Johnny Shoe Shiner

Vinnie's own contact into what's left of the Mafia's Los Angeles crumbs.

Called "Shoe Shiner." Vinnie asked once where the name came from and got a different story than the last person who asked, so he pays for answers and leaves the name alone.

Vinnie's line on him is "I got a guy," and it covers everything: an address, a name, who's still owed money, who's asking questions about the crew. Johnny is Vinnie's own contact into what's left of the Mafia in this city, a distant third to the Yakuza and the Triads here and shrinking, but still good for the kind of answer nobody official will give.

The name is also simply his job. He runs a two-seat shoeshine stand in one of the tiled courtyards at Union Station, on the public side of the border line, has run it longer than anybody can date, and still tells a different story about the name anyway. The trade runs on a ritual older than the station: take the chair, take the shine, and pass the tip palm to palm under an ordinary handshake while the two of you look at different walls. The shine is priced on the sign. The tip is priced by the question.

What the crew knows#

• He works for cash or favors, never on credit, and never twice for the same question in the same week.
• Everything he says came from somewhere. He won't say where.
• He is at the stand every day the hall is open, and he was there yesterday too.
• People who plainly have no shoes worth shining wait for the chair anyway: suits, surgeons, a priest once. Nobody comments.

He knows Tony Salas, who works the vehicle gate on the Melrose lot, the same way he knows most people: the same funerals, the same short list of who is owed what. Nothing is arranged and nothing is owed either way. Ask Johnny about a studio gate and Tony's name is what comes back.

One thing he will be asked and cannot answer. After run 04 the Salas family come to the stand about Tony Zamora, who took a tier and went south, and there is no word on him. Johnny has nothing, which does not happen to him, and he does not wait to say so. He is not an information source in run 05 and should not be turned into one: what he gives is the date Zamora stopped being seen and the fact that a family has now lost two, delivered by a man whose whole trade is knowing things and who is quietly rattled to be empty.

Contact#