“He never came back from the bathroom,” I said.

“I don’t know.”

Dutch Holland suddenly seemed in a big rush to put distance between us. I had to jump clear of the hangar door as it came down, him on the inside, me looking in.

The story of my life.

Legend has it that L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while staying at the Hotel del Coronado, across the bay from downtown San Diego. He supposedly modeled his “Emerald City” on the hotel’s Queen Anne-style architecture. It was at the “Del,” as the locals reverently call it, that an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson purportedly met a British prince named Edward, who would later give up the throne for her — just as Hitler’s dark shadow began to spread across Europe. American presidents have vacationed at the Del for more than a hundred years. The biggest names in Hollywood have had trysts there. All of which is to say that the place is dripping with history. But former Padres pitcher Eric “the Junkman” LaDucrie, whose luxury high-rise condo overlooked the Del, didn’t want to talk about any of that as I stood with him on his balcony, admiring the view from seven floors up.

“The truth,” the Junkman said, literally thumping a leather-bound Bible. “It’s all in here. ‘Eye for an eye,’ ‘tooth for a tooth,’ ‘hand for a hand,’ ‘foot for a foot.’ This is what the Lord decreed. You want proof? Read Exodus, and Matthew, and Leviticus—‘Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death.’ Look at Romans: ‘For the wages of sin is death.’ ”

The bucktoothed, forty-something LaDucrie was just warming up. He went on and on with his preaching, barely stopping to breathe, half moons of perspiration staining the pits of his pink golf shirt. Everyone from Jesus to Gandhi to Mother Teresa believed in the death penalty, he insisted, even if none of them ever said so openly.

I could take only so much.

“Mr. LaDucrie, I didn’t drive over here to attend religious services. I came to talk about Dorian Munz and the murder of Ruth Walker.”

“Ruth Walker. Right. Sorry. I can get carried away a little sometimes. The whole death penalty debate isn’t just some political cause for me. It’s my life. And I know I’m 110 percent right.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that.”

I asked him how long he’d lived there as I followed him back inside.

“Ten, eleven years. Bought the place right before the Padres wanted to send me back down to the minors. I’d been to the minors. So I hung up my spikes instead.”

His living room, like the rest of his swinging bachelor pad, was a shrine to unchecked egotism and his Big League career. Framed game jerseys lined the walls along with magazine covers and the pages of newspaper sports sections featuring photos of the Junkman in action. Autographed hardballs in clear acrylic cubes shared shelf space with displays of Junkman rookie cards and Junkman bobblehead dolls. Over the fireplace was a vintage, larger than life LeRoy Neiman painting of LaDucrie on the mound in his Padres uniform, uncorking a knuckleball.

He asked me if I wanted a beer or a soda. I declined both as he disappeared into his kitchen. “Dorian Munz killed Ruth Walker in cold blood,” LaDucrie said. “He deserved to die. Anybody who says different is misinformed.”

He returned with a Diet Coke, and plopped down on an overstuffed leather chair shaped like a giant catcher’s mitt. I parked myself on a sofa, the back of which was constructed entirely of Louisville Sluggers. Furniture design by Major League Baseball and the Marquis de Sade.

“Ruth Walker’s father is looking for additional information, facts that didn’t make the newspaper, that would help convince the public Munz was lying about Greg Castle.”

LaDucrie gulped his soda. “I’d like to help,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his left hand, “but all I know is what I saw on the news.”

“I’m told you were interviewed on TV just before Munz was executed. You said you were ‘completely confident’ he was guilty. ‘Completely confident’ suggests to me you know a lot more than what you saw on the news.”

“Let me put it this way: Fox News, they got me on speed dial, OK? Every time there’s some death penalty case around the country and people are squawking about how the dude who’s about to get it doesn’t deserve it, I’m the guy who goes on camera and says he does, OK? Somebody’s gotta stand up against all these bleeding heart pussies, unless you want ’em taking over the world.”

“What you’re telling me is, you have nothing to back up your ‘complete confidence’ claim that Dorian Munz was guilty.”

LaDucrie looked off to his left and thought about it for a long moment. “Not really, no.” He chugged the rest of his Diet Coke, strained forward in his catcher’s mitt chair — his gut hanging over the expand-o-matic waistband of his tan golf shorts — and set the can down on a coffee table shaped like home plate. “What I know is that from everything I heard and read, the evidence against the douche bag was dead on. Ruth Walker should’ve never died the way she did, OK? She was a real nice little gal.”

“How do you know that?”

“Maybe I met her once or twice.”

“You knew Ruth Walker?”

Again, the Junkman gazed off to his left for no more than a second, like he was thinking about it, then looked back at me. “I said maybe I knew her. You meet a lot of babes in the show. They’re all over the place, ya know what I’m saying? They all start blending in after awhile. You forget faces.” I caught a trace of sadness in his eyes as he looked down. “Soon as you retire, they scatter like cockroaches.”

I asked him if he’d ever met Janet Bollinger. Again, he looked left, then back to me.

“The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

LaDucrie’s eye movement, his involuntary micro-expressions in response to my questions, had at least been consistent. Either he was telling the truth when he said he may have known Ruth Walker but not Janet Bollinger, or he was lying through his buck teeth about both. I hadn’t known him long enough to accurately gauge which was which.

I asked him how he’d become so passionate about upholding capital punishment. He told me how his sister was murdered at thirteen, lured into a baseball dugout by his Little League coach, who swore he’d only meant to kiss her. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, Coach Rapist was sentenced to four years in Folsom. He ended up doing half of that.

“The son of a bitch got hit by a car a week after he got out of the joint,” LaDucrie said with a smile as he walked me to his door. “Sometimes, the good Lord has ways of setting things right. Deuteronomy 32–35. ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’ ”

The Buddha believed that vengeance is pointless. Vengeance can only be met by more vengeance, force with force, bombs with bombs. But, then, the Buddha never knew the pure pleasure of dropping a 500-pound JDAM down the pie hole of an avowed Al Qaeda killer, or putting a 9-millimeter hollow point behind a terrorist’s ear at Helen Keller-can’t-miss range.

I walked through the parking lot of LaDucrie’s condo to my Escalade. The sea breeze carried with it the cannonade of waves crashing onto the beach and the gleeful laughter of children chasing each other among the dunes. Nearly ten years earlier, less than a mile from where I stood, the body of Hub Walker’s daughter had been found amid those very dunes.

I turned and gazed up at the Junkman’s balcony. He’d been living there, I realized, about the same time Ruth Walker was murdered.

Crissy Walker was standing at her kitchen counter, making a smoothie. Her black short shorts showed off her toned tanned legs. The University of Georgia Bulldogs T-shirt she had on highlighted the fact that she was braless. Hub wouldn’t be back until after dinner, she said, dumping banana slices into a food processor. He’d gone to play golf at Torrey Pines with Greg Castle, hoping to convince Castle for his own good to go public with the paternity test he’d taken years earlier. She asked me if I wanted a smoothie. Given that I am not the smoothie type, I politely declined and went to make amends with Savannah.