The place was immaculate, like you could eat off the floors. Dominic stopped dead in his tracks when they entered the spacious living room. "Tell me she didn't have a movie screen in here where she took unsuspecting young victims and made them watch her movies."

Erin looked at him as if he were crazy. "Dude! She was not Gloria Swanson, and believe me, she didn't have to make people watch those movies. People were killing her with fan mail, wanting to star in them with her. They were sensual, erotic, captured the glory of the twenties and thirties--the golden age, not the usual sick shit with no plot other than sex. This woman was a genius-"

"A joke, Erin. Believe me I know what her movies were like. She's the one who gave me my first orgasm when I was fourteen. My brother snuck me into one of her movies in Sacramento. I think it was Latta Lick-ems in High Desire."

"I saw that one and she did me in. I have yet to recover from some of those movies. The woman had e.r.o.t.i.c tattooed on her ass."

As they walked further into the living room, a wooden statue of an African deity sitting on a mahogany coffee table captured Dominic's attention. He picked up the half-foot high, demonic looking doll with spears in each hand, eyes furrowed into a hellish stare, and a thick, black erection protruding to the sky. There were hulking muscles everywhere on it, despite the slenderness of the piece. It had long, wild hair, painted blood near the mouth and nuts like crazy protruding from under the leather loincloth. Dominic touched the tip of the engorged, over-sized phallus. "What the heck?"

Erin smiled and took the doll from him. "This is a souvenir from her movie, Do You Voodoo. You should remember it."

"I was a kid when I saw it."

"God only knows that was a hundred years ago."

"Cute. I ain't that old. I remember it being a long movie, a good two hours--a record back then. It won awards from selected areas and she took some heat for it. Huh, only Cora Lee would have something like this."

Erin held the doll by the penis, his face barely inches from it, seemingly inspecting it much the same way a gynecologist does a patient. He tapped his fingernail against the ridged wooden cock. "Don't you wish you had a stiff one like this?"

"That stiff, yes, but having a cottonwood dick, no. I wanna' kill women in bed from pleasure, not splinters. Imagine how a dame would beat me down after giving her splinters."

"I hear you. Tell me this, is the movie here?" Dominic asked.

"They're all here, especially that one, but I don't want you in on it yet. There are diaries to read and other movies to see first so you can get a feel for her."

"I know about Cora Lee. I've studied her, too, man--maybe not the way you have, but I definitely knew her game."

"Then you remember the scandal with Do you Voodoo. It really made waves."

"Hollywood and the rest of the world had a heyday ridiculing her. That marked the period when her mother refused to talk to her, and I don't know why because Rene Bruchard was practically nude in all of her movies."

"Yes, but what made the difference was that Rene was the wife, Dominic, not the beloved, virtuous daughter--that and the fact that she slept with a black man in it. In 1930, those issues were better left in the closet. Anyway, the movie is upstairs, but don't watch any of them until you've read the corresponding diary entries."