Man in the Water, page 7
“Uh-uh, no way. As Brad Heggstad’s attorney, I don’t believe that it would be prudent for me to participate in this sorry witch hunt that is being undertaken solely to distract the jury from the verifiable facts of the case. Oh, by the way, I thought you did very well during the deposition. I was proud of the way you kept your temper when Toomey started leaning on you.”
“Speaking of my temper—”
“It’s always a pleasure chatting with you, McKenzie. Love to Nina.”
* * *
By then I had found Highway 36 and was heading west through St. Paul’s northern suburbs toward Minneapolis. I made another hands-free call. This time I contacted the Stillwater Police Department. After jumping through a few hoops, I spoke to an administrator who said she would make sure that Officer Eden Stoll received my name, cell phone number, and request that she contact me.
Next I called Nevaeh.
“McKenzie, have you reconsidered?” she wanted to know.
“Yes, I have.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you.”
“I’ll try to find out what happened to your father, but Nevaeh, I’m making no promises, okay?”
“I hear you.”
“Something else, and this is important—you might not like what I discover. You might learn things you’ll wish you didn’t know. Have you thought of that?”
Nevaeh paused before answering.
“I understand,” she said. “Thank you again, McKenzie.”
“First things first—I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to call the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office. I don’t have the number, but you can probably find it on their website. I want you to call and ask them to send you a complete copy of your father’s autopsy report. I can’t do it myself because I’m not a family member.”
“Bizzy’s lawyer has a copy; I know he does.”
“Let’s not involve either of them for now. We don’t want them getting in the way.”
Nevaeh paused again.
“If my stepmother…” she said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, either,” I said. “Let’s not make any assumptions.” There’s that word again. “Your stepmother might be right about all of this. Just because we don’t like it…”
“You’re right, you’re right. I said I wanted to know the truth. Okay, the medical examiner. I’ll call him right away. It’ll be our little secret.”
Secrets, my inner voice said. As if you don’t have enough already.
“Let me know when you get the autopsy report. We’ll sit down and talk.”
“I will. McKenzie, I really appreciate this.”
FIVE
Twenty minutes later I was sitting at my desk in the office area of our condominium and staring at a computer screen. If you wanted to learn about someone these days, the first place you looked was the internet. I entered Earl John Woods’s name into a search engine and the first thing that popped up was his obituary as it appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Unlike most I’ve seen, his came with two photographs. The first featured a handsome young man dressed in a U.S. Army uniform, an American flag draped behind him. The second depicted a handsome older man wearing a black suit jacket over a white shirt. The copy beneath the photographs read:
WOODS
Earl John “E. J.”
Age 62 of White Bear Lake
Died unexpectedly March 25, 2023. Born June 10, 1960, in St. Paul.
E. J. served his country with distinction for 30 years in the U.S. Army.
Founder and partner of E. J. Woods Tree Care Services, he was a skilled landscaper and tree removal expert. He was loved by his employees and clients alike. E. J. was preceded in death by his parents, Jackson Woods and mother Carmen (Booth) Woods, and his first wife, Diahann (Puckett) Woods. E. J. will be deeply missed by his wife Elizabeth “Bizzy” (Beamon) Woods and his daughter, Nevaeh Woods.
Please join us for a celebration of E. J.’s life on Saturday, April 1, from 1 P.M. to 5 P.M at Potzmann-Schultz VFW banquet room in Maplewood, MN. Mass of Christian Burial 11 A.M. Monday, April 3 at Sacred Heart Church in White Bear Lake. Interment will be at Ft. Snelling National Cemetery.
I took notes on a legal pad because that’s what I do, underlining Potzmann-Schultz VFW Maplewood.
Next, I used my computer in an attempt to access all of Mr. Woods’s social media sites only to discover that he didn’t have any. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no LinkedIn, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, or Reddit. My first thought—good for you, Mr. Woods. My second thought—not so good for me. I had a third thought, though, and searched for social media sites maintained by Elizabeth “Bizzy” Woods.
Mr. Woods’s wife was everywhere and she posted about everything. The last three Instagram posts, for example, showed her sitting behind a meal she had ordered at the Oceanaire Seafood Room, a ritzy restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, a shot of her dressed in cycling tights, a form-fitting jersey, and a bicycle helmet while leaning against a ten-speed on the path that circled Lake of the Isles, and a pic of her lounging provocatively in a blue gown in front of the grand piano at the Commodore Bar and Restaurant, a joint in St. Paul where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to hang out, above the comment #Friday #night sets the mood for the entire weekend.
I guess she’s still in mourning, my inner voice told me.
I wondered if she was an influencer, or at least aspired to become one. She had 3,691 followers on Instagram, 2.9K followers on Twitter, and 3,011 friends on Facebook. I wrote the numbers on my notepad.
’Course, they could all be the same people.
Not all of her posts were frivolous, though. She had published several rants on Facebook in which she took issue with the insurance industry for its despicable treatment of her “darling E. J.,” not to mention the “criminal negligence of the Heggstad Marina.”
I kept surfing back in time and examining other posts involving Mr. Woods.
A pic taken at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, Elizabeth dressed all in black and still somehow managing to look sexy, her blond hair splayed across her shoulders, while an honor guard fired a volley over her late husband’s casket.
A pic of Elizabeth and Nevaeh supporting each other as they followed the casket out the front doors of Sacred Heart Church.
A pic taken at the Potzmann-Schultz VFW banquet room during Mr. Woods’s celebration of life, a dry-eyed Elizabeth smiling sweetly while surrounded by her late husband’s “comrades in arms.”
And back further still to happier times.
Earl and Elizabeth sitting behind home plate at a Minnesota Twins game.
Earl and Elizabeth walking hand in hand on a boulevard in Paris.
Riding bikes on a path along the North Shore.
Dancing at a party.
Eating dinner.
Kissing Nevaeh, each claiming a cheek.
A sunset.
A sunrise.
My favorite was a photograph of a grinning Earl Woods wearing an orange hard hat, red earmuffs, safety goggles, orange vest, Kevlar chaps, and heavy boots, with a chain saw slung over his shoulder, above the comment He’s a Lumberjack and he’s okay, the line taken from an old Monty Python skit.
Yet there were no pics of Mr. Woods on a boat or a dock or standing near water of any kind, which reminded me—Maryanne Altavilla had probably seen all of this, too.
I wonder if she knows the lumberjack song.
I searched all of Elizabeth’s social media accounts. In all of the pics that she had posted of them together, Elizabeth and Earl were both smiling as if there was no other place they would rather be and no one they would rather be with.
Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t conflict.
I wrote the word on my notepad—“conflict”—and stared at it. After a few beats, I added a question mark and stared some more. A Black man married to a white woman a full decade or more younger than he was, there must have been conflict, mustn’t there? If not between them, then certainly between them and a sizeable chunk of the population. Mustn’t there? I stared some more before asking myself, if there was conflict, where would it most likely be found?
* * *
We have a website here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes—Minnesota Court Records Online. Simply type “mncourts.gov,” add a slash and “access-case-records,” a second slash plus “MCRO.aspx,” and hit execute and you’ll be directed to a page on the Minnesota Judicial Branch website that will allow you to access district court criminal and civil records. I inputted “Woods, Earl John,” added his birth date into the search engine, and found—whoa—twenty-three results.
Most of the cases were listed as “crim/traf non-mand,” meaning the offenses were considered petty misdemeanors that carried a fine yet no jail time—speeding tickets, parking tickets, failure to stop for traffic control signal, driving after suspension, violating the open bottle law. Mr. Woods didn’t need to appear in court to deal with them.
Two events reached felony status, however.
In the first, Mr. Woods was convicted of Aiding and Abetting Burglary in the First Degree and sentenced to forty-five months. Except he appealed on the grounds of “insufficient evidence of his identity.” He claimed that the closed-circuit video taken of two men breaking into a tech store did not adequately identify him; that he was arrested solely because of his alleged personal relationship with the man that the video did adequately identify, another Black man named Keith Martin. The appeals court agreed and ruled that Woods should be given a new trial. The county attorney went to Martin and offered him a reduced sentence if he ratted out Woods. Martin refused. The CA subsequently dropped all charges against Woods, although Martin was sent to the Oak Park Heights Correctional Facility.
In the second, Mr. Woods was convicted of Aiding and Abetting Racketeering. It was a rather vague charge and I couldn’t find anything on the website that provided specific details, although a second charge that had been dismissed offered a hint—Aiding and Abetting in the Business of Concealing Criminal Proceeds. During my time as a cop I had always been impressed by the number of people who claimed that they were given something “to hold” for a friend that they didn’t know was stolen. Mr. Woods was sentenced to time served—twenty-one days in the Washington County Jail—and placed on supervised probation for five years, monitored by Washington County Community Corrections. There was a line at the very bottom of the first page of the sentencing order that made me go “Hmm,” though. The question, “Was this a departure from the sentencing guidelines?” was immediately followed by the answer, “Yes.”
A nod to his service record, I decided. Which made me wonder …
I did the math on my notepad. Mr. Woods was born in 1960. He did thirty years in the service of his country. Assuming he enlisted when he was a kid—eighteen, nineteen—he would have retired in 2008. His first brush with the system was June 18, 2008.
Are we watching a longtime veteran adjusting to the real world? my inner voice asked.
He must have finally pulled it together, I determined, because the last time Mr. Woods’s name was cited on the Minnesota courts’ website was in March 2010. Following that, Mr. Woods didn’t receive so much as a traffic summons.
After adding all of that to my notes, I looked up Elizabeth Woods and found—nothing. Undeterred, I inputted Elizabeth Beamon’s name into the search engine and holy mackerel! She had more results than Mr. Woods. Thirty-two by my count, most of them for parking tickets. Apparently, she had never seen a parking meter that couldn’t be ignored. Among all the other cases attached to her name, though, were a couple of eviction notices, a Disorderly Conduct-Offensive, Abusive, Noisy, Obscene Behavior citation, and two felony convictions.
The first—Soliciting/Inducing/Promoting Prostitution, Sex Trafficking. According to the sentencing order she was to be committed to the Commissioner of Corrections at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee for sixty-two months. However, the sentence was stayed for five years. Was this a departure from the sentencing guidelines? Yes.
The second felony—Identity Theft / Eight or More Direct Victims / Combined Loss Greater Than $35,000. Once again, she was sentenced to serve a prison term in Shakopee, this time for seventy-eight months. Once again the sentence was stayed. Was this a departure from the sentencing guidelines? You betcha.
A pretty girl can get away with almost anything in Minnesota, my inner voice reminded me.
Yet something must have clicked because from that day forward Elizabeth Beamon never again had any contact with the system, either. At least not according to the website.
Don’t tell me she actually started paying her parking fees.
I noticed something, though, while I was transcribing all this information. The dates. Elizabeth Beamon was summoned to the Washington County Courthouse in Stillwater for the last time on Thursday, March 11, 2010.
I checked my notes for Earl Woods. He had also been at the Washington County Courthouse in Stillwater on Thursday, March 11, 2010.
Jesus, you don’t think that’s where they first set eyes on each other, do you? Talk about meeting cute.
* * *
My next search led me to the website of E. J. Woods Tree Care Services. It featured a lot of photographs of Earl Woods and his people—all dressed in orange shirts and vests and wearing orange hard hats—as they removed trees that had fallen on houses and fences, that were blocking streets and alleys, and one that was leaning precariously against a bridge. In addition, there were other less dramatic pics of them simply trimming and removing trees that apparently needed to be trimmed and removed, plus a few shots of his team actually planting trees. The copy introduced:
E. J. WOODS TREE CARE SERVICES
Emergency Storm Cleanup a Specialty
E. J. Woods Tree Care Services is made up of passionate individuals, nearly all of them veterans of America’s armed services, who are ready, willing, and able to meet any challenge head-on whether it’s the careful removal of a tree or a major cleanup following a storm.
Starting in 2012, our mission has been to provide residential and commercial property owners with the best and most timely tree pruning, tree and stump removal, and emergency cleanup services in the Greater Twin Cities area. Our strongest asset is our people, whose combined knowledge and experience rival the largest and oldest firms around.
This is not a nine-to-five job for us, but a life commitment to be available when you need us most. This is especially true when a storm hits.
While your priority must be the care and safety of your family, your employees, and yourself, ours will be to eliminate the danger, mitigate the damage, and handle the cleanup. As a result, you can always trust E. J. Woods Tree Care Services to take care of you.
Yelp gave them four-point-eight stars based on 243 reviews.
Is this what put Mr. Woods back on the straight and narrow? I checked the dates again. He was last seen in a Minnesota courtroom in March 2010. He started his business in 2012. Did E. J. Woods Tree Care Services give him a purpose in life? Him and Bizzy?
I studied the website some more. I searched for a link that might help identify the company’s principals and employees and found nothing.
I wrote more notes:
Obit says Mr. Woods was founder and partner.
Who was his partner? Bizzy?
Who owns E. J. Woods Tree Care Services now?
* * *
The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State also has a website. One of the pages on the website allows you to search for the name of any business in the state. I typed in “E. J. Woods Tree Care Services” and discovered the name was owned by Norfolk LLP. Next I searched for “Norfolk LLP” and learned only that it was a registered limited liability partnership and the address for its chief executive office was the same as the address for E. J. Woods Tree Care Services. I couldn’t find Mr. Woods’s name much less his partner’s.
There must be an easy way to uncover these names, I told myself.
* * *
I strolled through the contact list on my cell phone, found the name I was looking for, and hit call. A few moments later a woman answered.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Honest to God, H, I thought I was a valued client, yet you talk to me like I’m imposing on you.”
“I’ve known you for a long time, McKenzie. You don’t make social calls and you don’t do small talk.”
“I do small talk. ’Course I do. How ’bout the Wild? Could they possibly have had a worse playoff run?”
H. B. Sutton didn’t respond. I could picture her sipping tea and staring out of the porthole or whatever they call windows on a houseboat.
“Minnesota Wild,” I added. “They play professional hockey.”
I heard a deep sigh followed by words so steeped in frustration that I nearly apologized.
“So, McKenzie,” Sutton said. “What do you want?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sutton was the most no-nonsense person I had ever known. I blamed her flower children parents for her brusque manner and so did she. They thought they were being cute when they named their daughter Heavenly-love Bambi. Instead, they doomed her to a life of teasing and mockery.
“Try growing up with a name like that,” she once told me. “Especially while wearing the peasant blouses and skirts my parents dressed me in, the flat sandals. Try going to high school or college; try getting a job; try being taken seriously by anybody.”
When she reached an age where she could make her own decisions, she stopped using the name, becoming H. B. or just H to the lucky few she called friend. She also immersed herself in the business of money, the one thing that everybody took seriously. She was the financial advisor I had alluded to during the deposition, the woman who made me independently wealthy.
“I met a fellow traveler this morning,” I said. “A CFP. Instead of a houseboat, he works off his yacht. He thinks you two should form a club.”
