It seems that Mr. Campos, our client, had plotted and planned to kill his next door neighbor, a young man he had come to loathe in such a way that living next to him had become unbearable. I had no idea what the circumstances surrounding the murder were, as Adrian had not given any details in his notes. We had been working together for so many years that he trusted me to get all the relevant information.
Once I arrived at the jail, I walked over to the far corner of the waiting room and handed my driver’s license to a corrections officer seated behind the bullet proof glass, along with my private investigator’s license and a letter from Adrian stating he was the attorney representing Mr. Lionel Campos.
Back at my office, I had skimmed the “A form” — the arrest affidavit — and learned that Mr. Campos had been born in Cuba, was sixty years of age, married, and lived in Hialeah, just like thousands of other Cubans who had come to Miami fleeing Fidel Castro. As I waited in the interview room, I decided to spend the time reading the rest of the A form. According to the report, Mr. Campos had killed his neighbor, a Mr. Kent Murphy, twenty-eight years old, Caucasian (or, as they were referred to in Miami demographics, a non-Hispanic white), single.
I was on my third reading of the A form when Mr. Campos walked in. I don’t know what I had expected, but it sure as hell was not the slight, sallow-looking, white-haired individual with the twinkling blue eyes that came into the interview room.
I stood up and extended my right hand. “Mr. Campos? I’m Lily Ramos, the investigator from your attorney Mr. Langer’s office.”
Mr. Campos shook my hand, even as he checked me over with a skeptical look on his face. I was not surprised at his reaction, as I knew I did not fit most individuals’ preconceived idea of what a private investigator should look like. I was small — five feet tall if the wind was blowing right — and, although curvy, I only tipped the scales at one hundred pounds. I was olive-skinned, with straight, shoulder-length, light-brown hair and caramel-colored eyes. Although I carried a big, heavy gun — a Colt .45 (I had bad vision, so I wanted to make sure that if I had to shoot someone, I would not miss my mark) — I was not exactly intimidating.
“You have some kind of ID?” Mr. Campos was not the first client who doubted me, so I had come prepared. I took out one of my business cards from inside my notepad and handed it over to him. I waited while Mr. Campos carefully examined it, turning the small white card over as if there might be a secret message somewhere on it. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine,” I answered. Then, thinking I was sounding just a bit too curt, I added, “I just had a birthday.”
“You look very young — maybe twenty,” Mr. Campos commented. It was not meant as a compliment and I did not take it as such. “Okay, we can start. What do you want to know?”
“Well, could you please tell me a bit about yourself, and then we’ll talk about what happened — ending up with how and why you’re here,” I said. “Whatever you tell me will be kept in the strictest of confidence.”
Mr. Campos, who had come over with his wife from Cuba thirty years before, had lived in the same house in Hialeah since then. He had worked as an automobile mechanic — he specialized in repairing air conditioners — at the same store since his arrival in Miami. His wife worked in a factory, as a seamstress. Although they had been very happy together, the couple had no children — “a great sadness,” as he said.
Mr. Campos told me that he had retired from his job five years before, not by choice, but on his doctor’s orders, due to a heart condition which was being aggravated by his work as an air conditioner repairman. His wife, who was ten years younger than him, continued to work. According to Mr. Campos, he did not like just hanging out with other old guys — all they did was drink cheap beer, play dominos, and tell lies about life back in Cuba — so he dedicated himself to improving their home, thinking that if he were to fix up the place nicely, he and his wife could sell it, and with the profits they were sure to make, move into an assisted-living community. He spent hours landscaping the garden, and took great pride in the results.
Mr. Campos also began to take an interest in cooking, and said he very much enjoyed surprising his wife with the meals he had prepared for her when she came home from work. He would try out new recipes, tweaking the ingredients here and there until he was satisfied. He even invented several recipes for marinating especially tough cuts of meat before barbequing them, some of which were so successful that his wife asked for a list of the ingredients. Life was good, and it seemed that it would only get better.
It had been two years ago, when the new neighbors moved in, that the “trouble” began. The owner of the house next door had died, and his children sold the home to a gay couple. At first, although he disapproved of gay people and the “gay lifestyle,” Mr. Campos had tried to be a good neighbor, greeting them whenever he saw them, even talking to them on occasion. Yet neither the Campos nor the couple ever went into each others’ homes, and it continued that way for the first year.
It was during the second year that the situation started to deteriorate. The gay couple began having trouble — first arguments, then shouting matches that escalated into physical attacks on each other, which became so violent that the police had to come on several occasions. Finally, much to everyone’s relief, one of the men moved out, and peace was restored in the neighborhood.
All was going well until the day when the remaining neighbor decided to buy a dog to help himself get over his loneliness. Everything would have been fine except for the fact that he was not just a dog, but a mastiff, a huge animal which barked all day. When he wasn’t barking, the dog was howling.
The neighbor, who worked as a personal trainer in one of the giant gyms located in a mall a few miles away from home, was away for hours at a time, which meant the dog was alone — and lonely — a condition that he let everyone know about.
Mr. Campos told me he liked dogs all right, but the neighbor’s mastiff drove him crazy. Not only did he bark and howl, he also left enormous smelly poops all over the neighborhood. The dog was especially fond of defecating on Mr. Campos’s front lawn, marring the landscaping he had so meticulously worked on. Mr. Campos told the neighbor on numerous occasions to pick up after his dog, but the neighbor did not pay any attention, and continued to let his dog run wild. Mr. Campos even put up a fence to keep the dog out, but the animal just jumped over it.
Mr. Campos went on to tell me that he began plotting how best to remedy the situation. He had become so consumed by his relationship with his neighbor and dog that he began thinking about it almost continuously. Things got so bad that his wife told him to get over it and deal with it, or, if he couldn’t do it by himself, get professional help. The fact that his wife told him he needed to see a psychiatrist had been the last straw. He had to do something about the dog, and he had to act fast, while he still had his sanity.
As I listened to Mr. Campos run through the events which led to him killing his neighbor, it was not difficult to see how it had been almost inevitable. As the time passed, it became clear to Mr. Campos that it was either the dog or him.
The longer the interview went on, the more I tried not to think about the situation with Rob, Royal, and me, and I slowly began listening to Mr. Campos’s story with more of a personal interest than a professional one.
Mr. Campos told me that he came to the conclusion that the only way to save his sanity — not to mention his property — was to kill the dog. It was after much contemplation that he decided that the best, most efficient, and least painful way to get rid of the animal was to poison him. That night, for the first time in months, instead of sitting by the window, lying in wait for the neighbor’s dog to shit on his front lawn, he slept through until morning.