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

SECOND WEEKEND IN FEBRUARY, Patrice’s parents and grandparents drove to Houston to spend the weekend with Patrice’s aunt. They invited Patrice and her friend to join them for dinner Saturday night. “It was about time,” Cliff said. “Patrice had met my parents, and they truly loved her; it was time I met hers. I was truly in the hot seat. We talked about what we would tell them – about what I did for a living.”
    Dinner was in a Chinese restaurant and everyone seemed relaxed and happy. “You know,” Patrice’s mother told Cliff, “You’re the first person Patrice has acted like she was more than just friends with.”
    “They really seemed to like me,” Cliff said proudly. “Patrice told them that I was a regional manager for Whirlpool, like my father.”
    On Valentine’s Day, Cliff gave Patrice an antique emerald ring she had admired in a pawnshop, and that night Sherry Airey and a friend invited Patrice and Cliff for dinner. Recounting that evening, Airey said: “You could tell Cliff was uncomfortable. That he didn’t know how to act. And Patrice was trying so hard. This was a new Cliff for me, but all night long he kept lapsing into Brandi West – snide remarks and off-color jokes. He had a tough time being anything else.”
    Soon after, Patrice told Airey she wanted to leave Cliff. “Well, why don’t you?” Airey asked her.
    “He’s been good to me,” Patrice answered. “And since he’s trying to stop doing drag, it’s like he needs even more from me. I don’t want to sneak out like Jimmy. When I go, I want to do it the right way.”
    When Kelly came home for a visit at the end of the month, she stayed with Patrice and Cliff. Kelly and Patrice shared the bed and Cliff slept on the floor. During the night, Patrice rolled off the bed onto the floor and joined him. Kelly and Patrice went shopping during the day and clubbing at night. Usually Cliff stayed home. “I could tell he was trying really hard to accept me,” said Lauren. “I’d tried to hide Jimmy from him once, and Brandi and I weren’t the best of friends. But he was being patient.”
    On February 26, Cliff invited Airey to join the three of them for dinner. He made fried chicken but sat watching a tape of Sweeney Todd while the others ate. “It was kind of eerie,” Lauren remarked, “but Patrice didn’t act like there was anything wrong. She and I got dressed up and went out to the clubs that night. Cliff didn’t go along. He just didn’t seem interested.”
    The clubs closed and Lauren, Patrice, and some friends decided to visit Howard Hughes’s grave in Glenwood Cemetery. They jumped over the white wrought-iron fence that encircles the monument and sat down by the Hughes family plot, a semi-circular wall with six tall trumpets. “Patrice said she wanted to come to Chicago to live with me,” says Lauren. “I was thrilled, but I asked, ‘What about Cliff?’ She just said, ‘Cliff won’t be coming.’ I didn’t ask any questions. In our world, you just don’t pry. You try to give everyone their privacy.”
    After Lauren left, Patrice became more isolated than ever. “It got so that when she wanted to see us she’d have to sneak out,” says Newman Braud. And when Braud ran into Cliff, he complained that Patrice was “demanding and jealous.”
    “It just didn’t make sense,” says Braud. “That was not the Patrice we knew. Patrice wasn’t that domineering. They were really getting on each other’s nerves.”
    At the end of the month, Patrice called home and told her mother that she needed $150. It was the first time Patrice had asked her parents for money since she’d moved, and Sheila LeBlanc put a check in the mail that same afternoon.
    On Saturday night March 1, Randy Rodriguez ran into Patrice at Rich’s, a hot new gay club. “She seemed happy and started talking about leaving Houston,” he says. “She didn’t know if she’d go back home to go to school or try Chicago. The only time Patrice