Read Online Killer Colt by Harold Schechter - Free Book Online Page B

“I am to get the proceeds.”
    Wells did not conceal his surprise. “There must be a misunderstanding between you,” he said, explaining that Colt also “expected to receive the proceeds.”
    Upon hearing this news, Adams became visibly agitated—“vexed and excited,” as Wells later described it. Exclaiming that he would “go see Colt” at once, he hurried from the office.
    The time, Wells subsequently testified, was “about three o’clock.” 4
    •   •   •
    Situated in the northeast corner of City Hall Park was a circular brick building called the Rotunda. It had been erected in 1817 by the artist John Vanderlyn upon his return from Paris, where—thanks to financial support from his patron, Aaron Burr—he had gone to study in the atelier of the neoclassicist François Antoine Vincent. During the first years of its existence,Vanderlyn’s imposing New York City gallery housed a number of his panoramic paintings, including
Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles
and
The Battle of Waterloo
, as well as his depictions of Adam and Eve in a state of semi-undress. Though the scandal created by the public display of these partially nude figures drew the predictable crowds of gawkers, Vanderlyn’s enterprise—often considered the city’s first art museum—proved a “complete financial failure.” The “unfortunate artist was forced to surrender his property to the city,” which employed it “successively as the home of the Court of Sessions, the Naturalization Office, and the Post Office.” 5
    Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on September 17, the City Hall clerk John Johnson, having completed an errand at the Rotunda, was emerging from the building when he spotted Samuel Adams walking briskly up Centre Street toward Broadway. Johnson had already seen and spoken to the printer twice that day, first at Adams’s shop, then at the Board of Foreign Missions office. This time Adams “took no notice” of the clerk. A look of grim determination on his face, the printer strode toward the corner of Broadway and Chambers.
    “I turned and looked after him,” Johnson later said, describing the last time he ever set eyes on Samuel Adams. “He kept on.” 6

22

    A lmost certainly, the noise that Asa Wheeler and his pupil heard from the neighboring room did not sound precisely as they later described it: “like the clashing of foils, as if persons were fencing.” 1 Though a lethal weapon was involved, the noise was generated by the impact of blade against bone, not metal on metal.
    There are good reasons why the two men might have been mistaken. Immersed in their lesson, they were not paying close attention to the goings-on next door. The intervening wall would also have distorted the sound. And though it was a cold and drizzly day, the Broadway-facing windows of Wheeler’s office had been raised, filling the room with the ceaseless clamor of the great thoroughfare and obscuring any noise from next door.
    Still, while it might not have sounded exactly like the striking of swords, the sound was sufficiently jarring to startle them from their work.
    “What was that?” said Wheeler, looking up from the sheet of ruled paper on which he had been inscribing a basic bookkeeping exercise for his student.
    Seated beside him on the bench, Wheeler’s student—a sixteen-year-old named Arzac Seignette, who was there for his first day of lessons—replied that he had no idea.
    Rising from the bench, Wheeler crossed his room and stepped into the hallway, Seignette following close behind. The time was around 3:15 p.m., Friday, September 17.
    With his ear pressed to Colt’s door, Wheeler listened intently. Silence. Kneeling, he put his eye to the keyhole, but the drop was down on the insideof the door. In his right hand, he still clutched the steel pen he had been using when he and Seignette were interrupted by the strange noise. Inserting the tip of the pen into the keyhole, he slid the drop aside and peered