The burglary: bound, gagged, and suffocated by a head-cold in his own kitchen

pivotal · Autumn YDPAH

• When: Autumn YDPAH — the family away on "a two-car foliage-tour in what's left of the Berkshires"; the Happy Holidays coupon-girl and the foliage put it in late autumn; he sits dead "for almost two nights and days" before Brookline's Finest find him
• What: DuPlessis's only on-page appearance is his death. Home alone and sick with "a plain old human rhinovirus," he wakes to find Don Gately and an associate (identified by the apparatus as Trent ("Quo Vadis") Kite) mid-burglary in his bedroom. Gately escalates to robbery: binds the "little and older-type homeowner with a football-shaped head and gray van Dyke" to a kitchen chair and — deaf to Québecois French that "doesn't even sound like human speech to Gately" — gags him with a dish towel and strapping tape despite the man's begging: "Do not gag me, I have a terrible cold, my nose she is a brick of the snot, I have not the power to breathe through the nose, for the love of God please do not gag my mouth." DuPlessis cooperates to the end (volunteering the safe combination and the location of his antique Québecois gold coins, in unheeded French), then suffocates over an hour-plus of agony — torn intercostal ligaments, the doorbell's false hope — thinking "of what a truly dumb and silly way this was, after all this time, to die," meeting it with "the rueful grin with which the best men meet the dumbest ends." The narration names him only at the moment of death: "this Guillaume DuPlessis passed bluely from this life." The scene's own frame for the event is accident — "It was either bad luck or kismet or so forth." — and its label for the victim is "unquestionably a V.I.P., although admittedly rather a covert V.I.P.," or more accurately a "P.I.T.," glossed by the apparatus as "'Une Personne de l'Importance Terrible,' presumably." (Whether anything about the job was other than accident is event 9's question; held open there.)