Lewis Honored Amid Mystery : Pro basketball: Celtics retire his No. 35 while controversy continues over possible cocaine use.

Reggie Lewis was not among the 14,890-plus who shoehorned themselves into Boston Garden Wednesday. He wasn’t around to see his No. 35 rise to the rafters, joining 19 fabled figures in Celtic lore.

Nor was he available to give the answer to this question: Did he, or didn’t he?

“The only person who knows what Reggie did,” Celtic guard Dee Brown said, “is Reggie.”

It was supposed to be the best night in a somewhat ho-hum NBA season. Michael Jordan was making an unexpected visit to the Garden, where he once scored 63 points in a playoff game, and the Celtics were honoring Lewis, a fine player and an even finer asset to the Boston community, at halftime of the Celtics’ game against the Chicago Bulls.

But inside the Celtic locker room before tipoff, Brown was sitting on a stool, wearily telling people for the umpteenth time that his best friend was no cokehead. Within earshot of Brown, Charles Grantham, executive director of the NBA Players Assn., was denouncing the timing of reports that threatened to soil Lewis’ night.

Outside the locker room, Celtic General Manager M.L. Carr was saying, “No, no, no.” Around the next corridor, a testy NBA Commissioner David Stern was giving a full vote of confidence to the NBA’s drug policy, which has come under attack.

And at halftime, Donna Harris-Lewis read an emotionally charged poem in support of her husband titled, “Believe What Your Own Eyes See.”

All this was necessary because Lewis may have used cocaine, which may have contributed to his heart failure and shocking death, and his family may be benefiting from insurance fraud.

There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, first produced by the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago, that links Lewis to cocaine use. There is no proof. That combination leads to speculation and theories. It invites some to confirm that Lewis snorted, and it invites others to step forward angrily as character witnesses.

Lewis died on July 27, 1993, three months after he collapsed in a playoff game. The official cause of death is heart failure caused by a virus. But then there is a trail of doubt.

At least two “Dream Team” doctors said the scarring was consistent with cocaine use; Lewis refused to submit to a drug test and changed doctors; a former college teammate said he took cocaine with Lewis five days before the playoff collapse (a story he later recanted); drug dealers claim they sold to Lewis, and a former athletic director at Lewis’ school, Northeastern University, said Lewis tested positive in his senior year.

The 20-minute halftime ceremony was dramatic. The crowd chanted “Reg-gie, Reg-gie.” Lewis’ family received a piece of the parquet floor and other gifts. Master of ceremonies Tom Heinsohn said Lewis “literally played his heart out for the Boston Celtics.”

Stern concluded: “I think the pure truth was buried with Reggie Lewis, and that’s the unfortunate thing.”