Charley knew Schroeder would keep his face out of things. It's how he was. Play dumb and go back to playing the piano, front it like some floosy artsy type, or the spaced out virtuoso when the questions came around. He was on the ball though, and could key out any classical you wanted while still putting two and two together. Arithmetic.
That's really what it was about at the end wasn't it? The simple human arithmetic of it all.
Linus would always add it up the same way. If a column came out in the moral red, he had to pipe up. (HIS moral red, mind you. Which was a sight more exacting than anyone ever liked.) He was read, and reasoned. Schoolteacher. Classics down at the local public high. Tried to get Socrates through Hobbes into the head of anyone who wasn't immediately bound for Voc. Tech., or stymied out of intellectualism, and put into the parochials by their parents. For all his head full of ethics and world views, he was more dualist than anyone. It came down to right or wrong for him. If it was wrong, it was unacceptable, and you had to fix it.
...Thing was, he argued like an idealistic intellectual too. Thought that being "Wrong", and being told how you were "Wrong" was why you should stop. Life doesn't work like that though, and it got him shut up.
He's still around. He got his job back after. After a week in the hospital, and three months in mental care for "nerves". He latched onto this bit of fabric, a curtain, first thing he could get, and held it next to his face. Never let it go until an hour before his discharge.
He never spoke up much after that.
Pig Pen was almost an opposite to him. Remember the old street cleaners? Bucket on wheels and a push broom? That's what he did. He must've been paid for it because he got by OK, but we never asked. Pig PEn, he watched the city, the streets. He knew it's laws and it's moves, the perverse human jungle. He watched it all, the harmless trash man sweeping at the Sisyphean accumulation. Get on his good side, and he'd quote a bit of Darwin or Kipling at you. Not in a way that made you want to argue, but in a way that made you look at Chicago again, and somehow see it like a sunset, a forest, or a stormy ocean. Terrible, but compelling.
He'd just go back to sweeping it all. At the bottom, in the shit, yet somehow above it, impervious to it. At home.
Pig Pen would see it all happen and never bat and eyelash. Broke one or two cases for Charles too. Dropping him a hint or a lead that Charles would just mutter away before turning over in the dumpster to barf, but would somehow be relevant to the next folder on his desk when he finally rolled into the precinct.
