pockets not lined with gold. How easy it would be for a petty thug like Crenshaw to slip the tooth into one of their unsuspecting pockets—reverse pick-pocketing—pocket-placing? But he was not like Crenshaw, and he walked off glumly, running his teeth over his own, intact incisors.

 Who would miss him when he went to prison? Not Crenshaw. He didn’t even know him, really, just an enemy of a friend. Not his mother. He ticked through the list of people he knew—it was short—and came up empty, save for Dawn. He had been lucky with her, and she had been patient, waiting for his genius to show itself, waiting for her engagement ring to arrive. And now, she would have to keep waiting.

 He looked around himself, shoulders heavy with wet self-pity, and sighed. He sat down on the edge of a lighted fountain, staring vaguely at a statue of some important man cast in bronze, covered in bird shit. A couple sat on a bench on the statue’s far side, the man fondling his mate as discreetly as he knew how in a public place. It seemed to Hilbek that he had sat there with Dawn once, but there were so many benches in this town, across from so many frozen metal men, that he could hardly substantiate this thought.

 He wondered what Dawn was doing. He wondered what he could buy her with the gold in his pocket. He wondered if she would still marry him if he went to prison, if she would be unashamed to meet him in the conjugal visit trailer once a month, if she would tell her coworkers at Mesirow that her husband was dead, had been bitten by some unearthly creature that left its tooth embedded in him, and he died from it.

 Overcome with self-pity, Hilbek began to cry, grinding the tears into salt with the backs of his hands. She had dropped hints, even today, and he had ignored them. He didn’t want to get married. But he couldn’t go into prison alone.

 "You… you okay over there?" the man called from the bench.

 "What?" Hilbek looked up at him, his eyes still glistening.

 "My girlfriend wanted to make sure you were okay." The woman looked down
shyly, and he slid his hand between her thighs.

 "Just worrying about something." He stood up, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked over to them. The woman curled into her boyfriend slightly, as if Hilbek were going to throw her down on the ground and molest her.

 "What’s that?" the man asked him, oblivious to his girlfriend’s actions.

 "Whether I should propose to my girlfriend or not."

 The man looked at his woman, who smiled. "We’re engaged," she told Hilbek, "me and Rob."

 Rob winked at Hilbek and smiled. "I don’t see why you shouldn’t," he said. "As long as you got a ring."

 "Yeah," Hilbek said, patting his pocket lightly. "Yeah, I do."

 An hour later, he found himself in front of this pawn shop.
 

He had been gone for two days, and he knew Dawn would be worrying. Perhaps the police had already called her about his father’s suicide, had said something about the tooth. But that no longer mattered, because he no longer had it.
 
The two days would forever be a blur in Hilbek’s mind, and eventually, ten or fifteen years later, he would forget them altogether. The only part of the story that was important was that he had had the tooth and then he hadn’t; the rest—sleeping on the cold bus stop bench, eating three-day-old burritos from the Golden Hen, pressing his forehead against the glass windows of the observation deck of the Sears Tower, pretending to be falling—had no impact on the story at all.

 It had taken the men in the pawn shop those two days to finish the job, and he did not begrudge them that. Transmutation was not an easy process, he was sure, especially with an ill-gotten tooth. He had no idea what went into their work and didn’t care, so long as the end result was to his satisfaction.

 At the end of the two days he picked up his parcel at the pawn shop, shaved and sink-bathed at O’Hare, gathered some flowers from the cemetery where his father would soon be buried, and rushed home to Dawn, a shiny gold engagement band, still warm, riding in his pocket where the tooth had once been.