Page 106 of Save Me

“Consider this your reply.”

“Thank you,” I say without a hint of gratitude. “Did you come here to confess to the reason why one of your chain employees chose to commit suicide inside one of your restaurants?”

A shadow crosses his face, but he looks away, and when he turns back, it’s gone.

“That young girl was troubled. It’s a shame she didn’t get the help she needed before she chose to end her life.”

He shakes his head.

“But I don’t see where that has any bearing on my business or me as a businessman.” He sits forward and points a finger in my direction. “In fact, as soon as I learned of her tragic passing, I offered to pay for her funeral services and any additional costs her poor mother might acquire to get her body back to her home state.”

“After you found out about her death?” I ask.

He nods. “Yes, I didn’t learn of the tragedy until weeks after it happened. As CEO, I’m not privy to all the low-level events in my restaurants. That is what managers are for.”

“I wouldn’t classify a person taking their life in your place of business as a low-level event,” I retort.

His cocky expression falters. “I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it.”

“How did you mean it, Mr. Blackmon?” I pull out my phone. “Since you came willingly, do you mind if I record this conversation? I want to make sure I don’t misquote you.”

He looks from me to the telephone I’ve placed in record mode, sitting on the table.

“I don’t have anything to hide.” His eyes shift from my phone to me to my phone again.

“Excellent. So, you offered to assist Ms. Dalton with the funeral costs for Erika and to have her body sent back to her home state?”

He sits up straight, poking out his chest. “Yes. As soon as I found out what occurred, I had my team make those arrangements.”

“That’s very generous of you. And when exactly did you find out about Erika’s passing?”

Another shift of attention back to my phone.

“About a month after her she died.”

“Is that so?” I ask. “Because I spoke with the coroner six weeks after Erika took her life, and she was, unfortunately, still in the morgue. Her mother hadn’t made any arrangements to have her body relocated, and there certainly wasn’t a funeral.”

Clearing his throat, he shifts in his chair. “It was possibly more than a month after her passing, then. But we did make those arrangements, and you can call Erika’s mother, and she will confirm everything I’ve said.”

“I plan to. I’m sure she appreciated the gesture,” I lie. Erika’s mother was as hard as a stone when I tried to talk to her about her daughter. “Tell me something, Mr. Blackmon. What is the name of the church you attend?”

His eyebrows raise slightly. “What does my church have to do with anything?”

“I’ve heard wonderful things about the services you do via your church. I’m looking into your business due to an unfortunate situation with an employee of yours, but I always do my best to form a complete profile of the subjects of any article I write. It’s only fair. Don’t you agree?”

He nods, his gaze shifting away from me toward the window. I can see the gears in his head churning as he thinks of a way to spin my question to his advantage.

He snaps his fingers and points to me. “Ah, yes. The name of my church is New Beginnings Church. We have a congregation of almost three thousand due to our dynamic,” he answers. “We do a lot of great work through the church. Especially with troubled teens and adolescents.”

“Is that so?” I ask with as warm a smile as I can muster.

“Yes, it is. And come to think of it, Erika Dalton was a member of our troubled teens program. That’s how she came to work for my company.” He shakes his head. “Unfortunately, I believe even she was beyond the help we could provide.”

Even though he gives a convincing pity-filled expression, his words ring hollow. There’s no heart in them. He doesn’t believe in what he’s saying.

Blackmon goes on for the next five minutes, talking about all of the charitable work his church does and the number of teens who’ve been saved from themselves—his words not mine—but I don’t believe a word of it.

If anything, the drive behind Blackmon’s charitable work is ego. It makes him look good, and it’s yet another prop he can use to boost himself in the public eye.

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