Chapter 22 Sadie
SADIE
In the archives of The Village Voice, she read about arson rings.
Landlords would over-insure their properties and throw kickbacks to an insurance adjuster.
After a landlord commissioned a “torch” to burn a building, the adjuster would assess the damages in the owner’s favor.
Sadie searched for a database with fire insurance application records, but neither the Fire Department nor the Department of Finance had kept one.
There was only one door left: visit the nodes in person.
Sadie rang the doorbell. She was buzzed into a waiting room with toys all over the floor and a wallpaper of pink and blue teddy bears. A few families—mostly Eastern European, one Chinese—awaited their appointments, their toddlers crawling on the rug.
“Are you sixteen?” the receptionist asked, glancing at Sadie. “Dr. Lipschutz only sees patients under sixteen.”
“Dr. Lipschutz,” Sadie repeated. Edward Lipschutz! That was one of the names from the web! “Uh, is he available to speak between patients? Briefly?”
“His schedule is packed today. Is there something I can help you with?”
Sadie glanced over her shoulder. One toddler pushed a train along a wood track. Another tapped at a rainbow xylophone.
“What about Mr. Griffiths,” Sadie asked. “Is Mr. Griffiths available?”
“Mr. Griffiths?” A look of surprise flickered across the woman’s face. “Hold on.” She stood up and crossed to an inner door, then disappeared.
The woman returned.
“If you’re looking for Mark, I’m sorry to tell you, but he passed away last September.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Sadie said, exaggerating her distress, though she couldn’t recall the name Mark. Was Mark related to Ethan Griffiths? She had promised herself not to lie to sources anymore, but this wasn’t even a source—this was just someone in the way of a source.
“That’s terrible news about Ethan.” Fuck. “I mean Mark.”
The woman tilted her head.
“Anyway, do you think I can wish the family condolences? My parents were… friends with Mark.”
Sadie could tell the lady wasn’t convinced.
“What’s your name?” she finally said, reaching for a notepad.
“Sadie… Sadie Wong.”
“I’ll tell Aaron you stopped by,” the woman replied, and she turned back to her computer to indicate the conversation was over.
Sadie made for the door and hurried across the street.
Sitting on the steps of another townhouse, she opened her laptop, pulled up ACRIS, and entered “Mark Griffiths” into the search database.
One property came up, a home just a couple of miles away.
It appeared the property had been transferred from Mark Griffiths to Aaron Griffiths earlier that year.
Also, she found an obituary she hadn’t seen before, for Ethan Griffiths—“survived by two sons, Mark and Baine, and one grandson, Aaron,” it said.
This, she concluded, was how it broke down:
Ethan Griffiths had been involved in 78 Livonia Avenue LLC. Ethan was dead.
Ethan had a son, Mark. Mark, the lady had said, was dead.
Mark had a son, Aaron. Aaron was on the deed for 9090 Eighty-Fourth Street.
“That’s where I’m going on my treasure hunt!” Sadie muttered to herself.
She rode the B1 to Dyker Heights, famous for its McMansions—at least that’s what her father had always called them.
When she was small, her father had taken her there in the winter to see the gargantuan Christmas decorations: homes lit up like Disney castles, their yards stuffed with flocks of lighted reindeers and human-size nutcracker soldiers.
In December, it was hard to believe anyone could actually live in those homes, but in spring they had a neat austerity that seemed to warn the passersby not to gawk, and certainly not to trespass.
She did so anyway—unlocked the bolt and walked right up the steps to 9090 Eighty-Fourth Street, then turned on her Olympus recorder.
It was a stone-clad house with a large patio and a border of sturdy evergreen bushes.
A minute after she rang the bell, a woman cracked the door.
She was middle-aged and heavily made-up.
“Hi. Is Aaron Griffiths home?” Sadie asked.
“May I ask what business you have with him?”
The woman seemed suspicious from the start.
“I would love to speak with Aaron about 78 Livonia Avenue,” Sadie said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m…” She was tempted to lie again, but feared compromising the integrity of the audio recording.
“I believe my grandfather was a business partner of Ethan Griffiths’s.”
At that, the lady was already closing the door. “Not interested,” she said.
Sadie put her hand against the finished wood. The woman raised her eyebrows.
“I know you’re not interested but…”
“Let go of the door.” The woman slammed it shut.
Sadie wondered what she was supposed to do now. Hoping to map the route to another spot on her web, she reached into her back pocket, only to discover her iPhone was dead.
“Damn it.”
At that moment, a black SUV drifted down the street, and the automated gate of the Griffiths house opened to admit it. The car rolled into the yard, parking in the driveway to the left of the house. Sadie shoved the dead phone back into her jeans.
“Can I help you?” a man said, lowering the window.
A voice fit for radio, clean of origin.
“Are you Aaron?” she asked as she approached. “I was wondering if you might have a moment to talk about a few properties.” He was a forty-something, clean-shaven white man in a navy-blue suit and tie, his hair slicked back with pomade—handsome in a ’90s razor commercial type of way.
“Who do you represent?”
“I think my grandfather sold your… your grandfather some property. Maybe you know his name. Richard Wong?”
“No, I don’t know that name,” he said, and he glanced at his Rolex. “And it’s been a long day, so.”
He closed the window, emerged from the car, and, avoiding her eyes, headed toward the front steps.
She scrambled to think of something to catch his attention.
“Do you know about the arson ring?” she called out. “Our grandfathers were part of an arson ring. I thought you might want to know about it.”
He turned to her again, his jaw tensed, and she thought she saw a glint of fear in his eyes.
“Are you a high school student?”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“Is this some kind of practical joke?”
“No!”
“Where’s the hidden camera?”
“I’m being serious.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He shook his head with repugnance, and opened the front door with his keys.
“Well,” she said, following him up the steps. “Shouldn’t I at least tell you—”
“You’re trespassing. Get off my property or I’m calling the police.”
He let himself in.
“Please!” She darted after him, propping the door open with her hand. “I know it’s disturbing, but we really need to talk about this.”
He did not slam the door in her face like the lady had, and she found herself stumbling into the front room.
She had never done this before—physically trespassed inside a house. At least Tyrell had held the door open.
The fineness of his McMansion chilled her. High ceilings, lacquered wood floors, mahogany stairs, carved balusters, Persian rugs, and cold enough to warrant a sweater.
He marched into another room. The lady—his wife or mother, Sadie wasn’t sure—watched in horror from the stairs.
“If your grandfather was Ethan Griffiths,” Sadie called after him, “he might know about these two properties that my grandfather sold in Brownsville to an entity called 78 Livonia LLC. All I want to do is work with you to figure out what—”
He had come back with his jacket off, his small eyes boring into her, and a gun.
“What the fuck?”
He was pointing it at her from about ten feet away. “Get out of my house.”
“Oh my god,” she cried, scooting toward the door. She was staring at the gun in his hands, and then she was deep within her head, watching a film: of herself staring at the gun in his hands. “What the literal fuck!”
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said coolly. “You’re trespassing, and under the Castle Law, it’s legal to protect my property.”
She stumbled down the stoop, grappled with the lock on the metal gate, and ran down the block. He had the semiautomatic pointed at her until she’d rounded the corner.
“What the literal, literal fuck!” she gasped once he was out of sight. She leaned her back against someone else’s wall and tried to take a deep breath. Tears came to her eyes. She slid down to the concrete.
“What the fuck! Oh my god!”
She was only twenty-four. She wanted to be home in the arms of her mother. Her mother who loved her, despite all her tempestuousness.
She struggled to her feet and tried to remember the way home.
“Fuck!” she cried to the sky, laughing, as she walked toward the nearest subway station. “Oh my god!”
All the way home, she relived the experience. She saw the moment Aaron Griffiths had pointed the gun. The amber glow of the wood floors. The woman on the staircase. Swirled in these thoughts, she almost missed her stop on the F.
And yet, after she’d spent the evening cuddling with her mother, after she’d eaten her father’s rice cakes and lap chiang, she saw her trip to South Brooklyn had been, from journalistic standards at least, a failure.
Sadie stayed up till four a.m. that night, writing down what she did know. She composed an article, though one poorly written and full of holes and question marks.
Then she thought about the draft email that had been sitting in her account for weeks, one she hadn’t had the bravery to finish. She added a few more lines to the email, attached the unfinished article, and, holding her breath, hit the send button.