A man who begged Margaret Rudin for work testified against her Tuesday afternoon, saying that while he was stripping carpet from her master bedroom, he came across stains that "looked like blood."

Augustine Lovato spent about four hours on the stand, assuring jurors that he was genuinely frightened when he came across what he thought was the blood of Ron Rudin. Rudin, a real estate mogul whom prosecutors say was shot while sleeping in his Las Vegas home, disappeared in 1994. One month after he disappeared, fishermen found his skull at Nelson's Landing near the Colorado River.

Under direct examination from prosecutor Gary Guymon, Lovato said that in 1995, shortly after he was released from prison for an aggravated felony, his family was poor. "My mother would bug me to get a job," he testified. "We had no money."

Lovato knew Margaret Rudin and had heard about the disappearance of her husband. Knowing she was wealthy, he decided to ask her for work. Rudin hired him to do odd jobs around the house for $7 an hour. Almost immediately, he said, Rudin began to talk about her husband's disappearance.

"She told me that her husband still was missing and that she didn't know where he is," Lovato said. "She said she was kind of worried."

One of the tasks that Lovato was employed to do was change the master bedroom into an office. First on his agenda was to rip up all the old carpet. But in one patch — about nine inches by one foot — he said he noticed a strange spot.

"It was hard, like something had been spilled in that area or something," he said. "When I cut into it, dark brown particles would fly up and hit me and stick to my skin. I had to wipe them off."

He also testified that there were dark "reddish-brown" stains on a portrait of Margaret Rudin that stood on an adjacent dresser. Lovato said the stains were "raindrop size." The prosecution then had Lovato draw spots onto a life-size line-drawing of the portrait to illustrate their approximate size and location.

"It looked like something had been flicked on there or something, like blood or something," he said. "It made the hair on my back stand up."

Under cross-examination, defense lawyer Tom Pitaro grilled Lovato about the very reason he had sought out Margaret Rudin in the first place: money.

First he tried to impeach Lovato's testimony by pointing out differences between what he said earlier Tuesday and comments he had made during a grand jury hearing. Then he struck Lovato hard with allegations that his only reason for coming forward with his testimony was the $25,000 reward being offered for information in the case.

Lovato, however, claimed that he did not know about the amount of the reward.

"You were a felon, and you are a felon, are you not?" Pitaro asked.

"At the time, it could have been reduced to a misdemeanor," Lovato replied.

"But you violated your probation and went to prison, did you not?" Pitaro asked.

"Correct."

"Now if anyone needed money back in 1995, it was you and your mother, wasn't it? In fact, you were so broke that the reason Rudin flipped you some work is because you and your brother went to her and told her you were so broke, isn't that true?" Pitaro asked.

"We weren't concerned by a reward. There was a man missing," Lovato said.

"I know, you were concerned about it and we admire you for that," Pitaro responded, sounding sarcastic.

Several times throughout the question-answer flurry, Pitaro and Lovato interrupted each other and their voices grew angry. On at least six occasions, Judge Joseph Bonaventure cautioned them to let each other speak before interjecting.

The jury was dismissed until Monday afternoon so that the defense will have extra time to prepare for upcoming prosecution witnesses — a request Bonaventure granted Monday after denying Rudin's bid for a mistrial.