MONTREAL — Before buying the brick duplex at 6700 Rue Jogues, Mark Lawson tailed a home inspector through the basement, the main floor and then the upstairs apartment. When the two of them reached the roof, they had a view of Ville-Émard, the quiet neighborhood spreading around them, and the downtown skyscrapers rising to the northeast. There, the inspector turned to Lawson and spilled a secret he’d been holding since he stepped in the house.



“Did you know this was Mario Lemieux’s house?” the inspector asked.



No, Lawson did not know that. No one had mentioned it. Not when they first saw the house, not when they made an offer on it, not when that offer was accepted. “It wasn’t a selling point,” Lawson’s wife, Michelle Paquette, says now, standing in the doorway. As soon as the inspector had left, Paquette leafed through property records and found that the house had previously been owned by Jean-Guy and...