…not an investment banker? His real name is Kyle Dorsey, and he’s wanted in two states for fraud.”
My daughter, Emma, went white. “His name is Alexander,” she whispered.
The waitress, a young woman named Tasha, had a cast on her left wrist. Last Thursday, she’d been crossing this restaurant’s parking lot after her shift when a black sports car backed into her at speed. The driver got out, saw she was hurt, and instead of calling 911, he offered her ten thousand dollars cash to say she’d tripped. Then he drove away before she could answer.
She’d written down his license plate. The police traced it to a car rented under a false name. When she saw that same face at our table and that same number on the receipt, she called them.
“He thought I wouldn’t recognize him in a suit,” she said.
The officers handcuffed “Alexander” at our table. Emma kept staring at him, waiting for him to explain. He didn’t say a word to her.
At the station, we learned the rest. Kyle Dorsey had spent five years posing as a wealthy financial adviser. He targeted successful women in their thirties, dated them for a few months and convinced them to “invest” with him. Then he disappeared. Emma had given him forty-two thousand dollars of her savings three weeks earlier. He’d told her it was going into a private fund.
The receipt with the ten-thousand-dollar tip was the final straw. His credit card was stolen too.
Emma cried in my car all the way home. She kept saying she should have seen it. I told her what the detective had told us: he’d done this to at least seven other women, including a lawyer and a doctor. He was very, very good at it.
The police recovered part of Emma’s money from one of his accounts. Tasha’s medical bills were paid by the restaurant’s insurance. Kyle Dorsey was sentenced to nine years.
A few months later, Emma and I went back to the same steakhouse. Tasha was our waitress again, with her wrist healed. When the bill came, Emma left her a two-hundred-dollar tip and a thank-you note. Tasha said it was the best tip she’d ever received, because it came with no conditions.
