Winter Counts(69)
“You find any evidence of that?”
She nodded. “Yeah, bank deposits to her personal account, a few other receipts. She’s been cheating the tribe, no doubt. Probably find more scams, if I looked deeper.”
“So what are you going to do? You finally got Delia, you can expose her as a thief and fraud. Just like you’ve been saying all these years.”
“Yeah, she’s the worst. Stealing money from the people—makes my blood boil.”
“Well, she can rot in jail,” I said. “Embezzling government funds—the feds won’t ignore that. She’ll probably get ten years or more.”
She took a drink, then frowned. “You don’t get it. If I report Delia, Lack goes down too. All the good work he’s doing to help our people is over. So what do I do? Take out Delia and send Lack to jail? Then the oyate really suffer. Send two people to prison, hurt the entire tribe. No justice in that.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Those assholes steal over a hundred thousand dollars from the tribe, they deserve prison time,” I said. “Live in a cage, shit in a metal bowl—that’ll be some justice.”
“Right, and the indigenous food revolution stops. He’ll be disgraced, which is fine, but so will the movement. Not to mention, the government will never award us another grant.”
“It can’t be just one guy with the healthy food?” I said. “There must be others talking about Native cooking and all that.”
“Not really. He’s the one getting the word out there in the press. He gets arrested, the media would jump all over it.”
“Can’t you report Delia and leave Lack out of it?”
“I thought about that, but there’s a paper trail leading to him. No way the prosecutors would miss it.”
This seemed incredible to me. She was actually planning to let these thieves steal a huge sum of money from the tribe and walk away. This wasn’t the Marie I knew.
“All right, I get that you don’t want to involve Lack,” I said. “I don’t agree, but I see your reasons. But if you don’t rat out Delia, she’ll just keep stealing. From the people. You think about that?”
She sighed. “Yeah, I have. All night long. Best I can come up with is this: maybe after the election, I go to my dad and tell him to keep Delia away from accounts payable. But I know him. He’ll start asking questions and figure it out.” She looked over at me, and I saw the anguish on her face. “Probably the best thing is for me to stay out of it, go become a doctor. Then I can at least help a few people. Instead of just fucking everything up.”
She put her head down on the table, only her black hair visible, her shoulders shuddering slightly.
I didn’t know how to comfort her, not when she was in such pain. I settled for a hand on her arm, the scabs and calluses on my knuckles contrasting against her soft skin. After a while, she took my hand, and we stayed there, silent.
24
The next weeks were hard. Marie remained depressed about the fraud she’d uncovered and wounded by the discovery that Lack was just another swindler. She’d believed in his work to change Native diets, which made the discovery all the more painful. Despite my attempts to persuade her, she stood by her decision not to report the embezzlement, because she didn’t want to derail the work Lack was doing nor create a scandal for the food program on our reservation. As for me, I would have happily sent both Delia and Lack to prison, but Marie had to work this out on her own, and she’d decided to focus on the greater good. She was convinced that Delia and Lack would receive the fate they deserved, that the universe would ensure it. I was skeptical, but kept my opinions on fate and justice to myself.
Not to mention, I had my own issues to deal with. Although I tried not to think about it, Nathan still had to wear the wire in order to fulfill the terms of his agreement with the prosecutors. He’d been laying low at school as he’d been instructed, waiting to hear from the heroin dealers and not raising any suspicions. He didn’t say anything more to me about kids bullying him at school, although I didn’t know if this had anything to do with my intervention with Ray Sits Poor or if he was just keeping quiet about it.
One afternoon, Nathan said he had something to tell me.
“Leksi, I saw those guys. You know, with the drugs. They were hanging around after school, and they asked if I wanted to buy some. I said yes.”
He looked at me like he’d done something wrong, but I think he was just scared. Scared of wearing the wire, scared of kids finding out what he’d done, scared that his life might change. Again.
“I’ll call the lawyer.”
I CONTACTED Charley Leader Charge first. When I finally got in touch with him, he said he’d phone the investigators right away and I should wait to hear from them. It didn’t take long. Dennis called me within the hour, said he’d start setting up the sting. Dennis spoke to Nathan on the phone, said that Nathan should talk to the dealers and find out when they could deliver the drugs. He told him to ask to buy more heroin, about ten times what he’d bought before. If they asked why he was getting so much, Nathan was to say that half of it was for a friend. He was to make sure that the deal would go down at the school, either inside or nearby. As soon as Nathan set up the day and time for the buy, he’d be fitted with the listening device. The wire.