"Yes."
"What about your adopted mother?"
"She died when I was four."
"Do you like your adopted father?"
"No."
"Why?"
"You ask a lot of questions," he said.
"I get paid to ask a lot of questions."
"But I'm only paying you two tacos."
"Payment is payment."
David looked at me, squinting against the last of the sun that was hovering somewhere over my right shoulder. David had a smattering of freckles over his nose and cheekbones. I predicted in two years the freckles would be gone. My son had freckles, too.
Shit. I took in a lot of air. When I had some control over myself, I said, "Why don't you like your father?"
"Because he's lazy and says shitty things."
"Did he ever hit you?"
"No."
"But he was psychologically abusive."
David nodded. "Yeah, that."
"How was he lazy?"
He shrugged. "He never worked. We usually lived with his girlfriends, until they kicked us out. He made me start working at fourteen, at a girlfriend's cookie shop. Then he took most of the money I made."
"He put you to work and then took your money?"
"Basically."
"What do you think about that?"
"I hate him."
I asked him some more questions and I did my best to piece together his often stunted, one-word answers. The kid had known at a young age that he was adopted. His father, apparently, liked to throw his adoption in his face. No doubt to be cruel. Apparently his father had not taken his wife's death too well. In the years after, the man had spent much of his time drinking and man-whoring.
David, at about age fifteen, began looking for his birth mother, until he quickly discovered that he couldn't request birth parent records in the state of California until he, the adoptee, was twenty-one. But the kid was dogged and industrious, and soon he had the help of a sympathetic superior court judge, who happened to be the mother of a close friend. The judge stepped in and was able to convince the Department of Social Services to release David's birth mother's records. She cited extenuating, extraordinary circumstances, the only reason the state would release such information.
David didn't know what the extenuating, extraordinary circumstance were, but I suspected the judge had simply pulled a few strings.
Now with her help, he was able to track down his mother all the way to Los Angeles, only to discover that she had been slain two years earlier. A mother who had left behind two children and a vast fortune. Those two children were being raised by grandparents; the father, of course, was currently awaiting execution at San Quentin.
The superior court judge next got hold of the will. In the will, Evelyn Drake, his birth mother, in an extreme act of generosity, had set up a significant trust fund for him, should he ever come looking for her.
David, who was already making arrangements to live with his adopted mother's sister here in southern California, was set to inherit a good deal of money.
But state law insists on a DNA test. So one was set, and when it came time to administer the test; meaning, extracting DNA from his mother's corpse, the body had been discovered missing.