“Where is it now?”
“In my wife’s name.”
Bertha raised and lowered her lids rapidly, a sure sign of interest. Her eyes, hard and intent, held Belder as a moth is held on a collector’s pin. “I think,” she said with quiet emphasis, “that I’m beginning to see. Now suppose you tell me the whole business. Begin with the things you’d decided not to tell me. We’ll save time that way.”
Belder said, “I had a partner. A man by the name of Nunnely — George K. Nunnely. We didn’t get along very well. I thought Nunnely was taking advantage of me. I still feel that he was, and always will. He was running the inside part of the business. I was on the outside. Unfortunately, I couldn’t prove anything, but I decided to get even with him in my own way. Nunnely was smart. He hired lawyers and went to court. He could prove his case against me. I couldn’t prove mine against him. He got a judgment for twenty thousand dollars.
“By that time the tide had turned and was running the other way. Salesmanship was a drug on the market. I wasn’t making a thin dime. I couldn’t have done very much no matter how hard I tried, so not having any current income, I — well, Mrs. Cool, I turned everything over to my wife; put everything in her name.”
“Did Nunnely try to set the transfer aside?”
“Naturally. He claimed it was a transfer with intent to defraud creditors.”
“When did you make it, after he got the judgment?”
“Oh, no. I was too smart for that. I don’t think I’d better say very much about that angle, Mrs. Cool, because, of course, if Nunnely could establish even now that the real intent of the transfer was to defraud creditors — well, let’s just let it go as it is, Mrs. Cool. My wife has the property.”
“And in court proceedings she had to swear it was her sole and separate property?”