After a morning in which Hans Reiser insisted on giving complex responses to yes-or-no queries and complained about some of the things asked by the prosecutor, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman called attorneys into his chambers and then let the jury go to lunch early.

Outside the presence of the jury, the judge admonished the 44-year-old Reiser, who is charged with killing his estranged wife, Nina Reiser. She hasn't been seen since dropping the couple's two children off at Reiser's home in the Oakland hills on Sept. 3, 2006.

"Mr. Reiser, your attitude to the court is disrespectful," said Goodman. "Your attitude to this court is condescending. I will no longer tolerate it. You are not in a position to control this court."

Nina Reiser's body has never been found and the defense has suggested she may be alive and living in her native Russia.

But prosecutors say she would never leave her children. They say circumstantial evidence shows Hans Reiser is responsible.

Prosecutor Paul Hora, in his third day of cross-examining Reiser, continued to question him closely about his behavior after Nina Reiser went missing. Among other things, Reiser discarded the passenger seat of his car, washed the floorboards and took two hard drives out of one of his computers.

Reiser says he gave the hard drives to his defense attorney and told the prosecutor Thursday he expects them to be produced soon.

"What good are they now after 17 months?" Hora said.

Reiser has testified that he threw away the passenger seat of his car to make it more comfortable to sleep in. He said he started sleeping in the car, rather than in his mother's house where he had been living, in hopes of strengthening her chances of being allowed to have the children, who had been taken into protective custody.

On Thursday, Hora turned to Reiser's search for a storage locker in September 2006 and especially why he looked at facilities in Manteca, about 60 miles east of Oakland.

Reiser said he wanted a place to hide his car so police would not seize it. He said he also wanted to store his possessions from his mother's house and planned on sleeping in the locker.

Hora questioned why Reiser wouldn't look at one of the many storage facilities closer to Oakland and also queried how Reiser proposed to live in a locker.

"The truth is that you were never going to live in that storage locker. You were simply looking for a place to hide that car," Hora said.

"That's not true," said Reiser, going on to question Hora's logic until the prosecutor cut him off.

"This isn't a chance for you to just talk," Hora said.