Oliver Jardiniere has seven outfits to create for a musical, but comes up with one design that will suit everyone. Later, in an Italian restaurant, he brags about “knocking off seven at once.” He is overheard—and misunderstood—by Guggie Mazzarino, who calls crime boss Big Caesar. Coincidentally, seven of Big Caesar’s enemies have just been mysteriously shot—and Ollie winds up the most popular, and feared, hitman in New York.

Excerpt: …Little Guggie frowned. Had something gone down tonight he didn’t know about? If so, his employer, Big Caesar Annunziato, would be righteously pissed. And that was a consummation devoutly to be avoided. Little Guggie removed Ms. Positano’s stockinged foot from where it rested in his crotch, went to the pay phone in the back of the restaurant, not being high enough up in the food chain to rate his own cellular, and called Big Caesar. He was told that, indeed, on the very evening seven members of the rival DiGiralamo family had met with some misadventure in a warehouse down on the docks, involving a good deal of semi-automatic weapons fire engineered by a person or persons unknown, and when he informed Big Caesar that he believed the person or persons was at this moment slurping pesto sauce at Mama Angelina’s, he was assured that if he knew what was good for him he would bring said person forthwith to the Annunziato compound in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

And so it was that Oliver Jardiniere, Broadway costume maven, was entreated and coerced into leaving his roommate in the middle of his tiramisu and accompanying Little Guggie from Mama Angelina’s restaurant, his napkin still tucked under his chin like a bib. He was hustled into Little Guggie’s black Oldsmobile Sierra and escorted to the home of Big Caesar Annunziato, where he was presented to the mob boss like a gift to the Christ Child.

(Also on this tape are two other short stories: Simon Brett’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and Jon L. Breen’s “Clever Hans.”)