I said, “No.”
“That settles it,” Bertha said. “Donald, we’ve got them licked.”
I said, “You keep forgetting the little matter of a murder.”
We dug deeper into the pile of documents. I came on some papers written in Spanish. Bertha said, “What are these?”
I said, “Let’s see if there isn’t a translation appended to them,” and turned over the pages. “It looks like a Mexican divorce.”
It was.
“Is it any good?” Bertha asked.
“Not much,” I said. “For a while some of the states in Mexico established a one-day residential qualification for getting a divorce and provided that the residence could be by proxy. A whole flock of attorneys did a land-office business getting Mexican divorces. The state supreme court punched holes in those divorces whenever the question came up for consideration, but a lot of California marriages had taken place after a Mexican divorce had been granted. Those marriages were so numerous that the authorities simply closed their eyes to their bigamous aspect and let it go at that. The general concensus of opinions is that they constitute a moral whitewash if not a legal justification.”
Bertha said, “Now why do you suppose she did that, lover?”
I said, “She wanted to re-marry, but she didn’t want Dr. Lintig to know of that marriage. She wanted to hold a club over his head. That was why she got the Mexican divorce. That’s a bet I’ve overlooked.”