Exhibit H is a book. A fat, felt-cornered ledger in cracked green leather, recovered from a lockbox under the grate at the swamp's only unlicensed ribbit casino — the felt-topped card operation the whole case keeps gesturing at and never once opened, until now. For seasons it was the plot hole in PeePoo's own frame job: everyone knew the seventeen checks had gone somewhere to get clean, everyone knew there was a casino under the grate, and nobody had ever put the two in the same evidence bag. Here they are in the same bag. The book is where the money learned to swim.
Seventeen checks in the left margin, seventeen shell ponds across the top, and one curl at the foot of every credit. The book is signed by the hand that wouldn't sign it.
Read the columns and the crime tells itself. Down the left margin, seventeen deposits in the exact swamp-buck amounts of the seventeen forged checks from Exhibit B — same figures, same spring, to the fly. Across the top, seventeen shell pond-companies, each a puddle with a letterhead and no frog inside it, opened and drained inside a single season. The book's job was to walk the money sideways: check into shell pond, shell pond into chips, chips across the felt, chips back out as clean spring-water swamp-bucks. Three of those seventeen puddles are the same three shell ponds the checks first washed through — the ledger doesn't just match Exhibit B, it continues it, one column past where the forgery file goes dark.
Now the tell, because there is always a tell, and in a ledger the tell is the handwriting. Every credit line is initialed. Not signed — initialed, in a tight private shorthand a frog only uses for himself, never meaning it to be read. And at the foot of each initial, where a tired bookkeeper's hand relaxes and his own nature leaks back into the ink, the same faint hook curls off the final stroke. The identical curl from the two tongue-prints. The identical curl the forger could not un-curl on seventeen traced checks. The book was kept by the hand that owns the hook — and the hook has never in its life belonged to the flat, honest frog in the dock.
Follow the last column to where the arithmetic points and it does not point at a cell in Lily-Pad Lockup. It points across the water. Every cleaned swamp-buck exits the felt on the far side of the table, toward the one pad the case never names — the smug pad the transmissions crackle in from, the pad belonging to a frog with PeePoo's exact face and a colder laugh, who runs the casino, keeps the book, initials the credits, and has signed nothing a court could hold. That is the whole shape of the frame: forge the honest twin's tongue onto the checks, launder the checks through your own casino, keep the ledger in your own tight little hand, and let the flat-tongued brother take the arrest while the curl-tongued one takes the pot. Exhibit H is the receipt for a crime committed by somebody who was very careful never to sign his name — which, in a book this full of his handwriting, turns out to be the loudest signature in the locker.