The Burglar in the Library by Lawrence Block

from a width of four or five inches at their outer edge to no width at all at the center.
    I was poised on the fourth step, one hand clutching a shelf for balance, the other hand reaching out for The Big Sleep, when I heard my name called.
    “Bernie!”
    It was Lettice, of course, Lettice Runcible Littlefield. I didn’t have to turn around and look at her to establish as much, but I did anyway, and there she was.
    I should have waited. My plan, if you want to dignify it with that name, was simplicity itself. Step One—get the book. Step Two—go home. As long as I performed those two tasks in that particular order, things ought to work out. I wanted to undertake Step Two as soon after breakfast as was decently possible, which gave me something like eight hours to execute Step One and scoop up Chandler.
    I thought of sleeping first and going after Chandler at the last minute, virtually on the way out the door. I thought of napping for a few hours, giving the rest of the house time to settle in for a good night’s sleep, and then paying a visit to the library in the hour of the wolf. But I didn’t want to rush, nor did I want to risk appearing furtive to a fellow insomniac. Best to get the book now, I’d thought, and tuck it under my pillow for the night, and make off with it first thing in the morning.
    There were guests in the library when I got there. Rufus Quilp, the very stout gentleman who’d been reading and dozing earlier, was still at it, breathing heavily if not quite snoring. A copy of Dombey and Son, part of a broken half-leather set of Dickens whose volumes I’d spotted here and there around the house, lay open on his lap. Greg Savage, unaccompanied by wife or child, looked up at my approach to flash the apologetic smile frequently found on the lips of the parents of precocious children, then returned to his book,a Philip Friedman courtroom novel. It was the author’s latest, and, from the looks of it, his longest; if I’d borrowed Savage’s copy and stood on top of it I might not have needed the library steps.
    I did a little reading myself, hoping Quilp and Savage would decide to call it a night, and before long Savage did, slipping away quietly so as not to disturb us. Quilp’s eyes were closed, and what did it matter if he saw me climb the steps and reach for a book? That’s what the steps were there for, and what the books were there for. And, by God, it was what I was there for.
    Then Lettice called my name.
     
    “What the hell are you doing here, Bernie?”
    I was already on my way down the steps. I touched a finger to my lips, then pointed across the room to the chair where Rufus Quilp sat in a Dickensian doze.
    “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s go where we can talk.” She spun on her heel and stalked out of the library, and I followed in her wake.
    We wound up in the East Parlour, beneath the gaze of the putative springbok. I turned on a lamp. Lettice told me not to bother, we wouldn’t be here that long. I said we might as well be comfortable. “Besides,” I said, “how will it look if somebody sees us sitting together in the dark?”
    “If it’s dark,” she said, “how will they see us?”
    “Sit down,” I said. “You’re looking well. Marriage agrees with you.”
    “What are you doing here, Bernie?”
    “What am I doing here? I’m spending a traditional weekend in a traditional English country house, withmore than the traditional amount of snow. I don’t know where you get off being surprised to see me. I told you I had a reservation here.”
    “You also told me you were going to take me.”
    “Well, you had a prior engagement.”
    “So you brought your wife.” She treated me to a sidelong glance. “You never told me you were married, Bernie.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Oh, really? Is little Mrs. Rhodenbarr your mother?”
    “Her name is Carolyn Kaiser,” I said, “and she’s not Mrs. Rhodenbarr. That seems to be an honorary designation a woman receives