The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (3 page)

PATRICE LEBLANC GREW UP IN A LARGE Spanish-style ranch house in an affluent section of Lafayette, the so-called capital of French Louisiana. Her parents were both from small towns near the coast, an area settled during the 1700s by French Canadians known as Acadians. Her father, George LeBlanc, was part owner of an insurance agency. Patrice, her two younger sisters, and their parents were a close-knit family, solid members of the local Catholic church, where Patrice taught catechism.

“The day Patrice got her driver’s license, at fifteen, her parents bought her a two-year-old Audi and then replaced it a year later with a brand-new Cutlass Supreme,” says Jamie Woods, Patrice’s best friend. “Patrice had about anything she wanted.”

Yet, life wasn’t going smoothly for LeBlanc. She dropped out of Lafayette’s University of Southwestern Louisiana after two semesters, and to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, she and Jamie and a group of friends went to Destin, Florida. While there, Patrice had a bittersweet fling with a boy she’d had a crush on since high school. Afterward, he showed no interest in her.

Back in Lafayette, she got a job collecting the cover charge at a club near the campus. Also manning the door was Grant, a friend from U.S.L. “Patrice was so much fun. She knew everyone in town, and they’d all stop to talk with her on the way in,” Grant said. “There wasn’t a night that passed when some guy wouldn’t try to get her to go out. But Patrice never seemed very interested in anything that looked as if it could become a serious relationship.”

At the club, Patrice became friends with the owner and his girlfriend, and on nights off they made the rounds of all three of his clubs, including Pharaoh’s, a gay bar in downtown Lafayette. To many, the Wednesday night drag shows were an outrageous embarrassment in a small conservative place like Lafayette – but not to Patrice.

As soon as she saw the drag queens, Patrice was mesmerized. “After the show, she pulled Naomi Sims over to the bar,” Jamie Woods recounted. “She spent hours interviewing him. She asked anything she could think of: Did he really want to be a woman? Where did they put their sex organs? Absolutely anything.”

“Patrice was really one of us,” said Braud, speaking out of drag. “She was open to everything, completely nonjudgmental, and as wild and funny as we were.” Patrice had experimented with pot in high school; she now became more adventurous: cocaine, acid, and ecstasy, her favorite. She also began begging Jamie and Steven Grant to move to Houston with her. “I wanted to go,” says Jamie, “but not that way. Not moving into Montrose and going to all the gay bars.”

Undaunted, Patrice zeroed in on Steven Grant. Sitting at a table at Chez Pastor, a Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, Grant is a tall, elegant man with a lean face and a ponytail the color of corn silk. He moved back to Lafayette, he tells me, soon after the murder. “For a long time, I felt responsible for Patrice’s death. I kept thinking that if I hadn’t agreed to go to Houston with her, she might still be alive, even though friends kept trying to reassure me that one way or another Patrice would have gone.”

On June 7, 1985, Patrice and Steven packed their possessions into the back of his red Thunderbird and headed for Houston. Patrice had saved $4,200 and Steven had almost $6,000, and Patrice knew she could always count on her parents for help. One month after she moved to Houston, they gave her a brand-new gray Mazda.

By the time Patrice arrived in Houston, Jimmy and Cliff were on cordial if not friendly terms. “A while after the breakup we ran into each other,” Cliff told me. “I had kind of cooled off. I didn’t try to get him back.” Although Cliff had played Pharaoh’s in Lafayette that spring, he didn’t meet Patrice until Jimmy introduced them in the Copa, at the time Houston’s top gay show bar.

“Jimmy had told me about this girl he was hanging around with,” says Cliff. “It was obvious that he was taken with her.” Brandi bought a round of drinks and they sat and talked. Cliff was thirty-one, and Patrice was twenty, the age Jimmy had been when Cliff met him. People often remarked that Patrice and Jimmy even looked alike. The next time Cliff saw Patrice at the club, she was alone. “She said Jimmy couldn’t make it, but he’d asked her to say hi,” Cliff says. “All I said was, ‘That’s nice,’ but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I kept thinking:
This girl is absolutely beautiful
.”

THROUGH JIMMY, PATRICE MET Kelly Lauren, who had sheltered Jimmy when he left Cliff. “When I was with Patrice, I never felt like a misfit,” Kelly tells me. “Patrice was so alive.”

“People were always coming up to touch Patrice in the gay bars,” Jimmy says. “She didn’t like it, but they seemed attracted to her.”

“We’d point out some great-looking guy sitting at the bar and say, ‘What do you think?’” Braud remembers with a laugh. “Patrice would always say, ‘Come on. He’s a fag. I’d never go to bed with a fag.’”

Late that summer, Cliff as Brandi was mistress of ceremonies at the Miss Gay Arkansas pageant in Little Rock, and Patrice showed up with some mutual friends. “Come paint my nails for me,” he said. Patrice did, and he invited her and the others back to his hotel room for cocaine. They all stayed for the night, and Cliff and Patrice paired off into one of the double beds. “She cuddled right over me and fell asleep,” he tells me. “I laid awake for about an hour looking at her and marveling at how pretty she was. It was the first time I felt something for her.”

Meanwhile, Steven Grant and Patrice were finding that living together was not easy. He insisted on order, something for which there was no time in Patrice’s world. In September, Steven reviewed their expenses, especially Patrice’s long-distance phone bill, and told her, “We can’t continue to live like this. We’re running out of money.” They had words, and she called Cliff and asked if she could spend the night at his place.

“Sure,” he said.

Again she spent the night in Cliff’s arms, but it was nothing more than two friends embracing. Soon after, Patrice invited Cliff to stay at her apartment for a night. Steven and Jimmy had both moved out; all that was left was her king-size mattress. “When we laid down to go to sleep, we were wrapped around each other like two spoons,” Cliff said, his voice wistful. “I pressed my hand against her stomach and she turned toward me. We kissed, and everything started. Patrice was the first one to teach me that sex wasn’t about control, that it could be pleasurable.”

After they made love that first night, he invited her to move in with him and his dachshund. “You can take care of Vienna when I go away to perform. No strings attached.” Patrice threw her arms around him and accepted.

When Patrice told her friends she was moving in with Cliff, they were startled. “But we just assumed it was like Patrice was with the rest of us – sisters,” says Kelly Lauren. “It wasn’t until much later when we began wondering if there was anything more.”

“I figured that it was a weird kick kind of thing for Patrice,” says Jimmy. “I knew she would get bored or it wouldn’t be fun anymore. Cliff was very relationship-minded. I told her, ‘You’re going to be sorry.’”

It was four months before Patrice admitted to anyone that she and Cliff had become lovers. Meanwhile, she took care of Vienna while he traveled and went about her life much as before, spending days and nights with her circle of friends. Cliff gave her a weekly allowance, and Patrice told a friend in Louisiana that she had found “a sugar daddy” in Houston. In the clubs, Patrice circulated and talked with friends while Brandi performed; afterward they laughed and gossiped like girlfriends.

More and more people remarked on how similar Jimmy and Patrice were with their dark hair, large eyes, and toothy white smiles. Others noticed the differences. Where Jimmy was pliable, Patrice had a mind of her own. “Patrice was nothing like me,” Jimmy says. “She wasn’t weak-willed. I always wished I was more like her.”

IN NOVEMBER, CLIFF AND PATRICE went for a long weekend to Cancun, a trip Cliff had always promised Jimmy. Before leaving Houston, Patrice cut Cliff’s hair and dyed it dark brown, his natural color. Then she took him shopping for jeans, shirts, sweaters, men’s clothing. “Patrice had started saying that she hated seeing me off-stage in drag,” says Cliff. “My nails used to bug her. She would knock on my dressing room door after the show and start taking my nails off. I guess she thought, I’m sleeping with
this
?”

Although Cliff hadn’t taken hormones in almost three years, there was still a visible effect that he could not easily shed – heavy, fleshy breasts. So he bought a set of weights, “to build up my pecs.” He said of those five days in Cancun: “No one knew us. No one knew I did drag. We were just two people in love on the beach. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”

That Thanksgiving, Patrice bragged to her family about how exciting her life was in the big city. Although she had worked only two days for an oil company during her five and a half months in Houston, Patrice made up a story about a job at a travel agency. She then gave them a phone number answered by a friend who’d agreed to relay their calls. Before the weekend was over, her mother took her on a shopping spree and bought her $600 worth of new clothes. “She was really up,” says Jamie, who met her for a drink. “I remember looking at her and thinking how much she had changed. She used to wear tennis shoes and big shirts; now she had on a dress, high heels, and fishnet stockings.”

In early December, Patrice began suffering from morning sickness. She was torn: Should she have Cliff’s child or an abortion. “I wanted it,” Cliff says. “But Patrice said she just didn’t know if she was ready to settle down.”

Patrice’s friends noticed changes in her. “She started acting nervous about what Cliff would think about everything,” remembers one. “If we went out, she would call and check in with him. It seemed strange. Anxiety was something totally new for Patrice.”

Cliff made attempts to sever Patrice’s ties with her friends, especially her friendship with his ex-lover. “When she first moved in, she was still spending time with Jimmy, and I was trying to get her away from him,” Cliff boasted. “If she saw him, I wouldn’t kiss her for two days. I was being cold, standoffish. She made up by giving me a music box with a little note inside saying she loved me.”

If Patrice was affectionate at home, she became annoyed whenever Cliff acted more than friendly in public. Cliff, in turn, used her reluctance to justify barring her friends from the apartment. “I’ll play that game in public, but not in my house,” he told her. “Our house.”

Patrice went home for Christmas and lied again about her job in Houston and how well things were going there. She also told her family that she was moving in with “a friend named Cliff. He travels a lot, and I’m going to take care of his dog.”

Christmas afternoon, Patrice and Steven Grant drove back to Houston and that night she joined Cliff at his parents’ home for dinner. They opened presents, and Etta Mae and Russ Youens were delighted to watch Cliff and Patrice on the couch with their arms around each other. “He was happier than we had ever seen him,” said Russ, a strong, silent man who had never approved of his son’s life and who had refused to ever see him on-stage. It seemed clear that the pretty young girl from Louisiana was changing Cliff.

Despite that outwardly serene appearance, by January there were small indications that all wasn’t well with Cliff’s and Patrice’s relationship. Kelly Lauren had moved to Chicago the previous fall, and Patrice began spending hours with Kelly’s mother, Sherry Airey, in the house Jimmy had fled to after leaving Cliff. On a shelf above the television was a glamorous black-and-white publicity shot of Kelly. “From the time she was small, Kelly never seemed like a son,” Airey said as she took a long drag off her cigarette. “I’m very proud of my daughter. She’s quite a star.”

I turned the conversation to Patrice LeBlanc, and Airy added, “She never told any of us she was pregnant. But she seemed a little unhappy; that was unusual for Patrice. She’d talk about leaving Cliff, but then she’d say she didn’t want to hurt him.”

Meanwhile, in the clubs Cliff had fits of jealousy whenever other men paid attention to Patrice. “Almost everyone was gay,” recalled one friend. “And so they shouldn’t have been a threat, but Cliff became obsessive.”

One night at The Old Plantation in Dallas, Cliff in drag pulled Patrice off the dance floor. The man she had been dancing with came over and yelled, “Leave her alone.”

“I told him Patrice was
my
girlfriend, and he should leave
us
alone,” says Cliff. “But he wouldn’t stop. So I told him that just because I was dressed as a woman, that didn’t mean I wasn’t a man.”

There was a scuffle and Cliff ejected the man bodily from the club, but not without receiving a black eye. On the trip back to Houston, Cliff and Patrice stopped at his parents’ lake house for a few days to let the eye heal. “We talked about what I could do besides drag, how else I could make a living. When we got home, we borrowed money from my mother to start a balloon shop. But somehow we never got it together.”

One night at Steven Grant’s apartment, Newman Braud asked Patrice, “What’s it like doing it 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.