Exhibit A gives the jury two inked prints and asks them to trust a description of a hook. Exhibit D removes the trust. It is a plaster cast — both twins' tongues poured, set, and mounted on one board, D, under a single raking lamp so the difference stops being a word and starts being a shadow. Where the ink flattens a curl into a smudge, the plaster keeps it. In three dimensions, at the tip, under a good light, the hook does not need explaining. It simply is there on one tongue and simply is not there on the other, and every juror who has leaned in has leaned back out convinced.
In plaster you can put your eye down at the board and follow the curl to its guilty end.
The method matters, because a cast is only as honest as the frog who pours it. Both samples were taken the same night, from life, witnessed, poured in the Swamp PD lab from the same batch of plaster so no one could claim the medium favored a twin. They set side by side and were mounted without being moved. The raking lamp is fixed. Nothing about Exhibit D can be adjusted to flatter PeePoo — which is exactly why it flatters him. He does not need the light adjusted. His tongue lies flat because he has never once needed it to lie.
Read the cast left to right, the way Flossie mounted it. PeePoo's tongue: a plank. It lands, it lies down, it ends. There is nothing at the tip because there is nothing hidden anywhere in the frog. The other cast: the same honest body, the same width, the same wholesome first impression — and then the tail. The little upward hook where an honest tongue would simply stop. In plaster you can put your eye right down at the level of the board and follow the curl to its guilty end. It is the single most persuasive quarter-inch in the entire locker.
What Exhibit D proves is that Exhibit A was not a matter of interpretation. Two frogs, one face, told apart by a physical fact you can cast in plaster and hand to a jury. The forged checks in Exhibit B all wear the flat plank, because a forger copies the honest tongue and hides his own. Exhibit D is the honest tongue and the hidden one, side by side, under one lamp, unhideable. The whole case is the curl — and here, at last, is the curl you can hold.