The neighbourhood, which seemed so menacing at night, in daylight turned out to be chiefly dilapidated. Windows on a number of buildings were boarded up. A six-flat apartment building on Danny's block had had a fire, and no attempt was apparently being made to repair the damage. The charred ruin just stood there, like a blackened tooth in an already unattractive mouth. A few blocks to the west, across Western Avenue, Skid Row began, with red-faced drunks wandering the streets. 

Danny and Mandel drove two blocks over to Bell Avenue, where Danny's girlfriend Claire was waiting for them outside the bungalow that she and her five brothers and sisters lived in with their widowed mother. Her father had been a Chicago cop, killed four years ago, as Danny had earlier explained, in the line of duty, while chasing a drug dealer down an alley off Wilson Avenue on the northside. Claire went to Immaculata, was Irish, and Danny's age. She was small, dishwater blonde, and was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Young as she was, there was already something a little tired-looking about her around the eyes, or so Mandel thought. 

The three of them drove down to Maxwell Street. The day was crisp and sunny. Maxwell Street was humming. Older men grabbed their arms, telling them that terrific bargains were to be had within their dark clothing shops. Carts in the middle of the street were loaded with fake Zippo lighters, playing-cards with blurrily photographed naked women on them, eight-battery flashlights, condoms of the kind known in those days as French ticklers. A butcher sold live chickens. An ancient-looking black woman was seated on a kitchen chair hovering over a blanket on which she displayed dishes, some of them chipped, that she offered for sale. A Gypsy family sat before its doorway, hawking fortune-telling and suggesting that maybe more than mere fortunes could be obtained within. The smell of fried onions and Polish sausage on the open-air vendors' grills suffused everything.

Danny, as always, seemed completely at ease. He bopped along, with his jaunty walk, very much with the show, laughing at the young black guy who stopped him in the hope of selling him a gaudy-looking wristwatch. Claire, less confident, clung to Danny's arm. Mandel didn't say much to her after Danny introduced them. He felt she looked on him as a rich (by her standard, anyway) Jewish boy from the far northside, possibly slumming, which, though he preferred not to think so, he may well have been doing. 

Danny bought Claire a necklace with a St Christopher's medal. They walked over to Roosevelt Road, where Mandel showed Danny that he could get very slightly factory-damaged Florsheim plain-toed cordovan shoes for $10 at a place called Wolinsky and Levy. They stopped for hot dogs at the Vienna sausage outlet store on Halsted. They looked at the wild clothes on display in the windows at Smokey Joe's. On the drive home, the three of them sitting in the front seat — this was before the age of bucket seats — Claire fell asleep on Danny's shoulder, continuing to clutch his arm. "She's not been feeling so good lately," he told Mandel. 

Danny Montoya never actually played for Senn. A week or so after the return to school from Christmas vacation, he didn't show up at his and Mandel's usual meeting-place for lunch. The next week Mandel asked Maj Singleton if he knew anything about Danny's absence. The Maj told him that Danny had decided not to return to Senn, but said nothing more. Mandel was disappointed but not completely surprised. Danny had no known social life at the school apart from him, which, for a naturally
gregarious kid, must not have been easy. He got no real coaching from Maj Singleton; nor did he need any. Maybe he just became bored with the long bus and El rides up and back to school.