The DuPlessis home-invasion and the accidental suffocation death

pivotal · Autumn YDPAH

• When: Autumn YDPAH; the bound DuPlessis "sat there... for almost two nights and days"; recalled in the hospital serial as "much later" than the Fackelmann finale and the Sorkin-era demapping (event 11), "when Gately was way more nonviolence-prone"
• What: Gately and an associate B&E a neo-Georgian Brookline home (shunting the alarm meter, his signature M.O.). The owner is home sick with a rhinovirus; Gately escalates the nonviolent burglary into a robbery, binds the little Québecois homeowner to a kitchen chair and gags him with a dish towel and strapping tape despite the man begging (in unheeded French) not to be gagged because his nose is blocked. The man — Guillaume DuPlessis, right-hand man to the most infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer north of the Great Concavity — slowly suffocates over an hour-plus and dies, sitting bound for almost two nights and days until Brookline police find him rigor-stiffened. This "accidental" suffocated-Canadian death — the "V.I.P.-suffocation"/"Nuckslaughter" Gately fears being convicted of — is the plot-driving crime hanging over the whole hospital serial (events 51-58). Two endnotes attach to the job itself: the pills by the occupied bed were "The codeineless kind, though — almost the first physical datum Gately took in in the nasty flashbulb-flash shock of the occupied bedroom's light coming on, to give you an idea of an oral-narcotics man's depth of psychic investment" (n17 p. 0985); and atop the seascape safe's "more negotiable contents" sat a "top-hole genuine InterLace state-of-the-art TP/viewer ensemble" and "several shelves crammed tight with upscale arty-looking film cartridges," over whose "discriminating-type-fence-value" Gately's colleague "just about drooled all over the parquet flooring" (n18 p. 0985) — a haul worth flagging given that the Read-Only Entertainment the A.F.R. later runs down is "the samizdat burgled from DuPlessis" (cf. M Fortier's timeline (event 5); connection inferential, cite both as written).