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over and quickly dropped the accusation.
    And then the next day, miraculously, Dalia came home with a cashier’s check in the amount of $191,000. He stopped her when she tried to explain the metaphysical happenstance by which this unlikely outcome had been achieved. He didn’t want to hear it. For the first time since she had offered to help him, things were finally moving in the right direction. Then he looked at the check and “rubbed it on his arm” to ensure that it was real.
    It was an authentic cashier’s check, all right, and in the correct amount. But in place of Dalia’s name was a name he had never heard before: Erik Tal.
    When he queried her on it, Dalia identified him as the husband of a girlfriend of hers, Kerrian Brown, a pretty Jamaican woman and mother of four whom she had worked with at Beachfront Realty. She told Mike that she’d had to reverse the wire to a third party. Or something. But it was money, and it was accessible, so he let it go.
    The next morning, March 30, they drove to Entin’s Fort Lauderdale office forty minutes away. But as soon as they were seated at his desk, Dalia became hysterical. Mike had doubted her after the CityPlace incident the day before, their trust was now broken, and she no longer wished to invest $91,000 in his future. She would not turn over the check to him until she had the money in her hand. Entin advised Mike that if she didn’t want to turn over the money, there was nothing he could do about it. He added that wire transfers generally take one to two business days, not all month, and told them to come back when they had come to an agreement. For his part, Mike felt like he was standing at the door of the solution to all his problems, only to have someone slam it in his face and bolt it from the other side. He still had roughly $140,000 in his safety deposit box. So, leaving Dalia there, he drove the half hour to Boca Raton and took out $91,000 in cash, put it in a Publix shopping bag, then returned and gave her the cash. She handed him an envelope with the check in it, and he marched back into the lawyer’s office and left it with the receptionist. When he came back out, Dalia was gone.
    As Mike stood there at the elevator banks contemplating his next move, the lawyer came running out of his office, screaming excitedly. He showed Mike the check. Everything about it was exactly the same as the check they had just been wrangling over, except now it was for $191.
    “I told you there was something wrong with this girl,” Entin said.
    Mike dialed Dalia, who answered on the first ring. She was down at the car, along with her friend Kerrian Brown and her husband, the enigmatic Erik Tal. Late thirties, skinny, Israeli, with a marked receding hairline and hooded eyes that missed nothing, Erik watched Mike like a cobra to determine which way things were going to go. Mike ignored him, demanding his money back from Dalia, who surrendered it willingly. He told her to get in the car. On the long drive home, she insisted Erik had switched checks on them. All he could think of was, who leaves a $191,000 check out in the open, and why wasn’t it in her purse?
    Back at home, between her intermittent crying jags, Dalia called Erik, who got on the phone with Mike. The first thing he said was, “I told her to tell you what happened.” Erik’s story—the one he had gotten from Dalia— was that she had lost the money in a dubious wire-transfer fraud. Whatever the mechanics of it, the money was gone, and she was terrified it would hasten the end of their marriage. So at his wife’s behest, and against his better judgment, Erik had agreed to loan her the money for Mike’s restitution, as a favor, to be repaid out of the money Dalia was expecting on her real estate closings. He was still willing to go forward with that loan. Only now, on account of the aggravation, it was no longer a favor. In exchange for ten points on the entire $191,000 ($19,000), Erik would loan Mike the