Page 33 of Old Money

My footsteps echo on the freshly mopped floor as I follow the signs for security.

This area is also empty, except for two guards chatting beside the conveyer belt.

Just past the security area, there’s a shuttered souvenir store, a magazine stand and in the corner, a tiny coffee shop with three café tables.

Alex Chapman is sitting at the last one, waiting for me.

He lifts his chin by way of greeting, hands wrapped around a paper cup of black coffee.

He wears a fleece vest over his T-shirt.

His face is cheesy pale and studded with black stubble.

He doesn’t look like someone who spent last month cruising the Italian coast, but I do recognize his face as the same one photographed in Naples: solemn and set, his mouth a flat line.

“Don’t bother getting coffee,” he says when I reach the table, his eyes on the cup. “It’s burnt to shit.”

His blue eyes, I notice, are bloodshot.

“Are you gonna sit?” he asks mildly. “I don’t have that much time.”

He doesn’t seem like the person who called me the other night either. He’d been panting and frenzied when I answered the phone, like someone fresh from a screaming fight. He’d exploded at me: What did I want? What was so goddamn important that I’d tracked down his fucking home address?

I’d gathered myself as quickly as possible, unsure where or how to begin. It hadn’t mattered though. As soon as I found my voice, Alex cut me off.

“Not on the phone!” he’d barked, pausing. “Tuesday. I’m on an early flight out of Westchester. Because of you.”

***

Now Alex sits before me, somewhere between abashed and indignant.

“So, are you going to ask me questions, or... ?”

I watch him for another few seconds, still adjusting to his wilted, bloodless affect.

“Where are you going?”

“Upstate,” he answers. “Rehab. Third time.”

He sits back, taking a shallow sip from the steaming cup.

“I thought—you said you were leaving because of me?”

“Yep.” He nods. “They’re shipping me out again, because of you this time.”

I shake my head, confused. He raises his cup toward me in a grim toast.

“I’m not an alcoholic. Patrick is—a sober one now. For now. I’ve seen him clean up twice before, and it never lasts.”

Alex sneers into his cup.

“I’m a better fake. I do it full-time.”

“What does that mean?” I ask delicately. What are we doing here?

He takes a breath and then, with great deliberation, Alex unravels, bit by bit, before my eyes. The story spills out of him with hardly any prodding. It’s like he’s had the whole thing queued up and ready, just waiting for me—for anyone—to come along and push the button.

***

Alex and Patrick had indeed been close in high school, but by their graduation, Alex was growing weary of being the constant sidekick.

Thanks to their reckless antics, he’d already fucked up his knee and any shot of getting into an Ivy League school.

Patrick, he’d noticed, had paid no such price.

Either way, he figured, they’d have one last drunken summer, then they’d go off to college and real life would begin.

But Alex’s life changed forever, the night he served as Patrick’s alibi.

“It never occurred to me back then,” he says. “You don’t think about consequences like that when you’re seventeen.”

“Did Patrick ask you to confirm his story?” I cautiously interject. “Or was it his parents?”

“What?” Alex answers sharply. “That night? Both of them. All of them. But it’s not like—”

He stops, scrubbing at his forehead, mumbling to himself.

“What’s that?” I lean forward.

“It’s not like they asked ,” he repeats, his anger surfacing again. “Nobody pulled me aside and said, ‘Tell the cops you were with him or else.’ ”

Alex looks at me affronted.

“It was like—I’m just standing there, and Patrick’s talking to his parents, saying we were doing coke in the locker room. And at first, I’m thinking, ‘Coke? Shit, where was I?’ Like I don’t even know why he’s telling this story. I thought—”

“Wait,” I cut in again. I have to. “Just to be clear. Are you saying it’s not true?”

Alex’s face goes from irate to confused.

“You were not with Patrick during that time frame?”

He looks at the wall, then back to me, his brow knit tight.

“Are you recording this?”

“No,” I answer quickly. Shit, why am I not recording this?

“If you are,” he says a bit louder, “I do not consent.”

“I’m not recording,” I huff, pulling out my phone and dropping it face up on the table.

“Fuck it. Doesn’t matter,” he says, more to himself than me. “ No , I was not with him. Yes, I lied. All clear now?”

I nod, speechless, my whole body beating with adrenaline.

“Where were you?” I squeeze the words out.

“Fuckin’ passed out in a bathroom stall,” Alex replies.

“We’d been going pretty hard that week—last hurrah, whatever.

I didn’t even want to drink at the club party.

We’d been up the whole night before, and I literally remember thinking, Shit, I just wanna go to bed .

But we always got shit-faced at those things.

It was like a rule. So yeah, I was tanked by dinner.

” He shrugs. “Then I went to the bathroom and next thing I know, I wake up falling off the toilet.”

He chuckles at the table, his face briefly lifting, then slowly sinking into a mask of bewilderment as he continues, following the memory.

“And then I clean up and go back upstairs, and the music’s stopped and everyone’s—everyone’s running around, and it’s like, I can hear all these voices but can’t tell what anyone’s saying?

And Patrick’s there, in the gallery with his folks, and he just sort of pulls me in, the way he does.

The cops weren’t even there yet, and already he’s telling this story about the coke and the sauna in the locker room, and then they all just—” Alex tilts his head, slowly.

“They just turn to me. And I don’t know what’s going on, but I know what they want me to say.

They want me to say yes to all of it. I didn’t have a choice. ”

I turn my head, hearing the distinct note of self-pity in his voice. “You did though.”

Alex stiffens and looks back at me through lowered eyelids. I’m starting to realize how backward I had it. Alex is more than willing to talk to me. He just doesn’t want me to talk back.

“Yeah, okay, I had a choice,” he says. “And I made it, and I paid the price.”

“The price,” I repeat, my own patience thinning now. “Alex, I’m sorry but—come on, you didn’t get a drug charge. You got to go to Princeton. You’re hanging out on his yacht.”

Alex pulls his lower lip in, nodding at the floor.

“I’m not ‘hanging out’ anywhere. I’m a paid employee.” He flicks a glance upward, checking my face. “I go where he goes. That’s how it works.”

I freeze, seized by a sudden, vise-tight panic. What if he’s recording? What if he’s not alone? I look behind me at the empty coffee shop and the empty terminal beyond. I can barely hear the security guards chatting in the distance. When I turn around, Alex has a small, satisfied smile on his face.

“Guess you didn’t know that part.”

“What do you mean you go where he goes? What do you do for him?”

“Uh,” Alex says, looking up. “Let’s see, back in San Francisco, I was his ‘house manager.’ After the first rehab trip, I was ‘sober companion,’ for, like, a year.

The second rehab, they had me go with him, so that was another title change—I can’t remember.

Then we moved back east, and I think I’ve just been ‘consultant,’ ever since.

” He shrugged. “It’s just what they put on the checks.

Really, I’m just Patrick’s full-time friend. ”

“Why though?” I ask, still puzzling it together. “You mean so you can—what, keep an eye on him?”

“Yeah.” Alex bobs his head. “And so they can keep an eye on me. A little of both.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, well.” He rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

“Took me a few years too. But that’s why I got to go to Princeton—my big prize, right?

I show up at the dorm and guess who’s my roommate?

Then he’s going to California, and they book me a ticket too.

At first it’s a gift, and then it’s a favor.

‘Won’t you keep him company? We hate to have him out there all alone.

’ It’s incremental. And by the time you realize what’s happening, you’re a fuckin’ hostage. ”

Hostage . That word cuts through the fog.

“What about your house?” I blurt out. “Who are those people? The family living there.”

“Christ,” Alex says, half laughing. “Tenants.”

I picture the woman’s furrowed brow as she called to me from her car—the man beside her, eyeing me through lowered lids.

“They said they didn’t know you. They didn’t recognize your name.”

“Yeah? I don’t know theirs either. My management company handles the details. If they clear the renter, I sign the lease.” He shrugs tightly. “I think the guy works up at IBM? I don’t remember, they’ve been there a while. I know his company’s paying, and they pay on time.”

I take this in, nodding. I can see his patience dwindling further.

“So, it’s a rental property,” I state. “And the renters don’t know your name because—”

“Because who gives a shit? Because I don’t live there, and they don’t personally hand me a check every month.

The rent goes to my property managers, who take their 25 percent and transfer the rest to my business account.

Ya got me, I’m an absentee landlord. Is that what you came here to talk about? ”

Alex shuts his mouth quickly, eyes scanning the room. I keep mine on him.

“Where do you live then?”

He leans forward, eyes wide, a tiny jaw muscle flickering.

“Nowhere. Are you listening? I live wherever he lives—in whatever pool house or cottage or little detached suite they stick me in. I am a permanent guest.”

Alex lifts his eyebrows at me, a soft warning in his voice.