Pete need not have brought up my knowledge of Johnny The Club Wallace. I had that particular fucker ingrained deep inside me.
A couple of years before Pete even transferred to the NYPD from San Francisco—and before I had been assigned to homicide—I'd been working the gangster beat. I'd gotten a bit too close to Wallace's employers in the Mafia, and that's when I'd met Johnny—and his club.
His club of choice at the time was a flexible rubber policeman's billy club. And his M.O. was to tie up his victims in some fleabag hotel or other at the fringes of Manhattan and to torture them for whatever information the Mafia wanted by raping them with the club first and then clubbing them to death with the same billy club. I was probably the first one to find out that he fucked the ones he was attracted to between the two acts with the club—and I only found that out because I probably was the first one who ever survived his assault. He got an erection off doing his victim with the club when he found the victim attractive, and I suppose he didn't think there was any reason not to put a well-worked hole to use while it was there.
I guess you could also say that it was because of me that Wallace had found his way into witness protection and had ended up here, finished off by a much thicker club than he once was prone to use.
I remember the hotel well because of its name. It was the Jefferson Davis in a particularly depressed section of the city, and despite my plight, I found that a bit amusing, because if there ever was a loser of a hotel it had been this one.
The hotel was a gay dive that rented by the hour, which was Wallace's ultimate undoing, because he'd plunked down the money for three nights, which became somewhat of a flag-waving memory jog for the night clerk there when my buddies on the force turned out to scour the city for one of their own.
Wallace had tracked me down in the Club Europa one night when I was crying in my beer over being overworked and having found someone I hoped to settle down with fucking my upstairs neighbor in our bathtub one night. I was out cruising for a quick "oh woe is me" fuck that night, and Wallace came on to me. He looked good and promised a rough fuck from how he approached me, which was exactly what I was looking for that night. He somehow slipped me a Mickey in a bar drink, however, and I was well short of sharp when he took me into the Jefferson Davis. A quick fuck was what I was after, so I might have gone with him without the senses deadening, but now we'll never know about that. I certainly had my guard down. I'd been warned a hit had been taken out on me, but, like all young and stupid men, I felt I was invincible.
