The Coniston Curse Hugo Miller Mystery 5: The wealthy Coniston family is infected with fights and intrigues. Then the two sons of the recently deceased paterfamilias vanish on their way home from school, only to be found dead soon thereafter. Whodunnit?

The Coniston Curse Hugo Miller Mystery 5: Mystery/LGBTQ

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BLURB: Dr. Hill’s Poet

Two teen-age brothers vanish walking home from school, and are found dead more than twenty miles from their posh Trinity School on the upper west side of Manhattan. They set out to walk home to their family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, near 96thStreet. Were they kidnapped? No ransom demand is ever made. How did the boys get to Westchester County? They both died from blunt force trauma, probably from falling from a tree or a cliff. Based on a real family tragedy from the late Middle Ages but set in today’s New York, Monte Carlo and Westchester County, the story of who did what to whom in the troubled Coniston family is surprising and chilling.

EXCERPT: The Coniston Curse

Gabriele was already waiting at Thalia when I walked in. He is an unusually handsome Italian fellow. He and his cousin, Dante, own a super-popular restaurant in SoHo called Ora di Pranzo. Dante is from Naples. Gabriele is from the famous Isle of Capri, setting the theme at Ora di Pranzo, where the menu is heavily weighted toward seafood.

He was standing, resting his back on the bar so he could see the front door of the restaurant, and I did a quick scan of the room, where virtually every female with a line of sight was staring at him, and some of the men.

I knew a tennis player, from my years in sports PR, who was a famous beauty, and I remember waiting at a bar on the east side for her to join me for dinner. When she walked in, every head turned as she walked down the bar to where I was standing, calmly put her hand on the nape of my neck and kissed me on the cheek. I could see all the men at the bar thinking, she’s with that old guy? Similar sort of thing happens when Gabriele walks into a room.

It doesn’t hurt that wherever he goes, the food and drinks are comped because he is so well known for his restaurant.

He held his hand out and I shook it, then we did the European kiss-kiss thing, one on each cheek.

The bartender put a dirty vodka down on the bar for me – I used to live a block away from Thalia before I moved to Long Island City. It was only a few minutes after noon, but I didn’t turn it down. Gabriele sipped on a glass of red wine. Although I am fond of dirty vodka, vodka with olive ‘juice’ – the liquid in the bottle, very salty, I decided to stop after a couple of sips. We were going to the police precinct, after all.

Gabriele told me he watched coverage of the Coniston kidnapping on television. Like Ruth, he knew some of the family from times they had been at the restaurant, including the recently deceased Eddie, his wife, Lizzie, and his younger brother, Ricky. He had never met any of the children.

I reluctantly left a lot of the vodka in the martini glass, and left a big tip for the bartender, something you do when the food or drink is comped. Then we walked over to the PD precinct. The Halal truck was in front of the precinct. I had my taste buds primed for some falafel, which looks like meatballs, but is made with ground dried beans, olive oil, scallions, lemon juice and parsley mostly – no meat of any kind, and usually green or yellowish when you bite into them, depending on what kind of beans were used. It sticks to your ribs like meat does. I don’t eat red meat, haven’t for years.

We ordered two falafel lunches, falafel on top of yellow rice and what the truck guys call ‘salad’, which is lettuce and tomato with a couple of French fries and pickle slices on top. Then we ordered a chicken lunch and a gyro lunch, pronounced like “year-oh” in Greek and a combo of beef and lamb. If you’ve never had Halal food from a truck, you have no idea what six bucks can buy, or how wonderful it tastes. We took the four lunches upstairs to Mike’s office.

Ruth and Mike were camped out in one of the interrogation rooms and had left the door open so we could find them. I claimed one of the falafel lunches. I could eat the chicken lunch, but I prefer the falafel. Surprisingly, Gabriele chose the gyro lunch, Ruth took the other falafel, and Mike took the remaining lunch, chicken. I got some containers of white sauce, mayo and yogurt, maybe something else in it, and red sauce, fiery peppery liquid that’s hotter than Tabasco sauce, and offered them to everyone. Gabriele and I dumped both sauces on our lunches, Ruth chose white only, and Mike chose red only. Glad I’m not a betting man, because I would have lost every bet, I could shake hands on.

Together, Ruth and Gabriele are like a society data base. I listened closely to what they had to tell us. Mike taped the whole meeting and took notes, too.

Ruth said Eddie and Ricky’s mother, Cecily Coniston, started a minor scandal some years back, when Eddie decided to marry Elizabeth Westbrook Harrison, a girl Cecily didn’t approve of. They had an argument in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons that was overheard by enough people it was reported on most of the television channels that night. Eddie maintained it was his right to pick his own wife. Cecily said, loudly, she found a suitable young lady whose family was distantly related to Cecily’s own branch of the Neval family. She then instructed him unequivocally that he was to marry this young woman who was Cecily’s second cousin once removed, which made her Eddie’s third cousin, no impediment to marriage.

Eddie wasn’t having any of it, because he had fallen in love with Lizzie, ‘no family at all’ was Cecily’s comment, and fully intended to marry her at Saint Bart’s on Park Avenue in short order.

The two of them kept ordering drinks and arguing, although they were never loud enough to be asked to leave.

“She is already married, and has a bunch of children,” Cecily said, loudly enough to be heard across the room.

The maître d’ started to walk over, and she waved him away, lowering her voice.

“She is divorced,” he said, “no impediment to marriage there either.”

“She’s a nobody.”

“She’s gonna be my wife. Tell your cousin thanks but no thanks.”

The next morning, the gist of this hour-long discussion was reported in a daily tabloid that was read widely in New York, following the late-news coverage on television. Naturally, a reporter called Eddie, who hung up with no comment, then called Cecily, who did. What Cecily said threw everyone in the family in a cocked hat.

“Eddie is not Richard Coniston’s son,” she said bluntly, referring to her deceased husband, “and should never have inherited the Coniston fortune.”

According to what she told the reporter, Richard had gone on an extended business trip to Australia, and while he was gone, Cecily had an affair. “I loved Richard, and I don’t know why I did it, but it was a long time ago, and I never told him. But I guarantee you that if someone does a DNA test on Eddie – or on Eddie’s children – they will find no matches to Richard, or to Ricky (her youngest child), who is the only legitimate heir. Look in your files for a picture of my husband and see if you think he could have been Eddie’s father!”

The question in the gossip columns was simple: why would Cecily Coniston tell the world that she had an affair and an illegitimate son if it wasn’t true? It would ruin her own reputation, of course. She was many years a widow and clearly had no intention of re-marrying, but her friends would shun her, of course, and she would become a nobody herself.

A couple of days later, Cecily was found dead in her bedroom at the Coniston Mansion on 5th Avenue. The coroner labeled her death a suicide, based on the high level of opioids in her blood and digestive tract.

Eddie married Lizzie, and faced the world with pride and defiance. After a while, the kerfuffle died down and was largely forgotten.

“Then, to cap it all off, George Coniston, who, like Ricky, was Eddie’s brother, and the next-eldest in the family, sued Eddie to reclaim the family businesses for the true heir – himself,” Ruth harrumphed. “Cecily wasn’t in the ground yet, and George wanted everything for himself.”

“George was the one who drowned, right?” Mike asked.

“Yes,” Ruth answered. “He took his yacht to California and one evening that summer, he drank too much and fell overboard in Avalon harbor and drowned. No evidence of foul play is what they said.”

“There are some rich families it’s a blessing not to be related to,” I said.

Mike nodded his head and added that Richard Coniston, Cecily’s husband and Eddie’s putative father, was murdered years earlier by a cousin who had accused him of trying to steal the land the cousin’s home was built on. It had been such a bitter relationship that when Richard was killed, the cousin cut off his head and put it on a pole in his front yard. He spent the rest of his life in a private psychiatric hospital in northern Westchester County.

“It’s like the family in the House of Seven Gables,” I said. “A curse that runs from generation to generation.”

KEYWORDS

murder, accidental death, kidnapping, dead boys, family curse, LGBTQ

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JosephAllen.Author

Twitter handle: @josephallenir

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