The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime Read Online Free PDF Page A

with Cliff?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” she replied. “I’ve never done it with him.”
    “It was the weirdest thing,” Braud tells me. “She was saying it wasn’t happening, and he was telling everyone it was.”
    Friends noticed that both Patrice and Cliff were relying heavily on drugs to make things seem right. For Patrice it was mainly ecstasy; for Cliff it was coke. In a sequined gown, on the stage of the Copa one night, he pulled out a chain saw, indicated a new railing the owners had installed around the stage and asked, “Does everybody hate this shit as much as I do?” When the crowd shouted yes, he revved up the saw and cut down the railing.
    “This was a new Brandi,” says Braud. “It was all the power of being on top. Even the old Brandi never would have been assertive enough to do anything like that.”
    There were also indications that Patrice had changed drastically. One night with Randy Rodriguez, they met a drunk and agreed to reconnect with him later at a nearby motel. “Patrice told him she wanted to have a good time,” Rodriguez testified at Cliff’s trial. “In the motel room, Patrice and the stranger sat on the bed, and Patrice removed his pants. “It was a little light in there. I could see there was no sex involved at all. The pants did come off and that was it.” That night, however, Patrice left the motel room with the stranger’s ring.
    The last week in December, to Patrice’s astonishment, Cliff announced his retirement from the stage of The Old Plantation in front of a standing-room-only crowd of nearly a thousand. At the end of the show, he pulled off his wig and said, “I’m in love.” Motioning for Patrice to stand, he said, “I’d like you to meet Patrice LeBlanc. We’re going to get married.”
    From Houston to Manhattan, those who knew Cliff were shocked. “The announcement that Brandi West was marrying a woman was scandalous,” says a friend who heard the news in New York. “It was like, my God. What will she do next?
    When we heard the girl was pregnant, I thought I was in the Twilight Zone.”
    After the show, Cliff and Patrice called Kelly Lauren in Chicago. “Patrice was crying. She seemed ashamed, but she said that she was having a relationship with Cliff and that he was going to quit doing drag,” says Lauren. “Cliff got on the phone and said that they were going to move to Chicago. He said he would rent a big house, and we could all live together. I tried to tell Patrice that it was okay, but I kept thinking about all the things Cliff had done to Jimmy. It just didn’t seem right.”
    Cliff’s last scheduled performance as Brandi West was emceeing a male strip night at The Old Plantation. A friend of Patrice’s from Lafayette remembers walking in to find her talking amiably with one of the hunky straight strippers. “She looked great,” says the man who stopped to give Patrice a kiss on the cheek. As he looked up, Brandi, in a red sequin dress, was barreling down on them. “Take off, quick,” Patrice told the stripper. She then whispered to her friend, “Please don’t leave. I’m afraid Cliff will cause a scene or hit me.”
    “How could you do this to me?” Cliff shouted, grabbing Patrice by the arm. After he stalked off, Patrice told her friend, “If a guy even looks at me, Cliff goes off.”
    “Why did you move in with him?” the man asked. “And what’s all this about the two of you getting married?” But she wouldn’t answer. “Patrice was terrified,” says her friend.
    In late January, Patrice had Cliff take her to an abortion clinic in downtown Houston, where a doctor terminated her three-month pregnancy. “She said she wasn’t ready to settle down,” Cliff said, wincing at the memory. “She said we’d have time in the future to have a child. I couldn’t help it; I was really disappointed.”
    “It just isn’t fun anymore,” Patrice told Jimmy. “Living with Cliff isn’t what I thought it would be like.”
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