THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : A Witness’s Last-Minute Rush to Testify : Court: Candace Garvey had less than an hour to reach the stand. She says prosecutors didn’t ask her about a bruise she saw on Nicole Simpson.

One moment, she was in the kitchen of her Brentwood home, dressed in pink sweats and feeding her 8-month-old girl from a jar of Good Earth natural baby food.

Forty-five panicked minutes later, Candace Garvey--dressed in black and wearing a now-celebrated gold-and-silver headband--found herself taking the stand in the Downtown courthouse as a prosecution witness in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

“Wash my hair? I didn’t even take a shower!” Garvey said Tuesday, describing her mad dash the day before. Garvey put on her makeup, called a baby-sitter, summoned her husband from the golf course and took lunches to her children at school and raced across town to appear before millions of transfixed television viewers in the so-called trial of the century.

Obeying Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito’s admonition, Garvey, 36, declined to discuss her testimony. But she said that she couldn’t get over what prosecutors didn’t ask her about--a 1991 incident in which she saw a bruise on Nicole Brown Simpson’s face.

Garvey said she saw the injury after Nicole Simpson, wearing oversized sunglasses and makeup, took a seat in front of her at St. Martin of Tours for Mass one Sunday.

“I tapped her on the shoulder and I was in shock,” Garvey said. “I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘I fell . . . ,’ some Mickey Mouse answer, and I was just staring at this bruise.

“I thought for sure they were going to ask me about that bruise,” she said, adding that she told a district attorney’s investigator about the injury months ago. “I can’t believe it.”

Garvey said she was so distraught at the thought of testifying that she suffered nausea and migraine headaches. She was told early Monday to be ready to testify, but that the chances were slight that she would be needed immediately. But then prosecutors called and asked her to drop everything and report right away. She said she cried right before she was called to the stand but felt calm as soon as she raised her hand to take the oath and decided to look Simpson in the eyes.

“I wanted to look at him and give him a fair chance,” she said, adding that she believes that Simpson is guilty. “I almost wanted him to tell me he didn’t do it.

“And I sat down . . . and I turned around and looked at him and I felt complete sadness when I looked at him. . . . The person who looked back at me was someone who was very sad. He wasn’t angry at me, he wasn’t angry at all. He was very sad.”

Yet Garvey, no stranger to the limelight since she married former Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey, said she also has been surprised by another public reaction to her testimony--a flurry of compliments about her headband.

“I can’t believe how many people have called me about that headband,” she said. “That headband is as old as the hills. It was the first one I grabbed out of the top of my drawer. I didn’t even open the door. It was just sticking out and I grabbed it.”